Section I - INTELLIGENCE HIGHLIGHTS

Fitzgerald to Head Probe on Outing of CIA Agents. Northern District of Illinois U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald was given another sensitive assignment to determine whether defense lawyers at Guantanamo Bay jeopardized the identities of clandestine CIA agents.

Fitzgerald, one of the Justice Department's most respected prosecutors, will probe the events surrounding almost two dozen photographs of CIA officials found in the cell of Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, who allegedly helped fund the Sept. 11 attacks, according to Newsweek. In 2007, The Chicago-based U.S. Attorney successfully prosecuted I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, for lying to federal investigators looking into the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame.

Among the photos were "paparazzi style" pictures of the agents in public places, a sign that they may have been taken by private investigators to identify CIA interrogators, said Newsweek. Although the photos didn't have the names of the agents, a former government official told the magazine that "there was real concern" the photos could be used by al Qaeda for revenge.

"These guys are killers - and KSM has made it clear they're going to look for retribution," the official said, referring to alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

The DOJ has already cleared al-Hawsawi's lawyers of the producing the photos. They are now focusing some attention on the civilian lawyers from the John Adams Project, an American Civil Liberties Union effort to give high-profile Guantanamo detainees high quality counsel. Anthony Romero, the ACLU's executive director, told Newsweek the project used private investigators to find CIA agents who used harsh interrogation techniques.

"It would be an essential part of any defense to cross-examine the perpetrators of torture," Romero told Newsweek. "To our knowledge, the 9/11 defendants were not told the identities of the CIA officers."

The DOJ National Security Division, which is prosecuting Sept. 11 defendants, was handling the investigation at first, but Holder decided to hand over the reins to Fitzgerald to avoid any conflict.

Fitzgerald is also personally handling another high-profile case: the prosecution against two Chicago men who allegedly helped plot the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. One of the defendants, David Headley, pleaded guilty last week to charges that he provided surveillance to a Pakistani militant group involved in the attacks. He faces up to life in prison. [Ramonas/MainJustice/21March2010 - site now defunct as of 2016]

James C. Trainor, Jr. Named Intelligence Division Special Agent in Charge for FBI New York. Director Robert S. Mueller, III has named James C. Trainor, Jr. special agent in charge of the Intelligence Division for the FBI in New York. Mr. Trainor most recently served as assistant special agent in charge of the Boston Division.

Mr. Trainor entered on duty as a special agent with the FBI in July 1996. Upon completion of training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, he was assigned to the FBI's Chicago Division. While there, he worked on a variety of criminal investigative matters for the first year until his eventual assignment to the Foreign Counterintelligence Squad. During that time, Mr. Trainor received numerous commendations for his outstanding performance in conducting counterintelligence operations.

In February 2001, Mr. Trainor was promoted to supervisory special agent at FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C., where he supervised investigations involving espionage and economic espionage. He was reassigned to the New Haven Division in March 2003, where as the supervisor for the Foreign Counterintelligence Squad he was responsible for all national security investigations conducted in Connecticut.

Mr. Trainor was named assistant special agent in charge of the Boston Division in July 2007. In that role, he was responsible for Intelligence operations in New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island.

Mr. Trainor was born in Washington, D.C. and raised in Massachusetts. He is a graduate of Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts and obtained a master's degree from the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut. Prior to joining the FBI, he was a military intelligence officer for the U.S. Army. He has served in numerous domestic and overseas assignments regarding intelligence matters for the U.S. Army and the FBI. [FBI/23March2010] 

U.S. Cyber-Combat Needs Rules. The Pentagon and intelligence agencies are at loggerheads about the rules that will control the unleashing of cyber-counterattack, a mission that could, with more investment, be conducted from aircraft against targets a half-world away.

But before airborne cyber-attack becomes a tactical weapon, resolution must be reached on the relationship between warfighters and intelligence and the authority to decide what is a valid target and what is not.

A unique characteristic of cyberwarfare - that weapons effects cannot be seen and often cannot be verified - means that the operator's location near the battlefield may well become more important. Those implications become increasingly relevant as Congress and the Obama administration are considering the buildup of the U.S. military's cyber-operations headquarters at Ft. Meade, Md.

Aircraft can create anti-electronic effects such as enforcing "cones of silence" on communications in a limited area or pre-detonation of certain types of buried explosive devices. Networks in other countries, or those employed by non-national irregular, criminal or terrorist organizations, can be monitored, tracked and exploited.

But the dividing line between tactical and strategic cyber- or network attack is a battleground between intelligence and warfighting organizations.

The active, electronically scanned array (AESA) developed for long-range, high-accuracy radar also brings radio frequency-injection (data streams of algorithms fired into an enemy antenna) to the battlefield as a weapon. The radar in the F-22 and F-35 can be used for the task in limited frequency bands. But AESA antennas are being redesigned to cover a far greater frequency range and are expected to be a key element of the U.S. Navy's Next-Generation Jammer, an example of sophisticated electronic attack entