Section I - INTELLIGENCE HIGHLIGHTS

After Senior Taliban Arrest, An Official Reflects on Expanding Pakistan-CIA Ties. A recently retired senior Pakistani intelligence official said that joint operations between the CIA and Pakistani intelligence officials like the one that arrested Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar are common now.

The US intelligence relationship with Pakistan has been a tangled one for decades. During the Soviet war with Afghanistan, CIA operatives worked with Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to funnel money and weapons to the mujahideen fighting the Soviets - as well as a group of Arabs fighting in the cause that later became Al Qaeda.

When the Soviets lost that war and departed, Pakistan maintained its intelligence and financial ties to many of the former anti-Soviet fighters, and developed a relationship with the newly emerged Taliban as US attention turned elsewhere. After the 9/11 attacks, there was a fair deal of suspicion between US and Pakistani intelligence officers, with the US disturbed by Pakistan's close ties to the Taliban.

Nevertheless, the ranks of CIA agents in Pakistan swelled quickly after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and the former Pakistani intelligence agent says his country has developed a strong working relationship with the CIA in the years since.

Though Pakistan has worked closely with the US in dealing with Al Qaeda - arresting alleged 9/11 planner and murderer of US journalist Daniel Pearl Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 2003 - US officials say Pakistan had been reluctant to target the Afghanistan Taliban too directly, since the group has been seen as important in Pakistani military and intelligence circles to securing Pakistan's influence in its neighbor.

But that is changing, and the emerging relationship is built on reciprocity. After the US killed Pakistan Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud last August as a favor to the Pakistan government, analysts predicted that Pakistan would do more scratching of America's back in turn.

The biggest payoff so far was the arrest of Mr. Baradar near the port city of Karachi about 10 days ago, which was announced late Monday. Baradar is the most senior Afghan Taliban official arrested since the war began and a man the US has been hunting for years.

The CIA brings a distinct technological advantage to joint operations but relies on their local counterparts to carry out interrogations, says the retired official.

Pakistani agents are now reportedly handling the interrogation of Mullah Baradar.

The retired official predicts the capture of Mullah Baradar will make Pakistan more dangerous for Westerners because of public anger over a perceived loss of sovereignty to the US. "Obviously the [opposition] politicians will pick up this point for government bashing and say the government has sold the country out," he said.

To be sure, the public response to the growing US presence in Pakistan has been muted so far, surprising some analysts.

The presence of large numbers of CIA agents in Pakistan traces back to 1979, the year the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and the Iranian Revolution took place.

Regarding the fact that Mullah Baradar was apparently captured in the port-city of Karachi, Pakistan's financial hub which is situated hundreds of miles away from the Afghan border, the retired official says that it is likely to re-ignite claims by the Karachi city government that their city is becoming 'Talibanized' owing to the large ethnic Pashtun population.

This may be overblown, he says. "I personally feel the best hiding place are the big cities. The bigger the city the more the anonymity. It's always better to stay in a place where no one knows who lives next door." [Ahmed/ChristianScienceMonitor/16February2010] 

Ex-Bankers Sign Up As Real-Life James Bonds. MI6 is recruiting former bankers in the City of London as the intelligence agency seeks out a new generation of spies.

The financial crisis has proved fertile ground for the British Secret Intelligence Service, with some well-traveled and well-heeled individuals turning away from banking in favor of serving their country.

Despite the pay cut, the service is able to play on its James Bond image of glamour and sophistication and offers the opportunity to travel to far-flung destinations in its intelligence-gathering role.

MI6's head of recruitment, who likes to be known simply as "John," said there had been "a lot of people in the city applying to join us" in the past 18 months.

Other professions seeking to join the spy game include doctors, lawyers and workers for non-governmental organizations. "John" said even former radicals could be recruited. He added: "If they can convincingly show over a period of time they had renounced their previous views, then I would be prepared to consider them."

But he said: "A persistent record of working against the legislation of the U.K. government will disbar you from becoming a member of SIS."

However, such a move is controversial in the wake of a suicide bomb attack by a Jordanian extremist that killed seven CIA officers in Afghanistan at the end of last year.

Humam Khalil al-Balawi, who was working as a double agent for the Taliban, had pretended to renounce extremism and been recruited to spy on militants.

MI6 has been infiltrated by double agents before, most notoriously by Kim Philby, one of the Cambridge spies.

MI6 prefers to remain "unseen and unheard," says "John," but the days of a discreet tap on the shoulder from a don at Oxford or Cambridge are gone and the current recruits have attended over 30 different universities.

MI6 is looking for academic high-flyers, with a top university degree, who are well-traveled, have a broad understanding of other cultures and are well-read.

The service is keen to attract more women - just over a third of fast-stream operational officers are female.

It is also seeking members of ethnic minorities, particularly speakers of languages such as Dari, Pashto, Urdu and Farsi, to serve in and analyze Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran.

The agency also wants those who can speak Mandarin to cover China, Korean to deal with the threat from North Korea, and those with knowledge of Russian and Arabic.

"John" said: "We are not targeting any specific community. We aspire to represent the U.K. in its fullness and complete diversity."

Individuals with engineering and IT skills are also sought after as MI6 seeks to harness cutting-edge technology and the Internet.

Referring to the James Bond image, "John" said: "Every so often, there is a gentle approximation between what we see on the screen and what we end up doing."

But he added: "We don't disappear for a month on some sort of personal crusade and there are no Aston Martins in the garage."

The officer, who is in his late 40s and was born abroad, said MI6 had changed enormously in the last 20 years but it was unlikely that the agency would emerge from the shadows just yet.

"It would be a massive cultural shift if we were to adopt a more open posture," he said.

Sir John Sawers was recently appointed as the new chief of MI6, known as "C."

The former career diplomat is expected to bring changes.

His predecessor, Sir John Scarlett, said last year the James Bond image of spies with a "license to kill" was a long way from reality.

"You need to have a very clear sense because you need to be thinking all the time what is right, what is wrong," he said. [Gardham/VancouverSun/17February2010]

Military Seeks an Intelligence-Gathering Airship. The U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command and the Army Forces Strategic Command are continuing their multiyear search for a futuristic, self-powered, intelligence-gathering airship. The ideal model would be able to linger for more than three weeks over a target area at 20,000 feet, carrying a 2,500-pound payload of signals and imagery interceptors with a view of 173 miles, according to a special notice issued last week.

Its engines would be able to keep a steady speed of 20 knots, but if needed possess an 80-knot "dash speed." Though it is expected to be unmanned and operated from the ground, it may be operated with a crew.

The success in Iraq and Afghanistan of "spy blimps" - now tethered to the ground but gathering intelligence such as full-motion video used to identify insurgents - has sparked interest in these new airships.

The ambitious and new five-year program for a 250-foot-long "Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle" calls for 18 months of performance testing "followed by additional tests and demonstrations conducted in Afghanistan," according to the notice. Under special acquisition rules designed to get new companies into the defense business, the winning contracting team will develop the airship, integrate its payload and other systems to keep them working, then test and support the vehicle. If all things work, the contractor is to support operation of the airship and train military personnel to run it during the five-year contract period.

This is not a new program, but one that has gone through many changes. Last year, the idea was to have a consortium of companies build a similar system based on a hybrid airship that Lockheed Martin flew in 2006. Lockheed's "Skunk Works" was to be central. Then, in July 2009, the Pentagon changed its mind and decided to reprogram $5 million to support a different initial acquisition and planning approach for the vehicle, which will be run by the Army Space and Missile Defense Command out of Huntsville, Ala. It will have cooperation from the Air Force and Navy. Now, Lockheed Martin is just one of 51 bidders.

Under this plan, one group will build the airship and another provide the payload of sensors and ancillary systems. Last week's notice is for construction of the airship, but that also includes integration of the payload devices, plus testing to make sure that everything works.

An additional $90 million for the program has received congressional support in the fiscal 2010 budget.

Potential bidders must apply for the documents detailing the requirements. They are classified "for official use only," according to last week's notice. "Office use" means potential bidders can show the documents to subcontractors but not disclose them publicly.

However, in May 2009, the Army posted a draft statement of objectives for the vehicle, and that document spells out the thinking at that time.

"Each individual LEMV can provide up to 173 statute miles line-of-sight at 20,000 feet for target reconnaissance, intelligence, surveillance and other missions in support of the battlefield commander," according to the document.

Although the sensor payloads would be selected by the military, the document said they could include optical or radar surveillance, other intelligence sensors, laser communication and other broadband data relay systems.

The earlier document also calls for control of the ship to be housed in a fixed, land-based command center, but the airship itself should be able to operate from "an austere location," such as a forward operating base. It will be able to be guided back to its home base. A "rapid deflation device" is required to terminate the flight if control is lost and to prevent the sensitive payload from falling into the wrong hands.

It must be able to carry 2,500 pounds in its payload gondola at 20,000 feet and it also should be able to carry 5,000 pounds at 10,000 feet. It should also be able to fly 2,500 statute miles during a three-week, roundtrip mission.

The solicitation also requires three test flights: a low-altitude flight and recovery, possibly from the winning contractor's facility; an operational-altitude flight with station-keeping for "days" over a military range; and a flight of 21 days in an "operational environment," set for spring 2011. [Pincus/WashingtonPost/15February2010]

No US Citizens on CIA Hit Lists. It is useful to be reminded from time to time that not every allegation or published report concerning Central Intelligence Agency operations is necessarily true.

A front-page story in the Washington Post on January 27 included the remarkable statement that "Both the CIA and the JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command of the Department of Defense] maintain lists of individuals... whom they seek to kill or capture. The JSOC list includes three Americans, including [Islamist cleric Anwar al-] Aulaqi, whose name was added late last year. As of several months ago, the CIA list included three U.S. citizens, and an intelligence official said that Aulaqi's name has now been added."

But at least the part about the CIA list turns out to be unfounded. 

"The article referred incorrectly to the presence of U.S. citizens on a CIA list of people the agency seeks to kill or capture," the Washington Post said in a correction published in the February 12 edition. "After The Post's report was published, a source said that a statement the source made about the CIA list was misunderstood. Additional reporting produced no independent confirmation of the original report, and a CIA spokesman said that The Post's account of the list was incorrect. The military's Joint Special Operations Command maintains a target list that includes several Americans. In recent weeks, U.S. officials have said that the government is prepared to kill U.S. citizens who are believed to be involved in terrorist activities that threaten Americans."

The correction has been appended to the online version of the article.

On February 3, Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair testified to his view that U.S. government agencies may use lethal force against U.S. citizens who are involved in terrorist activities. "We don't target people for free speech," he said. "We target them for taking action that threatens Americans."

"I'm actually a little bit surprised you went this far in open session," said Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) at the hearing of the House Intelligence Committee.

"The reason I went this far in open session," replied DNI Blair, "is I just don't want other Americans who are watching to think that we are careless about endangering - in fact, we're not careless about endangering lives at all, but we especially are not careless about endangering American lives as we try to carry out the policies to protect most of the country. And I think we ought to go into details in closed session." [Aftergood/SecrecyNews/16February2010]

DOD Gives Vendors New Rules to Protect Data. White House cyber security coordinator Howard Schmidt recently called the Defense Industry Base one of the major weak links in the IT security chain. He pointed specifically to the supply chain component. This is why the Defense Department issued a new policy to protect military information on or going in between unclassified networks run by contractors and the government.

There has been an abundance of talk about the importance of securing cyberspace, yet the U.S. government's actions and results to date do not seem commensurate with the oratory - that according to a new report by the National Security Cyberspace Institute. The report - Cyber Espionage: Is the United States getting more than it's giving? - says that despite the studies and recommendations, ongoing planning, and increased spending, there has been little significant progress made in securing cyberspace as a result of U.S. government action. [FederalNewsRadio/15February2010] 

EFF Sues CIA, DOD, DOJ, and Others Over Surveillance. The Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the CIA, the US Department of Defense, Department of Justice and three other government agencies on Tuesday for allegedly refusing to release information about how they are using social networks in surveillance and investigations.

The not-for-profit internet rights watchdog group formally asked more than a dozen agencies or departments in early October to provide records about federal guidelines on the use of sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr for investigative or data-gathering purposes, according to the lawsuit.

The requests were prompted by published news reports about how authorities are using social networks to monitor citizen activities and aid in investigations. For example, according to the lawsuit, government officials have: used Facebook to hunt for fugitives and search for evidence of underage drinking; researched the activities of an activist on Facebook and LinkedIn; watched YouTube to identify riot suspects; searched the home of a social worker because of Twitter messages regarding police actions he sent during the G-20 summit; and used fake identities to trick Facebook users into accepting friend requests. [BeforeItsNews/18February2010] 

Dozens Of Defense Contractors, Agencies Hacked. As cyberspies multiply and evolve, the military says many defense firms remain woefully insecure.

For anyone who has a security clearance and doesn't believe the U.S. faces a cyber-espionage crisis, Colonel Steven Shirley has 102 stories to share with you.

That's the number of cases in which Shirley's team of Pentagon researchers discovered cyberspies breaching the networks of government agencies, defense contractors and other organizations with ties to the U.S. Department of Defense, gaining administrator-level access with the aim of stealing military secrets.

The Pentagon's forensics-focused Cyber Crime Center, where Shirley is executive director, found that between August 2007 and August 2009, 71 government agencies, contractors, universities and think tanks with connections to the U.S. military had been penetrated by foreign hackers, in some cases multiple times. In total, Shirley told Forbes, the center performed 116 investigations following spying breaches and found that in all but 14 of those cases the intruders had gained complete administrator-level access to the victim's network.

"There are some significant defense contractors among that number," Shirley says. "We can say that any company that's involved in high-technology research and development is a target for these adversaries."

Shirley wouldn't reveal what information was stolen in any of the breaches, where the attackers seemed to be located or whether they appeared to be state-sponsored, saying only that the attacks were based "offshore."

He also declined to name any specific companies or organizations penetrated in the defense industry's hacking epidemic. But military contractors General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman have both been successfully breached by cyberspies in the last two years, according to sources familiar with the security situations of those companies. It's also likely that many other major defense contractors have recently had data stolen by hackers.

Northrop Grumman's chief information security officer Tim McKnight said the company is "always in the trenches" defending its network from cyberattacks but doesn't discuss internal security issues. "We don't talk about successful or unsuccessful intrusions," he says. A General Dynamics spokesperson declined to comment.

The defense-industrial complex's hemorrhaging of intellectual property to cyberspies is hardly new - in fact, it dates back much farther than the private sector hacking incidents revealed by Google's admission of a breach by hackers last month.

As early as 2003 Sandia National Laboratories and its managing company, Lockheed Martin, were penetrated by cyberspies, seemingly based in China, who pilfered plans for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a class of technology with potential military uses. In 2007 Forbes reported that cyberspies, again seemingly based in China, had breached the largest 10 military contractors, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and Boeing. 

But threats are increasing in both "sophistication and number," Shirley says, and many defense firms haven't kept up. "In some cases, there was a huge attack surface for an adversary," says Shirley. "The IT staffs in some companies were simply overwhelmed or inexperienced in their ability to contend with threats. "Almost every breach his agency investigated, Shirley says, began when an employee was sent a highly targeted and convincing phishing e-mail that spoofed a trusted sender. When the recipient opened a file attached to that message, it used a flaw in the target computer's software to invisibly plant malicious software on the machine and give it access to the user's network. (Finnish cybersecurity firm F-Secure recently found one such booby-trapped PDF intended to infect an Air Force computer using a vulnerability in Adobe Reader.)

But the large majority of those attacks, Shirley says, didn't use new, previously unknown software vulnerabilities. Instead, they exploited old software bugs that IT administrators had failed to patch, configuration errors and even poor password practices.

"We were surprised to see that even companies that we regarded as tech savvy in a lot of cases had significant vulnerabilities correlated with inattention to the basic blocking and tackling of information assurance," says Shirley. "The most popular password in the world is still 'password,' and we still see that from time to time even in these companies."

As top-tier contractors respond to attacks by improving their security, hackers are increasingly targeting a second tier of smaller defense firms with innovative military technology but little experience in protecting secrets. That's made defense contractors' acquisitions of small, insecure companies a prime avenue for introducing new vulnerabilities, says Shirley. "When you've just inherited a network, you also inherit all the ensuing impact on protection of intellectual property," he says.

But hacker exploits are also evolving to challenge the security of even long-established defense firms, says Kevin Mandia, a former Pentagon researcher whose firm, Mandiant, serves as a post-breach consultancy. In some cases, he says, intruders hide multiple hidden backdoors or steal documents from one computer that they later use to spoof an e-mail after an initial breach is thought to be contained. "The techniques imply that attackers have a great familiarity with the victim organizations, their people, their roles and responsibilities," says Mandia.

The spying software that hackers hide on victims' networks is also becoming harder to detect - particularly the code aimed at defense firms, he says. In a test in December 2009 of 1,400 malicious software or "malware" samples pulled from victims' machines, Mandia says only 24% of the programs were found by antivirus programs. "We see malware hitting the contractors that hits everyone else six to nine months later," he says. Even as cyberspies expand their targets to other sectors like law firms, oil companies and technology companies, that evolution of tactics means the defense industry's cyberstruggles are far from over. "As you do your judo to combat these guys, they escalate," says Mandia. "If you're Boeing, Lockheed or Raytheon, you simply have a threat that wakes up every day and tries to compromise you." [Greenberg/Forbes/17February2010] 

Interpol Releases "Wanted" Notices for Israeli Secret Agents. Official "wanted" notices for a suspected team of Israeli secret agents accused of participating in the assassination of a Palestinian militant were released Thursday.

The faces of an 11-strong alleged hit squad appeared on the Interpol website this morning, some 48 hours after authorities in the United Arab Emirates issued arrest warrants for the killing last month of a Hamas operative, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

Their offences are listed as "crimes against life and health". The team stands accused of entering the emirate state using forged or stolen European identities, murdering the militant in his hotel and then fleeing the country on 19 January.

The red wanted notices are not international arrest warrants, but allow details of fugitives to be released worldwide with the request that the wanted person be arrested and extradited.

Names, dates of birth and nationalities used by the five alleged killers using German, French and Irish passports are listed. However personal information relating to the six British passport-holders, who are believed to have assumed the identities of real UK citizens, are not included.

Although the faces of the suspects who used British passports appear on Interpol's website, their details are listed as "unknown".

"The red notices were issued with the names and features based on evidence we provided to Interpol," Dubai's head of police told the Abu Dhabi-owned National newspaper.

He also confirmed for the first time that investigations indicated the involvement of Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence agency. "Our investigations reveal that Mossad is involved in the murder of Mabhouh. It is 99%, if not 100% that Mossad is standing behind the murder," said the head of police.

Mabhouh, 49, was a founder of Hamas's military wing. [Guardian/18February2010]

Spy Plane Pioneer Named to National Academy of Engineering. Abraham E. Karem, a Lake Forest engineer who has played a key role in developing some of this country's most widely-used unmanned spy-and-attack aircraft, including one that recently led to the capture of the Afghan Taliban's second-in-command, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).

Karem, president and founder of Karem Aircraft, was one of 68 people elected this week to the NAE, the elite honorific and research society whose members include former astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google.

Karem is the former chief designer for the Israeli Air Force, and a pioneer in the development of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or UAVs. He moved to this country in the 1970s and later founded Leading Systems Inc. in Irvine, a company that was awarded $40 million in federal money in 1984 to develop a then-secret UAV known as Amber. The 15-foot aircraft was designed to perform reconnaissance and carry cruise missiles.

The Amber program was successful, as was Karem's development of the GNAT 750 UAV. But LSI encountered financial problems and the company was bought by General Atomics, which used much of Karem's work to create the Predator, a drone that has been extensively used in the Middle East to track and kill suspected members of al Qaida and the Taliban. Various media reports say the Predator has been used to track such figures as Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who was recently captured by Pakistan.

Another of Karem's companies, Frontier Aircraft, also helped develop a UAV that evolved into the A160 Hummingbird, an unmanned aerial vehicle helicopter that Boeing is now building for the U.S. military.

More recently, Karem and his Lake Forest company Karem Aircraft have been focused on developed tilt rotor aircraft that can be used by the Defense Department's Joint Heavy Lift program. [ScienceDude/17February2010] 

Caryn Wagner Named Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis for DHS. Caryn Wagner became under secretary for intelligence and analysis for the Department of Homeland Security in February 2010. She was previously an instructor in intelligence resource management for The Intelligence and Security Academy, LLC.

In October 2008, Wagner retired from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, where she served as budget director and cybersecurity coordinator. Prior to that, Wagner served in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence as assistant deputy director of national intelligence for management and the first chief financial officer for the National Intelligence Program. She took this position after serving as executive director for intelligence community affairs.

Wagner's previous position was that of the senior Defense Intelligence Agency representative to the United States European Command and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. She also served as DIA deputy director for analysis and production and as director of military intelligence staff.

Before joining DIA, Wagner serves as director of the Subcommittee on Technical and Tactical Intelligence, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Her experience also includes serving as a signals intelligence and electronic Warfare Officer in the United States Army.

Wagner has a bachelor's degree from the College of William and Mary, and a master's degree from the University of Southern California [ExecutiveGovernment/18February2010] 

Intelligence Officials Cite Agency's Losing Battle Over Station Chief Job as Proof of Military's New Dominance. For some intelligence officials, proof that the CIA's influence on the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan is waning, and the power of the Pentagon is growing, came last summer when the CIA named its new station chief in Kabul.

As a rule, the CIA always gets to pick its chief of station in foreign countries, but in Afghanistan it lost a political battle to the military and the State Department. According to several former and current intelligence officials, that loss is symbolic of the declining influence of the CIA, which once shaped the strategy for the U.S. war effort.

Last summer, when the CIA tapped a veteran office to become the new chief of station in Kabul, the State Department's special envoy to Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, objected. According to current and former officials, Holbrooke had served with the officer in Croatia during the Balkan conflict in the 1990s, when the officer was station chief there and Holbrooke was the Clinton administration's special envoy to the region.

By the time Holbrooke weighed in privately to agency officials, the officer had already been told that he would be assigned to Afghanistan.

"Holbrooke had a problem with [the agency's choice]," said a current senior intelligence official. "And he told the Agency he wasn't going to work with [the CIA officer]."

A spokesperson for Ambassador Holbrooke denied Holbrooke's involvement in the CIA's decision.

In the past, say officials, the CIA wouldn't have backed down. Less than 10 years ago, the U.S. ambassador in France objected to the agency's choice of station chief. He said he didn't want to work with the agency's choice, and asked that he not be sent. The agency made its preferred candidate station chief anyway.

This time, though Kabul is one of the CIA's most important bases of operations, the agency acceded to State Department wishes and withdrew its candidate. Then Gen. Stanley McChrystal intervened.

According to the current and former intelligence officials, McChrystal, commander of U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan, had his own preferred candidate for the job, a good friend and decorated CIA paramilitary officer. McChrystal started lobbying for his friend.

The officer McChrystal preferred has extensive experience in war zones, including two previous tours in Afghanistan, as well as time in the Balkans, Baghdad and Yemen. The officer also served as the CIA's liaison to the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), then led by McChrystal. JSOC is the Pentagon's command structure for special forces from all military branches, including the Navy SEALs and the Army's Delta Force.

The officer had already served as Kabul's chief four years ago, and it is unusual, though not unprecedented, these intelligence officials say, for CIA officers to serve as chief of station twice in the same country. In interviews with a dozen current and former officials, the current chief of station was uniformly well-liked and admired. A career paramilitary officer, the station chief came to the CIA after several years in an elite Marine unit.

During the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan more than eight years ago, the CIA officer worked closely with McChrystal, who was then a commander of elite military commandos. The CIA official is well known in CIA lore as the man who saved Hamid Karzai's life when the CIA led the effort to oust the Taliban from power in October 2001. Karzai is said to be greatly indebted to the CIA officer, and was pleased when the officer was named chief of station three years later.

In the end, however, the officials say, it was the CIA officer's long relationship with General McChrystal that was the deciding factor. Rather than find another candidate, the agency gave McChrystal's friend the job.

That McChrystal, an Army general, was able to install a friend as station chief, said a former official, was indicative of both McChrystal's pull and the reality of the Afghan war zone, where the military now has a greater presence than it did just a year ago. "McChrystal can have anyone he wants running the CIA station," said a former senior intelligence official who now consults for the Pentagon on Afghan issues.

According to two current and former intelligence officials, the official who was the agency's first choice told colleagues he was frustrated by the decision. Instead of going to Kabul, he kept his job as the chief official in the CIA's European operations division.

At the request of the CIA, ABC News is withholding the names of both the CIA's original choice for the job and the official who got the job because both are still undercover.

CIA spokesman George Little denied that Holbrooke or McChrystal had any involvement in the agency's decision.

"The CIA makes its own personnel decisions. Period. That's all there is to it." The intelligence officials, who requested anonymity when discussing sensitive personnel matters, have no problem with the officer who was eventually chosen by the agency. But they said the agency clearly preferred someone else, and they fear the CIA has become subordinate to the military, after many years dominating U.S .efforts in Afghanistan after the September 11th attacks. "We were in the lead after the invasion, but clearly the CIA has taken more of a support role," said a former senior official who served in Afghanistan.

The current and former intelligence officials say that putting a paramilitary officer in charge on the Afghan base highlights the CIA's evolving role. The CIA's historic wartime role was collecting information in order to shape overall strategy. Now the agency has been relegated to a supporting role, supplying tactical intelligence to help the military. The military determines the strategy.

The problem with this shift, the officials say, is that both the military and the CIA are focusing on short-term, tactical intelligence, and ignoring the long view. The shortfall in intelligence collection was highlighted last month in a public report by the military's top intelligence officer that was prepared for a thinktank. In the report, Major General Michael T. Flynn concluded that intelligence collection in Afghanistan was "only marginally relevant to the overall strategy."

Flynn's report was as critical of the CIA as of military intelligence. But it is the military that is now shaping intelligence collection in Afghanistan, in part through sheer numeric dominance. Military forces far outnumber the CIA, and the disproportion is growing. According to a current intelligence official, the CIA has roughly 800 personnel in Afghanistan scattered among 14 bases. By next summer, the military expects that it will have nearly 100,000 troops, roughly double its strength in early 2009.

Flynn concluded that the "vast intelligence apparatus is unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which the US and allied forces operate and the people they seek to persuade." [Cole/ABCNews/19February2010] 

Lebanese Sentenced to Death for Spying on Israel. A retired member of Lebanon's Internal Security Forces was sentenced to death for having spied for Israel and for his involvement in the murder of two Palestinian militant leaders.

Mahmoud Qassem Rafeh, 63, was convicted of "collaboration and espionage on behalf of the Israeli enemy," according to the verdict handed down by a military tribunal.

He was also convicted of involvement in the 2006 car bomb murder in the southern coastal town of Sidon of brothers Mahmoud and Nidal Mazjoub, members of the Islamic Jihad group.

A second defendant, Hussein Sleiman Khattab, was convicted in absentia.

Under Lebanese law, they have the right to appeal. At the same time, any death sentenced must be signed both by the country's prime minister and its president to be carried out.

Rafeh remains accused of the murder of Hezbollah officials Ali Hassan Dib in 1998 and Ali Hussein Saleh in 2003, as well as the 2002 murder of Jihad Jibril, son of Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command leader Ahmad Jibril.

The trial for those killings is still underway.

Rafeh was arrested in 2006 and confessed last year to having collaborated with Israeli intelligence agents from 1993.

More than 70 people were arrested in Lebanon in 2009 in a crackdown on espionage rings, including a retired general and a policeman.

Lebanon and Israel remain in a state of war, and convicted spies face life in prison with hard labour or the death penalty if found guilty of contributing to Lebanese loss of life. [AP/19February2010] 

Military Launches Afghanistan Intelligence-Gathering Mission. On their first day of class in Afghanistan, the new U.S. intelligence analysts were given a homework assignment.

First read a six-page classified military intelligence report about the situation in Spin Boldak, a key border town and smuggling route in southern Afghanistan. Then read a 7,500-word article in Harper's magazine, also about Spin Boldak and the exploits of its powerful Afghan border police commander.

The conclusion they were expected to draw: The important information would be found in the magazine story. The scores of spies and analysts producing reams of secret documents were not cutting it.

"They need help," Capt. Matt Pottinger, a military intelligence officer, told the class. "And that's what you're going to be doing."

The class that began Friday in plywood hut B-8 on a military base in Kabul marked a first step in what U.S. commanders envision as a major transformation in how intelligence is gathered and used in the war against the Taliban.

Last month, Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the top U.S. military intelligence officer in Afghanistan, published a scathing critique of the quality of information at his disposal. Instead of understanding the nuances of local politics, economics, religion and culture that drive the insurgency, he said, the multibillion-dollar industry devoted nearly all its effort to digging up dirt on insurgent groups.

"Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy," he wrote in a paper co-authored by Pottinger and another official and published by the Center for a New American Security.

Part of Flynn's new approach is to deploy dozens of new intelligence analysts with more freedom to move throughout the country, including out on the ground with U.S. soldiers and civilians, to write detailed narratives about key districts of Afghanistan. These reports are intended to give commanders and foot soldiers a more textured understanding of the population that the U.S. military has set out to protect.

At the moment, about 90 percent of the intelligence effort in Afghanistan tries to unravel the links "between various guys who are putting IEDs in the road," Pottinger said of the makeshift bombs known as improvised explosion devices, and "ten percent on all the rest."

"This ratio needs to be perfectly flipped upside down," he said.

The first crop of about 20 intelligence analysts assembled Friday at a counterinsurgency academy in Kabul for a week-long course to begin the process of rethinking their mission. Most of them came from the Defense Intelligence Agency, along with the Office of Naval Intelligence and Pentagon outfits such as the Afghanistan-Pakistan Task Force.

"You are like the IV being put into my arm right now," Flynn told them. "I need about five of them, but you're one that will be an infusion of energy and intellect that's going to help us continue to clarify and really give us a more clear picture of what it is that we're facing."

Military intelligence officials described the huge and unwieldy military bureaucracy as perhaps the biggest obstacle to change. The bureaucracy makes headquarters commanders wary of sending their analysts to roam the country conducting research.

Some of the intelligence analysts taking the course said they welcomed the new mission but still seemed unsure about what their new jobs would look like.

"My biggest question is, once they get the new data . . . how are they going to use that information to really change the situation here?" one analyst asked. Military officials requested that the analysts not be quoted by name.

The stakes involved in improving the quality of intelligence, Flynn told the class, could not be higher. Fueled in part by anger at the ineffective Afghan government, the insurgency has steadily gained strength. Around 2003, he said, the Taliban had about 1,500 fighters. That number has reached nearly 30,000. The past year, a record number of roadside bombs - more than 9,000 - were used, and the amount last month has set an even faster pace. He warned the analysts not to underestimate the sophistication or determination of the insurgents.

"I've heard people describe this [as] 'we're fighting a bunch of guys in shower shoes and bathrobes.' Well, a bunch of guys in shower shoes and bathrobes could beat 44 nations of the international community," Flynn said. "I mean, think about that."

But the military won't be able to defeat the insurgency just by chasing Taliban fighters across the country, Flynn said.

"If we didn't kill one more insurgent, we could win this thing. But if we kill 10,000 more, we'll lose. So it's not about killing our enemy," he said. [Partlow/WashingtonPost/20February2010] 

Section II - CONTEXT & PRECEDENCE

Russian Spy Lived in Dayton, Stole Secrets. Anyone looking up his name in the city of Dayton directory back in 1945 would have found nothing to raise their suspicions: "Koval, George. R 827 W. Grand Ave. Chemist, Monsanto Corp."

Nor would neighbors have noticed anything unusual about the tall, polite, bespectacled young man coming and going from his boarding home near Grand and Salem avenues. No accent. No uniform. No furtive or standoffish demeanor.

George Koval, an Iowa-born and -bred communist and a U.S. Army engineer, was a master at blending in - and, as it turns out, a master spy for the Soviet Union. He did just that while working on the Manhattan Project in Dayton for six months in 1945.

Koval is one of the two top Russian spies during World War II credited with stealing secrets that enabled the Soviet Union to enter the nuclear arms race with the United States at least five years ahead of predictions. He died in Moscow in 2006, having narrowly escaped banishment to a gulag for his American roots and his Jewish ancestry.

In a posthumous ceremony in 2007, then Russian President Vladimir Putin awarded Koval the nation's top honor for meritorious service, the gold star for Heroes of the Russian Federation. Even so, Putin referred to him only by his codename of "Delmar."

Since then, historians and researchers have been able to piece together an incredible tale of deception carried out by Koval - with the help of some plain dumb luck - during his years in the U.S. Army from 1940 to 1945.

Long-time veterans of the U.S. nuclear weapons program, Danny Stillman and Thomas Reed, first detailed Koval's exploits in a book published in January 2009. Former TIME foreign correspondent Michael Walsh followed with an article in the May 2009 issue of Smithsonian magazine.

"It's a fantastic story, with serendipity playing a part all along," said Don Sullenger, a past president of the Mound Museum Association. Sullenger will present a talk on Koval at the Mound Museum on Feb. 24. The Mound Laboratory in Miamisburg is where Dayton's vital nuclear research continued after the war.

In June 1945, Sgt. Koval, then at Oak Ridge, Tenn., where uranium was being enriched for the Hiroshima bomb, was transferred to Dayton just when scientists here were finalizing the design of the polonium trigger needed to detonate the more advanced Nagasaki bomb.

A month later, on July 16, 1945, the Dayton trigger proved itself by successfully detonating a nuclear device in the desert near Alamogordo, N.M.

Although a chemist and engineer by training, Koval was not directly involved in the research in Dayton. But as a health physicist whose duty was to protect workers from the effects of polonium radiation, he had access to all parts of the top-secret research complex at the old Bonebrake Seminary at First and Euclid streets.

Dayton had four sites devoted to the work of the Manhattan Project, the massive, $4 billion program during World War II to build a nuclear bomb.

The research on the triggers was first done at Monsanto's original laboratory building at 1515 Nicholas Road, but was soon moved to the old seminary as the project grew.

Project workers were checked and treated for radiation sickness at a third location, the General Electric Supply Warehouse at 601 E. Third St. When production began, the triggers were assembled at a fourth location, Runnymede Playhouse in Oakwood near the intersection of Dixon and Runnymede avenues. Of the four Dayton-area locations, only the warehouse and several storage buildings on the old seminary grounds remain.

Koval was brilliant, having graduated from a Sioux City high school in 1929 at age 15. But as the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who had fled the brutal persecution of the czar, he was an avowed communist even as a teenager. When his family moved back to Russia in 1932, Koval went with them.

He enrolled in a Moscow technical university, married a fellow student and earned his degree in chemistry in 1939. Then, under the ruse of being drafted into the Soviet army, he disappeared.

Sometime between then and his return to the United States in October 1940, Koval trained as an agent for Russia's spy agency, at the time called the GRU.

Koval was good-natured and likable - traits that probably helped deflect any suspicion about his activities, Sullenger said. "He could get along with everyone. He was always very helpful and friendly."

Of the three Dayton Manhattan Project workers still alive when Koval's spying came to light last year, only Howard DuFour remembered having contact with him, Sullenger said.

DuFour, who died late last year, also recalled that FBI investigators came to Dayton in the 1950s and began asking about Koval. But Dufour "said he wasn't certain (the FBI) proved he was a spy," Sullenger said.

Koval's history of service in the U.S. Army showed an uncanny knack for being in the right place at the right time - including his arrival in Dayton. After basic training at Fort Dix, N.J., in 1940, Koval trained as an electrical engineer at The Citadel and, after graduating in 1941, was admitted to a new unit, the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), aimed at keeping the Army's top scientists from going to the front.

In early 1944, with the Allies still bogged down in France, the ASTP was disbanded and its members assigned to the infantry. But, as luck would have it, not Koval. Instead, he and about a dozen other scientists were assigned to The Manhattan Project through something called the Special Engineer Detachment (SED).

After training as a health physicist, Koval found himself with unquestioned access to America's nuclear secrets at a time when the Manhattan Project had solved all but the final hurdles to building a working, reliable bomb.

Koval's ideal positioning within the Manhattan Project has led to speculation that he might have been a double agent planted by American forces to spy on other possible spies.

Sullenger said the many questions surrounding Koval and his activities in Dayton in 1945 may not be answered "until a lot more records are opened" related to the Manhattan Project and the ensuing Cold War.

Like Koval himself, some of those answers may have already gone to the grave.

"As far as I know," Sullenger said, "there's no one still alive from Dayton who remembers him." [DeBrouse/DaytonDailyNews/17February2010]

Mossad: The Elite Women Who Work For "The Family." From the moment Mahmoud al-Mabhouh checked into his suite at the Al-Bustan Rotana hotel, he became Gail Folliard's target. Mabhouh was in Dubai to buy missiles from Iran which would then be smuggled to Gaza and launched on Israel. Gail Folliard was on business, too. The hotel's security cameras silently observed her as she walked through the ballroom-sized lobby, around the pool area and past the eight restaurants. Ms Folliard paid for her room in cash. It was the first step in ensuring she left no trail.

The passport in Ms Folliard's shoulder bag was an Irish one, giving her age as 26. We now know that passport was a fake - and that her lipsticked smile concealed that she was a member of kidon, the department of Mossad responsible for assassination and kidnapping. She is one of six women in the unit of 48.

Meir Amit, the director-general of Mossad in the 1960s, laid down the rules for kidon women in a document that remains in force today. It contains the following passage: "A woman has skills a man simply does not have. She knows how to listen. Pillow talk is not a problem for her. The history of modern intelligence is filled with accounts of women who have used their sex for the good of their country... It is not just sleeping with someone if required. It is to lead a man to believe you will do so in return for what he has to tell you."

These skills are honed during the two-year course all Mossad recruits undergo at the training school, a dun-coloured building outside Tel Aviv. The women are taught how to shadow a target; how to create a dead-letter box; how to break into a hotel room. "Gail Folliard" would have been shown how to pack a gun inside her knickers; stealing passports and disguise are also on the curriculum.

The failure rate is high. Those who pass work either at Mossad's headquarters in Tel Aviv or at one of its many overseas stations. A few are then considered for further training as kidon. The unit is based in the Negev desert, the pay �2,000 a month. Ms Folliard would have been told that joining the kidon was like joining a family and she would be protected and nurtured. In return she would serve the family in any way it asked.

Arguably the most famous female kidon was Cheryl Ben-Tov, code-named Cindy. Born in Orlando, Florida, Cheryl moved to Israel to study Hebrew and Jewish history. At 18 she fell in love with an Israeli who worked for the Internal Security Service, Shin Beth.

A year after they married, Cheryl volunteered to join Mossad. Her motivation, she later told me, was "the thrill of its mystery".

Her training taught her, among other skills, how to construct a waterproof strip of microfilm that could be left buried in the side of a river bank. She also learnt how to change her facial appearance by inserting cotton wadding in her cheeks. She became adept at posing as a drunk and chatting up men in nightclubs, then disengaging herself outside their hotel.

With an IQ of 140, and her ideal psychological profile, Cheryl was invited to join the kidon. On the day she was trucked out to its base in the Negev, she was questioned about her sexual experience. Would she sleep with a stranger if her mission demanded it? She answered truthfully: there had been no one before her husband, but if she was convinced the success of the mission depended on it, then she would. "It would purely be sex, not love," she explained to me.

In 2004, Cheryl joined a team of nine katsas - field intelligence officers - in London. Their task was to entrap Mordechai Vanunu, who had worked at Israeli's top-secret nuclear facility in the Negev desert, but had fled to London to try to sell his story. Mossad had to stop him from doing so, and Cheryl was chosen as the bait to trap him.

Using her seduction skills, she "came alongside" Vanunu in Leicester Square. Their relationship quickly developed, and Vanunu suggested they spend the night together. Cheryl agreed, saying they should go to Rome and "enjoy a few romantic days in the city of love", as she put it to me.

Five members of the Mossad team were passengers on the flight Cheryl and Vanunu took to Rome. In the old quarter of the city, Cheryl led the way up to an apartment she had told Vanunu belonged to her sister. Already waiting inside were the Mossad katsas from the flight. They overpowered Vanunu, injecting him with a paralysing drug. Three days later he had been tranferred to Haifa in Israel. A swift trial and a life sentence in solitary confinement followed. Cheryl Ben-Tov disappeared back into her secret world.

She resigned from Mossad after the Vanunu case. It had "burned" her as an agent, she told me. Today she lives back in Orlando, with her husband and two daughters, running a real estate business.

Tzipi Livni, the head of the opposition Kadima Party in Israel, was another Mossad high-flier. She was posted to Paris as a kidon, carrying out ruthless operations against Arab terrorists. Ephraim Halevy, a former chief of Mossad, has described her as "running substantial risks to get her targets". She resigned to launch her political career.

Nineteen hours after arriving in the Gulf state, Gail Folliard had left Dubai. In the debriefing in a safe house in Tel Aviv, a Mossad psychologist would have been present. How well did she think her disguise had worked? Had there been any moments when she thought she would abandon her mission?

Gail Folliard, now the subject of an international arrest warrant for murder, will vanish. She may undergo surgery to change her appearance. Her passport will be burned. No one - not her husband nor boyfriend nor family - will be allowed to contact her for months. It should be sufficient for them to know that she was a heroine to Mossad. [Thomas/Telegraph/20February2010]

Spies with the Write Stuff. One of the enduring popular myths about journalism and intelligence is that foreign correspondents make good spies and their job gives them good cover to nose about and recruit informants.

It surfaced again this week in the ABC documentary on the family of the legendary Richard Hughes, the Asia-based correspondent who was the acknowledged model for two fictional spies: Australian intelligence's man in Tokyo, Dikko Henderson, in Ian Fleming's You Only Live Twice, and the British MI6's station chief in Hong Kong, Craw, in John le Carre's novel The Honourable Schoolboy.

Advance publicity from the ABC breezily referred to Hughes as ''the legendary correspondent, raconteur and alleged double agent for MI6 and the KGB''.

The doco, also titled You Only Live Twice, was mostly about Hughes's son Dick, the Sydney jazz pianist and journalist, and his granddaughter Christa, the energetically outrageous chanteuse and comedienne who came to note with the band Machine Gun Fellatio. There is an offstage role for another generation of Hughes performers: the father of Hughes senior, who was a performing ventriloquist with stage dummy and all in pre-World War I Melbourne.

A poignant theme is the relationship with the Catholic Church. The great-grandfather packed away the dummy to marry a wowserish Catholic; Dick Hughes snr was a notorious lampooner of the church; Dick Hughes jnr is a redemption seeker attending Mass several times a week; Christa set out to shock, but got married in a church.

When I met Dick Hughes snr in 1981, three years before his death, he was also by then a performer - playing himself at his lunch table in Hong Kong to a devoted crowd of acolytes, mostly foreign businessmen and publicists, flattered to be included in his life-long joke of addressing people in ecclesiastical terms. The term ''legend in his own lunchtime'' might have been invented for him.

Hughes was up in Tokyo for a dinner in his honour at the Foreign Correspondents' Club, an outfit he had managed for two years in its early Occupation-era days after refusing a recall to Sydney by Sir Frank Packer's Daily Telegraph. Away from the flattery, Hughes came across as intelligent, modest, and wholly encouraging to the young Australian correspondents who got him aside for a drink and a talk.

If by then he was resting on his laurels, he was entitled. Hughes had shown more enterprise than most Australian journalists of his generation, going to Japan in 1940 and coming back with the first clear reports of the rising menace of its expansionism. Previously, as Jacqui Murray shows in her book Watching the Sun Rise, only four staff journalists from Australia visited Japan in the tumultuous 1930s. The Australian press was completely taken in by Japan's propaganda that it was responding to ''aggression'' and ''banditry'' in China.

Reporting for London's Sunday Times in Moscow before the momentous 1956 Communist Party conference, Hughes persuaded the Soviet leadership to bring out the British Foreign Office defectors Burgess and Maclean, an interview conveniently timed on Saturday evening to give his newspaper the best possible news break.

In 1940 Tokyo, Hughes met, in the Ginza beer-halls favoured by the local Nazi Germans, the greatest journalist-spy of all time, the German-born Soviet agent Richard Sorge, whose cover was a reporter for German newspapers. He never met the other master-spy who moved in and out of journalism, Kim Philby - that scoop remained for another Australian with The Sunday Times, Murray Sayle.

While he certainly mingled with the other side in the Cold War, Hughes used the contact to talk his way into previously closed places and try to reach remote leadership figures. Mostly he didn't succeed, but he collected a lot of journalistic colour in the process. If it were not ridiculous to think the deeply anti-communist Hughes was somehow turned by the KGB, the proof is in his writing: everything he learnt, he put into his reports.

As for MI6, there was a clubbishness between Britain's intelligence, diplomatic and quality press in the 1940s and 1950s that would have included him informally. Ian Fleming had been in naval intelligence in World War II and managed the foreign coverage of The Sunday Times while he launched his James Bond thrillers. MI6 and its Australian equivalent ASIS (formed in 1952) later agreed not to recruit each other's nationals, but in those days many Australians still identified themselves as British.

In that era, some Australian foreign correspondents thought it an honour to be formally ''listed'' as having been informed of the existence of ASIS, which was not disclosed to the public until 1977, and invited to its former headquarters in Melbourne's St Kilda for debriefings.

These days, the diminishing corps of foreign correspondents are even more of a red flag to local security agencies, and less and less likely to get away from recycling ''news'' at their screens to get out and mingle with original sources. Intelligence agencies would be much better off employing businessmen, academics and aid workers.

My own brush with the KGB came first in late 1970s Jakarta when Leo, a Soviet correspondent recently expelled from Washington for ''activity incompatible with his status'', brought his tool of trade - a brown paper bag of cash - to our circle of foreign correspondents in return for contributions to ''in-house'' journals. This was an offer all refused as far as I know.

Nearly 20 years later in New Delhi, a new correspondent from Russia (as it now was) turned up at the foreign correspondent's club one Sunday. There was something familiar about that Lenin-style goatee, now greying, and that pushy manner. It was Leo. He wanted to join the club, and pay up his fees in advance, on the spot. Of course, he had the cash with him. [McDonald/NationalTimes/20February2010] 

Vegetarian, Painter - Spy Chief. The man who runs one of the world's most feared spy agencies is a happily married vegetarian, who spends his free time painting among the beautiful Galilee scenery around his village home.

Born on a train in Siberia in 1945 to survivors of the Holocaust, Meir Dagan spent most of his career in the military, serving in the six-day and Lebanon wars, and working in undercover units in the 1970s. Twice wounded in combat, he was decorated for his bravery after challenging a Palestinian carrying a live hand-grenade. The resulting injury means he now relies on a walking stick to get around.

Despite his tough-guy image, Dagan, who has three grown-up children, is softly spoken and an accomplished amateur artist. He has called art "my balance between the military world and real life". He studied painting and sculpture at Tel Aviv University as he rose through the army's ranks.

While other Mossad heads have been known for their extravagance, Dagan, who also has a degree in political science, shuns luxury restaurants and chooses to stay in modest hotels when abroad.

Known as a fiercely loyal friend, he likes to spend his free time with a group of former colleagues in the Israel Defence Forces with whom he particularly enjoys going out on long Jeep rides exploring Asia.

He was promoted to run Mossad by his long-standing colleague, the former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, in 2002 and became one of the agency's most successful directors.  [Times/20February2010] 

Section III - COMMENTARY

Dispersing the CIA Myth, by Yevgeny Bazhanov. It has become customary in recent decades to blame the United States for every catastrophe afflicting the planet - from tsunamis to revolutions. Before the United States, it was the Jews who were blamed for the world's problems. In medieval Europe, for example, Jews were said to have spread the plague - and, ironically, the accusations were most virulent in those regions where Jewish people didn't even live.

Governments have often blamed foreign elements for instigating revolutions. Opponents of the 1789 French Revolution considered it the fruit of an English and Lutheran plot, and Russian authorities considered the Decembrists to be French agents. Bolshevik leaders were thought to be agents of the German military, and Adolf Hitler viewed the Bolsheviks as part of a global Jewish plot. The capitalist West invariably implicated Moscow in national liberation movements of the 20th century, and the Kremlin was convinced that every right-wing dictator was a puppet of Uncle Sam.

But the truth is that all of these political upheavals were the result of internal forces. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, many Russians thought that it was caused by the Central Intelligence Agency. No doubt, Washington did concoct various schemes during the Cold War to weaken the Soviet Union and possibly hasten its collapse - for example, drawing Moscow into an arms race by launching the "Star Wars" program and conspiring with Saudi Arabia to precipitate the collapse of oil prices in the 1980s.

But accusations that the CIA alone caused the Soviet Union to collapse are ridiculous. Why do Russians seemingly hold the CIA in such high regard? It can't even uncover the simplest intelligence, much less cause the collapse of the Soviet Union. Take, for example, the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. Shah Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi, a close ally of the United States, had been ruling the country, and various individuals operating as U.S. agents filled his inner circle. Nonetheless, the Islamic revolution, which had been brewing for years, came as a complete surprise to the shah and his cohorts. Then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter summarily fired the CIA chief and decided to conduct a thorough housecleaning at the agency. 

Nor did anybody in the CIA expect that the collapse of the Soviet Union would occur as soon as it did. After it happened, the U.S. Congress ordered an investigation to determine why the intelligence service did not predict the Soviet collapse, much less organize it.

The key reasons for the Soviet collapse had little to do with the United States. The reasons were internal, of course - not least among them were the perestroika reforms introduced in 1987 under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who understood that the economy had no chance of surviving without at least a modicum of democratization and economic liberalization. But those democratic reforms ultimately caused the already weak Soviet foundation to collapse. The political kettle had been boiling for years, and as soon as Gorbachev opened the lid even a tad, the country experienced a violent overflow of opposition to Soviet rule in the Baltic states and an outbreak of interethnic fighting in the Caucasus. The political explosions sharply exacerbated the country's acute economic woes.

Things did not go well for the former Soviet republics either after they gained independence. People expected conditions to improve, but instead they witnessed the emergence of oligarchic "bandit capitalism," which resulted in a huge gap between the few rich and the many poor. The great disappointment, disillusionment and chaos in the decade following the collapse of the Soviet Union paved the way for new "color revolutions" in three former Soviet republics. The West may have funded some of the opposition forces, but it is ridiculous to claim that it caused these revolutions.

The Feb. 7 Ukrainian presidential election proved that the hyped-up claims of Western subversion in its color revolution was patently false. Conservative groups in Russia love to claim that the Orange Revolution was designed in Washington and that Yushchenko's victory allowed the United States to control Ukraine and dictate Kiev's "anti-Russian" policy. But when Yushchenko received only 5 percent of the vote in an election declared democratic by all international monitoring groups, this was a crushing defeat not only to Yushchenko, but also to the fear-mongers in Russia who claimed that Washington had completely orchestrated the Orange Revolution. On the contrary, thanks to the democratic Orange Revolution, Ukrainians were able to remove an unpopular, pro-Western president through free elections. [Yevgeny Bazhanov is vice chancellor of research and international relations at the Foreign Ministry's Diplomatic Academy in Moscow.] [Bazhanov/TheMoscowTimes/17February2010]

Cheney's Wrong, Obama's Not Soft on Terrorism. Regardless of what former Vice President Dick Cheney says, President Barack Obama is not soft on terrorism.

When he ran for the presidency, Obama promised to make Afghanistan - the home of the 9/11 terrorists - the focus of the war on terror. And that's exactly what he has done.

He has raised the level of armed forces in Afghanistan, and currently, U.S., NATO and Afghan forces are engaged in a major offensive to drive Taliban forces from Marja, Afghanistan.

Last week, CIA and Pakistani intelligence operatives captured Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban's No. 2 commander in Afghanistan. According to reports yesterday, two more Taliban leaders were arrested in Pakistan.

The U.S. has stepped up Predator missile attacks on terrorist targets in Pakistan following the killings of seven CIA operatives in Khost Afghanistan, in December.

In January, a drone killed Hakimullah Mehsud, the architect of a series of terrorist bombings in Pakistan.

According to the Washington Post, U.S. counterterrorism officials say that attacks on terrorist networks are weakening al-Qaida.

If Obama's soft, these actions are hardly the way to show it. Yet, Cheney persists.

Despite the successes, no one believes this war is close to being over. The experts say that al-Qaida and the Taliban will reshape their tactics and mount smaller attacks on America.

The failed attempt to bomb a Northwest airliner on Christmas Day may be the harbinger of those tactics. While it is hard to accept that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was able to board the Detroit-bound plane, Cheney's call to give investigators the option of waterboarding the suspect was misguided. Abdulmutallab is reportedly talking to interrogators.

Obama's policies are fair game for criticism. But the criticism should be based on facts, and right now, Cheney should admit that the facts are on the president's side. [RepublicanEditorials/Masslive/18February2010] 

The Spy Trade Likes to Keep Success a Secret, by Rupert Cornwell. In crucial respect, the spy trade is different from almost every other business on earth. Its successes - an enemy agent turned, a disaster averted by skilled intelligence gathering - are by definition secret. When we learn of them, it is often years after the event. Of things which did not happen, we may never learn at all. So when an intelligence agency starts making headlines, it's usually because of a failure.

That principle holds good once again in the increasingly lurid affair of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the Hamas commander murdered last month in Dubai by, it is widely assumed, Israel's Mossad organization.

Yes, in narrow terms, the operation was a success. A targeted assassination had been carried out, a senior figure in a group committed to the destruction of the state of Israel had been eliminated. But - again assuming Mossad was responsible - the gains are surely outweighed by the losses: international uproar, the straining of relations with important allies, further evidence that Israel behaves as madly or worse than its enemies. Of course the hubbub will fade. But would Israel have preferred the whole thing had passed without much notice, as until this week it seemed set to do? You bet.

That is of course, if it was Mossad. James Jesus Angleton, the brilliant but paranoid head of CIA counter-intelligence, used to talk about the "wilderness of mirrors" in the spying trade that could drive a man close to madness - and in his case did. Angleton was a Cold War warrior; his business was assessing human loyalty: whether defectors were genuine, whether your people were working for you or for the KGB. He ended up believing a Russian disinformation campaign was taking over the world.

In the Middle East, the mirrors are different, but the wilderness they create is no less disorienting. Was it Mossad? Or was it foes of Israel who deliberately made it look like the agency's work, in order to discredit Israel. But then again could the legendarily efficient Mossad really have left so many clues? To which the answer is yes, if you subscribe to the cock-up theory of life. Or were the Israelis quietly working with the Fatah movement, Hamas' rival for control of Palestine, on the basis of my enemy's enemy is my friend? Or - a thesis supported by the absence of his usual retinue of bodyguards - was al-Mabhouh the victim of an internal Hamas power struggle, in which Israel was set up to take the blame?

One thing though is certain. Targeted assassinations are a fact of life, and not only in the Middle East. Israel's staunchest ally, the US, has used them in the so-called "war on terror". That indeed may be why Washington has remained conspicuously quiet about the Dubai affair, even after it emerged that five of the suspects had credit cards issued in the US. Last summer the CIA was swept up in controversy over a secret 2001 presidential order by George W Bush that purportedly set up special hit teams to hunt down and kill al-Qa'ida terrorists. Briefly, there was a huge fuss over whether the order breached a quarter-century ban on CIA assassinations of foreign figures, imposed by President Ford in 1976.

The CIA quickly let it be known the plan was never carried out. But the difference between targeted assassinations by human hand and those indubitably being carried out today by remote controlled drones is only one of technology, not morality.

In Russia too, assassinations on foreign soil are a constant of history. More than 60 years after Leon Trotsky was murdered in Mexico on Stalin's orders, many people believe former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko's old employers arranged a similar fate for him in London. The KGB's "wet jobs" division that handled such business is said to have been phased out. But Israel, the US, Russia (and probably not a few other countries) will continue targeted assassinations. The real trick is keeping them quiet. [Cornwell/Independent/20February2010] 

Section IV - BOOKS, OBITUARIES AND COMING EVENTS

Books

Former CIA Director Hayden: Thiessen's 'Courting Disaster' a Must-Read. Marc Thiessen begins his new book, "Courting Disaster," with something of a disclaimer: For reasons of security and classification, he says, he should not have been able to write it. He's right. He shouldn't have been able to write it. But I'm glad he did.

Thiessen jumps into the once murky (and once highly classified) world of the CIA's detention and interrogation program with zeal and energy. And he puts fresh light on a story that up until now seems to have been taken to the darkest corner of the room at every opportunity.

I opposed the release of the Office of Legal Council memos on the CIA interrogation program last April. I opposed the release of additional memos and the report of the CIA inspector general on the interrogation program last August. But whatever their release did to reveal American secrets to our enemies, it did inject something into the public debate on this program that had been sorely missing - facts.

Thiessen has taken these documents, as well as his own extensive interviews and research, and created for the first time a public account of a program previously hidden from public view. Prior to this, some opponents of the program could create whatever image they wanted to create to support the argument of the moment. And those who were in government at the time were near powerless to correct the record. No longer.

There will still be those who remain adamantly opposed to the interrogation effort, but now they must be opposed to the program as it was, not as they imagined or feared or - dare I say, for some - expected it to be.

Thiessen lays out the facts without much varnish. Here are the techniques, here's what was learned, here's why it was thought lawful. And make no mistake, he lays out the facts with a point of view. He stops just a little short of being argumentative, but this is meant to be persuasive as well as expository prose.

He doesn't use much varnish in his treatment of opponents, either. While not quite condemning them outright, he does take a variety of players to task. He chronicles, for example, the current attorney general's journey from counter-terrorism hawk in 2002 ("They are not prisoners of war - they are not, in fact, people entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention.") to this in 2008 ("Our government...denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants and authorized the use of procedures that violate both international law and the United States Constitution.... We owe the American people a reckoning.") Thiessen is also not particularly kind to civil liberties lobbies who have seemed to push their agendas without regard for any security consequences and he saves a special brand of disdain for the pro bono work of law firms who seem bent on discovering new "rights" for enemy combatants.

And the book's subtitle - How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack - should suggest that Thiessen does not think even the president immune from criticism.

As someone who lived and worked them from the inside, I can tell you that these are tough issues and honest men can and do differ on them. Thiessen has been giving as good as he is getting in the numerous interviews he has been giving since the book came out. And I admire his range, from the Catholic Eternal Word Network to Christiane Amanpour on CNN. That people are willing to consider his message is borne out by the book's popularity to date, No. 9 on the New York Times best-seller list and No. 6 for The Washington Post as of this writing.

Thiessen's instincts for the broader audience seem to be on the mark. Acceptance and even support of the interrogation regime is higher among the general populace than it is among some political elites and that support has seemed to grow as more details of the program have become public.

All of this is good. These issues need to be joined and we need the wisdom of an informed public to help us.

But there's something even better about this book. In the overheated rhetoric of today's Washington, we have lost sight of the fact that this program was carried out by real people, acting out of duty, not enthusiasm.

In preparing President Bush's September 2006 speech on the interrogation program, Thiessen got a chance to meet real CIA interrogators. These decent people told him candidly what they had done, why, how they felt about it and how they felt about the fellow human beings they interrogated. Thiessen recounts how one of the interrogators that I sent down to talk to him was dubbed Emir Harry (not his real name) by KSM.

Thiessen's book has put a human face on Emir Harry and his associates. That's a good thing. These people deserve better than to be stalked by the ACLU's John Adams project or to be subject to a re-investigation of their past activities. For doing what they were asked to do, these quiet professionals are bearing the nation's burdens still today and Thiessen has given them their due. And that alone would make "Courting Disaster" worth a read. [Michael Hayden is a retired U.S. Air Force four-star general and former director of the National Security Agency and director of the Central Intelligence Agency.]  [Hayden/DailyCaller/15February2010] 

Five Best Books on British Military Deception. The British talent for wartime trickery and misdirection is fully revealed by these books, says Nicholas Rankin. 

1. 'Blinker' Hall, By David Ramsay, Spellmount, 2008. 
As David Ramsay recounts in this fascinating biography, Britain's Machiavellian director of naval intelligence in World War I, Reginald "Blinker" Hall, was a man whose talent for tricks and bribes made the U.S. ambassador consider him "the one genius that the war has developed." Hall's organization, working out of Room 40 in the Admiralty offices, "tapped the air" for German wireless messages and scanned diplomatic cables. The codebreakers' greatest coup came in 1917 with the interception and deciphering of "the Zimmermann telegram," a secret message from Germany to the Mexican government offering money and the return of the American Southwest if the Mexicans would help wage war on the U.S. The furor that ensued after the message's contents were revealed helped impel the U.S. into the war, thus clinching final victory for the British and their allies.

2. The Double-Cross System in the War of 1939 to 1945, By J.C. Masterman, Yale, 1972
J.C. Masterman was an Oxford don who, during World War II, chaired the secret Twenty Committee - 20 is XX in Roman numerals, but XX is also a "double cross." The group coordinated false information fed to German intelligence through Nazi spies who had been "turned." Masterman waited nearly three decades after the war's end to publish his account of how the committee and more generally the British Security Service (also known as MI5) actively ran and controlled agents of the German espionage service, but his book caused a sensation nonetheless. It was the first great, unsanctioned breach in the wall of British wartime secrecy. As an operating handbook of astonishingly successful deception, "The Double-Cross System" is without peer. But some of Masterman's colleagues never spoke to him again for having exposed their work.

3. The Man Who Never Was, By Ewen Montagu, Lippincott, 1953
Operation Mincemeat, designed to divert German attention away from the Allies' impending invasion of Sicily in 1943, involved planting false papers on a genuine corpse outfitted to be a British Royal Marine, "Maj. William Martin." The body was dropped in the ocean off the coast of Spain; when it washed ashore, the Germans soon discovered what seemed to be plans for an invasion of Greece and Sardinia. Mincemeat worked perfectly - the Nazis took the poisoned bait and rushed to bolster their Greek defenses. A novel published soon after World War II told the tale of the operation, but readers had no idea how close to the truth the improbable story was until the appearance a few years later of "The Man Who Never Was." Lawyer Ewen Montagu, who had been the naval-intelligence representative on the Twenty Committee during the war, was given official permission to write the book after a reporter began digging for the half-buried facts in the fictional version. Montagu produced a genuine wartime thriller.

4. The Deceivers, By Thaddeus Holt, Scribner, 2004
This scholarly yet entertaining magnum opus is the definitive account of all the stratagems used by the Allies against the Axis in World War II. The "master of the game" was the enigmatic Britisher Brig. Dudley W. Clarke, and "The Deceivers" follows the development of Clarke's organization, from its origins in a converted bathroom in Cairo to a world-wide network with key nodes in Washington, London and New Delhi. It was during the desert warfare in North Africa that Clarke started using such ruses as dummy vehicles and fake radio traffic to make the enemy think the British were stronger than they were. The culmination of these ideas was the big lie that convinced the German high command in 1944 that the Allied invasion of Europe would come not at Normandy but with an Army Group led by Gen. George S. Patton at Calais.

5. Garbo, By Tom�s Harris, Public Record Office, 2000
Catalan-born Juan Pujol - the greatest of World War II double agents - was such a brilliant actor that British intelligence gave him the code name Garbo. The Germans, who thought Pujol was working for them, called him Arabel (sometimes Arabal). His exploits were recorded by his handler, Tom�s Harris, in an intelligence file that made such riveting reading that it was published in book form. It shows how Pujol and Harris collaborated in creating a network of fictitious sub-agents throughout Britain to channel bogus information through "Arabel" to the enemy. His ultimate coup was playing a key role in persuading the Germans to hold troops ready for the imminent D-Day invasion at Calais. During the war the oblivious Germans gratefully awarded the Iron Cross to Pujol; after the war, he was given the Order of the British Empire (fifth class) and a gratuity that allowed him to retire quietly to Venezuela, where he died in 1988. [Rankin/WallStreetJournal/20February2010] 

Obituaries

Colonel Jens-Anton Poulsson: Norwegian SOE Officer. As a young officer of the Special Operations Executive, Jens-Anton Poulsson led the in-country support team for two attempts to destroy Hitler's heavy water plant in German-occupied Norway.

The first operation proved a tragic failure, the second a resounding success. Poulsson's outstanding contribution was to keep his team alive and highly motivated during the intervening three months - living on what they could scavenge or snare above the tree line on Norway's uninhabited Hardangervidda mountain range.

Towards the end of 1941 intelligence sources in occupied Norway reported a marked increase in the production of heavy water - water with a raised concentration of deuterium, essential for the manufacture of plutonium - at the Norsk Hydro plant at Vemork, 50 miles west of Oslo, in the province of Telemark. Operation Freshman, using glider-borne engineer commandos, was the first attempt to halt the German atomic bomb development programme.

At 6pm one day in early November 1942 duplicate teams of engineer commandos boarded two gliders which were to be towed by Halifax bombers to landing zones within skiing and marching distance of Vemork.

Three weeks earlier Poulsson and his team of three Norwegian NCOs - all from SOE - had been parachuted at night on to a nearby plateau. Their task was to prepare the operational base and landing zone, to which they were to guide the towing aircraft using a Eureka homing device.

But as the aircraft and gliders crossed the Norwegian coast on the night the operation was launched, icing on their wings forced them to lose height. The first glider crashed near Stavanger and the second tug aircraft, after briefly picking up the Eureka signal, hit a mountainside. All nine survivors of the second glider were executed on Hitler's order. Poulsson and his team were left to their own devices on the mountain.

Knowing that after the glider catastrophe they would be hunted by German troops, he took his team up above the tree line. They found an empty trapper's hut and survived there, living on snared small game and a reindeer Poulsson shot just before Christmas. News received from London by radio in early January gave warning of a new plan - a great boost to their morale and resolve to survive.

Meanwhile at the Commando training base at Aviemore in Scotland, a new sabotage group was forming up under Lieutenant Joachim R�nneberg. He trained his team of five Norwegians on a scale model of the Vemork plant prepared by Professor Leif Tronstadt, who had worked there and knew it intimately.

R�nneberg's group was parachuted over the Hardangervidda on the night of February 16, 1943. Apart from one weapons container falling wide but recovered, the drop was perfect. After sheltering in an empty hut during a three-day gale, by good chance they met two members of Poulsson's group on the mountainside.

Working together, the two teams carried out the destruction of the heavy water plant with ruthless efficiency. Carrying the explosives brought by R�nneberg's group, they set up a forward base close to the plant and climbed up to it from the bed of the Maan river. While Poulsson's group gave cover and stood ready to intervene should anyone try to interfere, R�nneberg's group entered the plant via the electricity supply tunnel and placed the charges alongside the heavy water plant.

Both parties were on their way down to the valley when the explosions were heard and the plant's alarm siren did not sound until after they had recrossed the river. By dawn they had collected their skis from the forward base and set out for the mountain. Before dark, after struggling through a snowstorm, they reached their main base on the Vidda, where the two radio operators were waiting to send the success signal to London.

The German reaction to the SOE triumph was predictably furious. The local Quisling leader, co-operating with the occupation forces, ordered Norwegian hostages to be taken for reprisals. But when General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, commander of German forces in Norway, had inspected the damage and pronounced it a purely military operation - and one of the best acts of sabotage he had seen - he ordered the hostages to be released.

Leaving three men behind to train the local resistance and distribute equipment they could not take back, the two teams split up for their return to Britain. R�nneberg's group returned via Sweden and Poulsson's by sea to Scotland. Both Poulsson and R�nneberg were awarded the DSO and their respective team members either the Military Cross or the Military Medal.

An attempt was made in February 1944 to move from Norway to Germany the stocks of heavy water produced before the plant was sabotaged. When this intention became known to Knut Haukelid, one of the SOE team who had remained behind after the 1943 operation, he informed London and, with the help of the local resistance, placed charges on the keel of the ferry carrying the two railway trucks with the heavy water across Lake Tinnsj�. The ferry sank at a point where the lake is 1,000ft deep.

This episode and the earlier sabotage of the heavy water plant were dramatized in the film The Heroes of Telemark (1965), starring Kirk Douglas, Richard Harris and Michael Redgrave. Poulsson appeared as himself in a French-made drama documentary about the sabotage mission, Kampen om tungtvannet (1948, The struggle for heavy water). In 1982 he published Aksjon Vemork. Vinterkrig p� Hardangervidda (Winter war on the Hardangervidda), an account of his wartime experiences.

He continued to serve in the Norwegian Army after the war and eventually retired with the rank of colonel.

He is survived by his wife, Bergljot, and two daughters. [UKTimes/16February2010] 

Allan Kornblum, Counsel to F.B.I., 71. Allan Kornblum, who helped steer the F.B.I. into the post-J. Edgar Hoover era by drafting guidelines for its surveillance operations in the 1970s, and whose testimony helped convict the murderer of a black man in a celebrated civil rights case revived nearly 40 years after the event, died Feb. 12 in Gainesville, Fla. He was 71.

The cause was cancer of the esophagus, his son Aaron said.

Mr. Kornblum, a former New York City police officer and F.B.I. agent, was recruited by the Justice Department under President Gerald R. Ford to write new procedures that would provide the Federal Bureau of Investigation, for the first time, with a clear set of rules to govern its domestic surveillance and counterintelligence work that respected the Fourth Amendment rights of private citizens and would, in theory, prevent the kind of abuses that had tarnished the agency's image in recent years.

He went on to write key provisions in the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, specifically the procedures for minimization - the separation of potentially valuable intelligence data from private data of no concern to the government. FISA governs the surveillance and collection of intelligence from foreigners or agents of foreign powers suspected of espionage or the planning of terrorist acts.

As deputy counsel for the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, Mr. Kornblum supervised wiretap applications from the F.B.I. and the National Security Agency for surveillance operations focused on, among others, the spies John A. Walker Jr. and Aldrich H. Ames.

In 2003, Mr. Kornblum's past as an F.B.I. agent cast him in a new role: the government's chief witness in the murder trial of Ernest Avants. In 1966, Mr. Avants and two fellow Ku Klux Klansman had abducted and killed Ben Chester White, a black farmhand, in the hope that the heinousness of the crime would lure the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Natchez, Miss., where he could be assassinated.

Mr. Avants was tried and acquitted in a state court. But when federal prosecutors decades later discovered that the killing had taken place in a national forest, they brought federal murder charges against him.

By this time, both of Mr. Avants's accomplices had died, but Mr. Kornblum, a young agent working in Mississippi at the time, had heard him confess to the crime when interviewing him about another case, the bombing of a civil rights worker's car. He returned to Mississippi to testify.

After a three-day trial that began in late February 2003, a jury of nine whites and three blacks deliberated for three hours and returned a guilty verdict. Mr. Avants was sentenced to life without parole and died in prison in 2004.

Allan Nathaniel Kornblum was born in Brooklyn on March 4, 1938. He grew up in Park Slope and attended Stuyvesant High School, where he was a star quarterback.

After earning a degree in police administration from Michigan State University in 1958 and a law degree from New York University in 1961, he joined the New York City Police Department as a patrolman, and later worked as a criminal investigator for the Treasury Department.

He served for two years in the Army with a military police battalion in Korea before joining the F.B.I., where he worked on civil rights cases in Mississippi, and served with the bank robbery squad in New York.

In 1969, after earning a master's degree in police administration at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, he became the director of security at Princeton University, where he earned a doctorate in 1973 with a dissertation on ethics and corruption in the New York Police Department.

At Princeton, he distinguished himself during the mayhem later known as the Snow Riot of 1970. When a horde of students, inspired by the first snowfall of the season, went on a semi-nude rampage punctuated by Christmas caroling, he herded them into the gym, where college officials had prepared hot chocolate and doughnuts.

In addition to his son Aaron, of Mercer Island, Wash., he is survived by his wife, the former Helen Ettinger; another son, Jesse, of Silver Spring, Md.; and three grandchildren.

In 2000, Mr. Kornblum left the Justice Department and became the first legal adviser to the secret court established by FISA to oversee requests for surveillance warrants. Three years later, he was appointed a federal magistrate judge for the Northern District of Florida.

At the Avants trial, Mr. Kornblum testified that Mr. Avants had told him, "I blew his head off with a shotgun," and then had bragged that he could not be convicted of murder because Claude Fuller, one of his accomplices, had already shot Mr. White more than 15 times.

The lawyer for the Justice Department asked Mr. Kornblum: "It's been 37 years. How do you remember?"

"It's one of those singular events in a person's life," Mr. Kornblum answered. "It's burned in my memory." [Grimes/NYTimes/21February2010] 

General Alexander M. Haig Jr. It was June 25, 1950. Alexander Haig Jr., then just a junior Army officer fresh out of West Point and assigned to the staff of Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Tokyo, took the phone call offering ominous news: The North Korean communists had just crossed the 38th parallel and started a war.

Gen. Alexander Haig awoke a sleeping MacArthur to inform him of the surprise attack.

When Haig passed away Saturday at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Md., after a short illness, his career of public and private service, beginning as an aide to MacArthur, had spanned more than six decades. In all, his professional life cut a broad swath, covering fully one-quarter of the nation's history.

A Time magazine profile of Haig in 1984 best distilled the man's unique place in American history: "Few American public figures have had such tempestuous careers. Alexander M. Haig, Jr. has spent much of his life in war zones - bureaucratic and geopolitical."

Haig's life was no time marker. He was, in fact, an actor and player in some of the most momentous events of our times: President Nixon's opening of China, the tumult of Watergate, the global crisis under Jimmy Carter, the rollback of communism under Reagan, and even the emergence of the Internet as a force in American life.

In the bloody carnage of Vietnam, the West Point man served as a battalion and brigade commander.

Lt. Col. Haig was a battalion commander in Vietnam when he won the Distinguished Service Cross during a battle near An Loc. He went on to command a brigade.

As the CO of 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry, 1st Infantry Division, Haig boarded a helicopter and flew to where his troops were engaging a superior enemy force. An excerpt from Haig's citation for his exceptional conduct follows:

"When two of his companies were engaged by a large hostile force, Colonel Haig landed amid a hail of fire, personally took charge of the units, called for artillery and air fire support and succeeded in soundly defeating the insurgent force....the next day a barrage of 400 rounds was fired by the Viet Cong, but it was ineffective because of the warning and preparations by Colonel Haig.

"As the barrage subsided, a force three times larger than his began a series of human wave assaults on the camp. Heedless of the danger himself, Colonel Haig repeatedly braved intense hostile fire to survey the battlefield. His personal courage and determination, and his skillful employment of every defense and support tactic possible, inspired his men to fight with previously unimagined power.

"Although his force was outnumbered three to one, Colonel Haig succeeded in inflicting 592 casualties on the Viet Cong."

The crucible of this war was followed by a tour as the brusque and efficient aide-de-camp to President Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger.

Nixon, impressed with both the political and military skills of Kissinger's young aide, eventually tapped him to be his White House chief of staff.

During this time, Haig would serve the nation as a force of stability during the nation-rattling shock and aftershocks of Watergate.

Haig was instrumental in the painful negotiations leading to Nixon's resignation in August 1974, and to Gerald Ford's accession as commander in chief. Bob Woodward's 2001 book "Shadow" describes Haig's role as the indispensable point man between Nixon and then-Vice President Ford during the final days of Watergate.

After Richard Nixon's presidency ended, Ford put Haig back into uniform, appointing him NATO's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe.

On June 25, 1979, Haig was the target of an assassination attempt in Mons, Belgium. A land mine detonated under a bridge as Haig's car passed over it, narrowly missing Haig's car but wounding three of his bodyguards in a car that was following it. The Red Army Faction was blamed, and a German court sentenced an RAF member to prison for the assassination attempt.

In July 1979, Haig resigned from his NATO post, reportedly because of President Jimmy Carter's efforts to remove the Shah of Iran from power during the Iranian Revolution. Haig predicted that the fall of America's strong ally, the Shah, would lead to negative repercussions throughout the region. Haig once said in an interview that the Carter administration "stabbed him [the Shah] in the back."

"But it was during his tenure as Ronald Reagan's secretary of state that Haig found himself most embattled," reported Time magazine. In a memoir, "Caveat: Realism, Reagan, and Foreign Policy," published in 1984, Haig recounted his tumultuous tenure as commander of his nation's foreign policy juggernaut.

Critics quickly charged into the fray, claiming that the military man was temperamentally unsuited for the statesman-like position of chief diplomat.

Haig, dubbed the "vicar" of Reagan's foreign policy, appeared to be the ideal man for Reagan's "respected, not loved" foreign policy, especially in enforcing his tough stance toward the Soviet Union and its client states.

Haig quickly earned friends and enemies - even within the Reagan camp - for his strong policy positions toward Cuba, Afghanistan, Poland, Lebanon, the Falklands, and Nicaragua. A staunch friend of Israel, he angered many in the Reagan administration by opposing arms sales to Saudi Arabia.

Haig once described Reagan's close advisers as "foreign policy amateurs," who fretted only about the domestic repercussions of global issues.

Perhaps ironically, of all the flaps during the 18 months of his service as secretary of state, Haig may be remembered best for his famous "I'm in control" statement - fatefully uttered on the afternoon of March 30, 1981.

The nation's new president, Ronald Reagan, had just been shot leaving a Washington hotel. Wounded grievously along with the president was press secretary James Brady, police officer Tom Delahanty, and Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy.

No one knew at the time that shooter John Hinckley was a deranged young man who acted completely alone.

In the Situation Room in the White House, key members of the president's Cabinet and national security team assembled. It was a long-believed Pentagon view that a Soviet nuclear attack on the United States might be preceded by a "decapitation" of the federal leadership, including assassinations of the president and the vice president, creating chaos and breaking the chain of command.

At the time, the Cold War was still hot. The Soviet army seemed poised to invade Poland, and lurking Soviet nuclear missile subs had strayed closer to the Atlantic seaboard than usual. The Kremlin also had been angrily denouncing the cowboy Reagan as too militaristic.

This was the background as the president was in surgery and rendered unconscious with general anesthesia.

Secretary of State Haig was trying to reach Vice President George H.W. Bush, who was airborne somewhere over Texas. National security adviser Richard Allen was frantically rounding up the codes to release nuclear weapons, and White house lawyer Fred Fielding was preparing for a transfer of presidential power.

According to presidential counselor Ed Meese, Haig gave voice to a very salient question: "Who's minding the store?"

A military man, always cognizant of the vital links of chain of command, Haig and other senior officials watched the television incredulously as a member of the press asked neophyte deputy White House spokesman Larry Speakes who exactly was in charge of the federal government. Speakes' response was vague and uncertain.

Haig announced he would rush up to the press room to reassure friends and enemies that the U.S. government was running smoothly. Haig had to climb a flight of stairs to make his way there. He quickly took the podium, somewhat out of breath and sounding shaky, and announced:

"Constitutionally gentlemen, you have the president, the vice president and the secretary of state, in that order, and should the president decide he wants to transfer the helm to the vice president, he will do so. As for now, I'm in control here, in the White House, pending the return of the vice president and in close touch with him. If something came up, I would check with him, of course."

Years later, Haig explained: "What I meant was, we had to run a government. We had to have an authority to send all the messages out, to speak should we find it was a conspiracy and to take appropriate action, if necessary, pending return of the vice president."

In fact, the Constitution does mention the secretary of state in the transfer of power, placing him fourth in line for the presidency.

"I wasn't talking about transition," Haig said. "I was talking about the executive branch - who is running the government. That was the question asked. It was not, 'Who is in line should the president die?'"

But Reagan survived, the vice president soon returned to Washington, and normalcy was restored. Haig became a convenient punching bag for critics in the press and adversaries in political struggles in the Reagan White House.

Audiotapes of what took place in the Situation Room, released in recent years, back up Haig's account of how events unfolded that day. One was Haig's claim that the United States came perilously close to igniting a confrontation with the Soviet Union.

Defense Secretary Caspar "Cap" Weinberger told all present in the Situation Room that the Pentagon had not raised the alert status of U.S. troops. Haig bought that line and repeated it publicly.

"There are absolutely no alert measures that are necessary at this time or contemplated," Haig told reporters.

But unknown to Haig, Weinberger had approved an increase in the alert status to Defcon 2. SAC pilots were manning nuclear bombers and firing up their engines - all in readiness for a potential Soviet attack.

"I said up there, Cap, I am not a liar. I said there had been no increased alert," Haig told Weinberger, according to a tape of the incident that emerged years later.

Haig feared that the Soviets would see U.S. officials, including himself, claim there was no increase in America's alert status, but meanwhile gather intelligence indicating the opposite. The Soviets, paranoid to begin with, could misinterpret the events and believe the United States was planning a surprise attack.

Haig's actions that fateful day have become the stuff of urban myths. Even Oliver Stone got into the mix, with his made-for-cable movie "The Day Reagan Was Shot." The eccentric director asserted in his film that Haig (played by Richard Dreyfuss) actually tried to leverage the shooting of Reagan into a full-blown military coup.

The truth was the opposite: Haig had been a calming figure during the turmoil of the day. The audiotapes contradicted Stone's wild claims, and he had to temper the movie's spin by stressing it was a fictional representation of events. He even offered personal praise for Haig's taking responsibility during the confusion of the day.

Haig was the warrior caught up in a civilian fire drill. Political correctness was trumped by the natural instincts of the military leader - and Haig was the textbook military leader.

Never apologetic about the incident, Haig once dismissed the furor with: "I don't worry about the midgets."

Haig's actions on the day Reagan was shot did not lead to his departure as secretary of state, but they helped lay the groundwork. And on June 25, 1982, he resigned from the job, a resignation Reagan pushed for.

Though his time as secretary of state was short, Haig had played a role in laying the groundwork for Reagan's rollback of the Soviet Union. But Haig had pointed out that the heavy lifting that made possible the undoing of the Soviet empire had been completed in the Nixon administration.

Nixon's opening of relations with China divided the world's two great communist powers, and the Soviets became weakened and vulnerable. Reagan exploited this division to the fullest, but Haig had helped to make it happen during his days in the Nixon White House.

After leaving government service for the last time, Gen. Haig focused most of his energies on private business.

He became chairman of his own advisory firm, Worldwide Associates Inc., assisting corporations around the world by providing strategic advice on political, economic, commercial and security matters.

But he still had the political bug in him. In 1988, Haig entered the GOP primary fray to succeed Reagan. Soon he was in a scrappy battle for the Republican presidential nomination with Vice President George Bush.

Haig questioned Bush's record and called on the vice president to give a full explanation of his role in the Iran-Contra affair.

In speeches in New York City and Manchester, N.H., the then-62-year-old former secretary of state said his more than four decades of public service qualified him for the job. "The 1988 campaign is going to be primarily about leadership, competence, experience with the complex array of affairs that constitute the national interest. I will be the nominee of the party."

Despite his signature brash confidence, the Haig presidential bid never gained traction.

Languishing at the bottom of the Republican field, Haig withdrew from the presidential race and turned over his support to Sen. Robert J. Dole, whom he described as "head and shoulders above George Bush as a potential president."

Though Haig will be remembered as a political and military figure, he was also a successful business executive.

After resigning as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander in 1979, Haig became president, chief operating officer and a director of United Technologies, a major defense contractor. He held the job until Reagan nominated him for secretary of state in 1981. (In later years, Haig would note that, by leaving United Technologies, he was forced to cash out stock options to avoid conflicts of interest in the government. Had he held these stock options, he would have reaped hundreds of millions. Haig would say he never regretted the financial loss for the chance to serve his country.)

Upon his departure from the Reagan administration, Haig turned again to business and served as a member of the board of directors of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc., MGM Mirage Inc., and Indevus Pharmaceuticals Inc., and as chairman of the board of DOR BioPharma Inc. He also served on the international advisory board of Newsmax Media.

Perhaps his most notable board position was as a founding director of America Online. In the mid-1980s, a West Point friend of Haig's was an investor in a Virginia company called Quantum. His friend asked Haig to join the board. The company was facing bankruptcy, and Haig's friend wanted Haig to see how he could help close down the software company to get his money back.

But Haig was impressed by a young marketing executive at Quantum named Steve Case. Haig helped persuade his friend to give Case and the beleaguered company a chance. The friend agreed, reluctantly.

In 1989, Quantum changed its name to America Online and offered online games to paid subscribers. Under Case's leadership, America Online (AOL) became an early behemoth in the Internet world, and in 2001, merged with Time Warner in a historic $164 billion transaction.

The AOL-Time merger later soured and Haig remarked that he had pushed AOL's Case to avoid the old media play altogether and instead make a bid for Amazon, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, was open to a deal.

Out of government service, Haig was a frequent commentator on networks such as CNBC, Fox, and MSNBC. He also hosted the television program "World Business Review" for several years, followed by yet another hosting tour of duty on "21st Century Business," with programs featuring expert interviews, commentary and field reports.

The remarkable Haig leadership trait reared up very soon after his graduation from the U.S. Military Academy. Early in his career, junior officer Haig impressed high-ranking superiors - not the least of which was his one-time boss Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

In several ways, Haig was an heir to the great general's legacy. MacArthur had been known as the "Republicans' General" who had defeated the Japanese while limiting U.S. casualties.

MacArthur was touted as a presidential candidate, and remained wildly popular after President Truman fired him during the Korean War. The general argued that political considerations should not interfere with military victory in Korea, a view that resonated with Haig.

For sure, Haig was molded under MacArthur, serving as the administrative assistant to the chief of staff of the Far East Command and, during the early part of the Korean War, as aide to the X Corps commander. Earning his captain's "railroad tracks" in late 1950, he got out from behind his desk and into combat, going ashore at the Inchon landings - the tactical brainchild of his genius mentor MacArthur.

Capt. Haig was responsible for maintaining Gen. MacArthur's situation map and briefing MacArthur each evening on the day's battleground progress. Haig recounts that he was on hand when MacArthur famously stated to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "Gentlemen, we will land at Inchon on September 15 or you will have a new Supreme Commander in East Asia."

In a speech he gave on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Korean War armistice, Haig offered a telling insight into the hero of Inchon: "When I informed him that this or that young man had been killed or captured, I was amazed to see that our losses were of profound and, at times, even tearful concern to this remarkable soldier."

His time with MacArthur was just the beginning of Haig's long career in which he would see world leaders up close and personal.

In 1992, Haig published his memoir, "Inner Circles: How America Changed the World." In it, he fleshed out his unique insider status in the halls of power, revealing such nuggets as President Lyndon Johnson's theories on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the indecision in the Oval Office at the beginning of the Vietnam War, and Henry Kissinger's confrontation with J. Edgar Hoover.

Haig is the most poignant in his own recounting of Richard Nixon's final hours at the White House as president: "We went together to the Lincoln Sitting Room, his favorite place. The only light came from a log fire on the hearth.

"He began to talk. He spoke about his predecessors and the times of doubt and anguish through which nearly all of them had passed. Not a single word did he speak about his own tragedy. He uttered no recriminations. He had lost the thing he wanted all his life, but he seemed to be at peace.

"I left him there, sitting alone in the dark. When I returned, shortly after dawn, Nixon was still in the same chair. He had a way of sitting on the small of his back, and that was how he was sitting now. The gray light of morning filled the room. There was the smell of a fire that had died. On a table lay a stack of books - the memoirs of presidents. In each, he had inserted a slip of paper, marking a place where he had found something of interest.

"That is how Nixon had spent his last night as president. He had been seeking solace from the only men who could truly know what he was feeling - his kinsmen in history."

Perhaps unknowingly, Haig himself had gone from the "long gray line" of West Point to become one of the great kinsmen in U.S. history.

The process of his life had made Haig more than a military man. He had become a realist, a pragmatist, and an honest voice for his country's interests.

In an address in 2004, he urged Washington leaders to "engage in a little intellectual hygiene" and sharply criticized President George W. Bush's "war on terror" foreign policy:

"The notion that the United States can remake the world in its own image, on its own, as a reaction to violence from abroad dates from Woodrow Wilson's time. It's an old populist con detached from reality; calling it a neo-con doesn't make it any better. Does anyone believe that the United States can turn Afghanistan and Iraq into thriving democracies; reconcile India and Pakistan; transform the Middle East and do it all with a 10-division army and a $500 billion deficit?�

For sure, the great man was thinking not just of his country but also of his family: wife Patricia (they married in 1950), sons Alex and Brian, and daughter Barbara. Brian followed his dad's example, graduating from West Point and having a distinguished military career before becoming an acclaimed author of popular fiction.

Haig may have composed his own best epitaph when he wrote of a simple blueprint for living life: "Practice rather than preach. Make of your life an affirmation, defined by your ideals, not the negation of others. Dare to the level of your capability then go beyond to a higher level."

Alexander Haig also could add what he learned on MacArthur's staff: Always be ready for the call, always be ready to answer it for your country. On both counts, he was. [Eberhart/Newsmax/20February2010]

Coming Events

EVENTS IN COMING TWO MONTHS....

MANY Spy Museum Events in February with full details are listed on the AFIO Website at www.afio.com. The titles for some of these are as follows:

• True Lies/True Lives: Famous Spies of the 20th Century - Wednesdays in February and the first Wednesday in March; 10:15 am
  Location: International Spy Museum, Washington, DC
• Wednesday, 24 February 2010; 10:15 am- Washington, DC - Robert Hanssen: The Anonymous Spy
• Wednesday, 3 March 2010; 10:15 am - Washington, DC - Ana Montes: Cuba’s American Mole at the International Spy Museum

23 February 2010 - Arlington, VA - The Defense Intelligence Forum meets at the Alpine Restaurant, 4770 Lee Highway, Arlington, VA 22207. Jon Wiant will speak on Imaginative Writing - The World of Fabricating Intelligence. Dr. Wiant is Adjunct Professor of Intelligence Studies at The George Washington University and lectures at the Intelligence and Security Academy. He has held the Department of State chair at the National Defense Intelligence College. He has served as Assistant Inspector General for Security and Intelligence Oversight, Chairman of the National HUMINT Requirements Tasking Center, Senior Advisor for Policy to ASD (C3I), Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and Director for Intelligence Policy on the National Security Council. This forum will follow a modified Chatham House Rule. You may use the information, but with the exception of the subject and speaker's name, you may make no attribution.

Make reservations for you and your guests by 16 February by email to diforum@verizon.net. Pay at the door with a check for $29 per person payable to DIAA, Inc. Registration starts at 1130, lunch at 1200. Give names, telephone numbers, email addresses, and choices of chicken, veal, or salmon. Pay with a check. The Forum Doesn't Take Cash.

24 February 2010, 9 am - 5 pm - Ft Lauderdale, FL - The FBI/INFRAGARD has invited AFIO Members to the FEBRUARY 24, 2010 Conference on Counterterrorism measures at Nova Southeastern University.  If you plan to attend, please RSVP to AFIO Miami Chapter President, Tom Spencer, at TRSMIAMI@aol.com. Provide your AFIO National member number, address, phone number. Your information will be provided to the FBI for assessment. Their decision of which members can attend is final. AFIO bears no responsibility for costs or arrangements made in anticipation of attending this Infragard/FBI event based on the decisions of their security personnel. If available, bring your government issued ID. Infragard is the public/private partnership of the FBI. You can get more information on Infragard at www.infragard.net.
Please respond to Tom Spencer no later than February 10, 2010 via email.
Location: NOVA Southeastern University , Knight Lecture Hall, Room # 1124
3301 College Ave, Ft. Lauderdale, Fl 33314
Abbreviated AGENDA
09:00 - 09:30 AM - Registration and coffee
09:30 - 10:00 AM Welcoming Remarks - Carlos "Freddy" Kasprzykowski, InfraGard South Florida Chapter President; Eric S. Ackerman, Ph.D., NSU Assistant Dean and Director of Graduate Programs; SA Nelson J. Barbosa, InfraGard Coordinator/FBI Miami
10:00 - 11:00 AM - Stephanie M. Viegas, Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Coordinator, Miami FBI Field Division Will give an overview on how the FBI responds and coordinates WMD threats and related cases.
11:00 - 11:15 AM - Break
11:15 -11:30 AM - FBI employment needs - SA Kathleen J. Cymbaluk, Miami FBI Recruiter. This presentation will discuss current hiring needs of the FBI and
requirements on how to qualify and apply.
11:30 - 12:30 PM - Christopher L. Eddy, Supervisory Intelligence Analyst. The use of Intelligence Information in the FBI. This presentation will discuss how intelligence is collected, analyzed, and pushed to the right people at the right time and place and how vitally important it is to the security of our nation and its interests.
12:30 - 01:45 PM - LUNCH (Food court available on campus)
01:45 - 02:45 PM - Gun Running from Broward and Palm Beaches Counties
SSA Mark A. Hastbacka; This presentation will touch on IRA gun running operation in the above counties from a Counter terrorism investigation point-of-view.
02:15 - 03:15 PM - FBI Extraterritorial Responsibilities: Focus Iraq ASAC Scott A. Gilbert, FBI Miami. This presentation will focus on FBI activities in the International
Terrorism Organizations (ITO) and in the Middle East in general, with specific focus on IT and kidnapping investigations.
03:15 - 03:30 PM - BREAK
03:30 - 04:30 PM - Overview of Current Terrorism Trends: South Florida
SIA Vincent J. Rowe. This presentation will focus on terrorism trends in the South Florida
territory.
04:30 - 05:00 PM - Conclusion

10 March 2010 - Scottsdale, AZ - The Arizona Chapter of AFIO meets to hear Robert Parrish on "Private/Public Partnership Protecting the Homeland." Robert Parrish, Director of Corporate Security, the Arizona Public Service, will speak on "Private and Public Partnership in Protecting the Homeland."
Parrish is responsible for all APS physical security (except PaloVerde), all investigations including power diversions, site assessments,threat assessments response plans, security installations, security monitoring, and workplace violence. He is a retired Commander from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, Phoenix AZ. Dates of service: 1983 to 2005.
This event is being held at: McCormick Ranch Golf Club (7505 McCormick Parkway, Scottsdale AZ 85258 ~ Phone 480.948.0260) 
Our meeting fees will be as follows: • $20.00 for AFIO members• $22.00 for guests. 
For reservations or questions, please email Simone sl@4smartphone.net or simone@afioaz.org or call and leave a message on 602.570.6016.
Arthur Kerns, President of the AFIO AZ Chapter, president@afioaz.org.

Wednesday, 10 March 2010, 6:30 p.m. - Washington, DC - A "Weapons of Mass Disruption Program from Cold War to Cyber War" featuring Gail Harris, Naval Intelligence Officer - at the International Spy Museum

WHAT: “I decided to be unorthodox."—Gail Harris
When Gail Harris was assigned by the U.S. Navy to a combat intelligence job in 1973, she became the first woman to hold such a position. By the time of her retirement, she was the highest ranking African American female in the Navy. Her 28-year career included hands-on leadership in the intelligence community during every major conflict from the Cold War to Desert Storm to Kosovo. Captain Harris was at the forefront of one of the newest challenges: cyber warfare, developing intelligence policy for the Computer Network Defense and Computer Network Attack for the Department of Defense. Harris, author of A Woman's War: The Professional and Personal Journey of the Navy's First African American Female Intelligence Officer, will share her unique experience providing intelligence support to military operations while also battling the status quo, office bullies, and politics. She’ll also offer her perspective on the way intelligence is used and sometimes misused.
WHERE: International Spy Museum, 800 F St NW, Washington, DC, Gallery Place/Chinatown Metrorail Station. TICKETS: $12.50. Advance Registration required. Tickets are non-refundable. To register: order online; or purchase tickets in person at the International Spy Museum.

11-12 March 2010 - Washington, DC - 5th International Conference on the Ethics of National Security Intelligence by International Intelligence Ethics Association International Intelligence Ethics Association (IIEA) and Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies co-host this event featuring these two keynote speakers: Jody Williams, Nobel Peace Prize Recipient 1997, and John Inglis. Deputy Director, National Security Agency
Topics for the conference will include: * Ethics of CyberWarfare and Security; * Intelligence support for counterinsurgency operations; * Military Anthropology and the Ethics of Espionage; * Intelligence and the War Against Terror: The Israeli Experience; * A Case Study: A Course of "Ethics and Intelligence" with a Multi-Discipline Approach; * The Ethics of Human Intelligence Collection: Ethical Problems and Issues Involved in the Recruitment and Use of Informants by Foreign Intelligence Services; * Torture and Intelligence
* Justum Speculatum: Evaluating the September 2008 Attorney General's Guidelines for Domestic FBI Operations through the Lenses of Just War, Just Peacemaking and Just Policing Theory; * A Case for Constraints: Deontic Moral Checks on the Unrestricted Right of Intelligence Gathering; * Human Rights and the CIA: The Case of the Assassination of Patrice
Lumumba; * The Ethics of Intelligence and The Just War Principle of Noncombatant Immunity; * Can We Ethically Communicate the Threat?; * Identifying and Managing Corruption and Other Misconduct Risks in Counter-Terrorism Policing: Case Study of New South Wales Police Counter Terrorist Coordination Command; * The Ethics of Intelligence Support to Military Operations; * Cultural Intelligence for Winning the Peace; * Challenges of The New Committee for the Oversight of The Kosovo Intelligence Agency; * Using Private Corporations to Conduct Intelligence Activities; * The Ethics Of Surveillance: Suspicious Activity Reporting and the Production; * of US Domestic Intelligence and * Privatized Information Gathering, Just War, and Morality.
-- Also available for preview/sale will be new publications on ethics, intelligence, and national security from several publishers.
-- Register for your hotel room at the Georgetown University Hotel and Conference Center (on-line or by phone) and receive the Special Conference Rate.
Rate for event: $450.00 per person.
Event location: 3800 Reservoir Street NW, Washington, DC 20007
Conference and Hotel Registration: http://scs.georgetown.edu/ethics
Conference Questions : conference2010@intelligence-ethics.org

Friday, 12 March 2010 – San Francisco, CA – The AFIO Jim Quesada Chapter hosts Michael Rinn, Vice President/Program Director for the Missile Defense Systems Division at The Boeing Company. He will be discussing the Airborne Laser Program. RSVP required. The meeting will be held at United Irish Cultural Center, 2700 45th Avenue, San Francisco (between Sloat and Wawona). 11:30 AM no host cocktails; noon - luncheon. $25 member rate with advance reservation and payment; $35 non-member. E-mail RSVP to Mariko Kawaguchi (please indicate chicken or fish): afiosf@aol.com and mail check made out to "AFIO" to: Mariko Kawaguchi, P.O. Box 117578 Burlingame, CA 94011

13 March 2010, 10 am to 1 pm - Coral Gables, FL - AFIO Miami Chapter hosts talk on FUTURE WARS by Dr. John Alexander.
Please save the date. Dr. John Alexander, author of Future Wars, will be leading a presentation and discussion.
Event to be held at the Hyatt Coral Gables. For further information contact chapter president Tom Spencer at trsmiami@aol.com

17-18 March 2010 - Fairfax, VA - The National Military Intelligence Association hosts Spring 2010 Symposium at the SECRET/NOFORN Level. Topic: Transformation of Military Department Intelligence and Their Service Intelligence Centers 
The intelligence agencies of the Military Departments - Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, including the Coast Guard are making dramatic and significant changes to their capabilities, missions, organizational structure and future vision. Along with these Service intelligence agencies, their Service Intelligence Centers - NGIC, NMIC, NASIC, and the NCMIA are playing an increasing role in supporting not only their own services but the national intelligence community. Hear as the senior officers of those organizations highlight new developments and changes to the organizations as they undergo transformation.
Further event details and registration can be found: https://www.123signup.com/event?id=mqxhn
Location: Northrop Grumman Mission Systems.

18 March 2010, 11:30 am - Colorado Springs, CO - AFIO Rocky Mountain Chapter hears Bryan Cunningham on "National At Risk." Talk to occur at the Air Force Academy, Falcon Club. Markle Foundation's Bryan Cunningham speaks on "Nation at Risk." Cunningham is with the Markle Foundation Task Force on National Security in the Information Age. RSVP to Tom Van Wormer at robsmom@pcisys.net

20 March 2010, 2:00 p.m. - Kennebunk, Maine - The AFIO Maine Chapter hosts Dr. Terence Roehrig speaking on ASIA-PACIFIC CHALLENGES AND THE U.S. Dr. Roehrig, Associate Professor of National Security Studies at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, RI, will address economic, political, and security issues in the region and how they will affect the U.S.  He will discuss the direction of China's rise, and the roles played by India, Japan, and the two Koreas.  Dr. Roehrig travels frequently to the region doing research and will travel to Japan later this spring in connection with work on a new book.  The meeting will be held at the Kennebunk Free Library, 112 Main Street, Kennebunk.  The public is invited.  For information call 207-985-2392

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

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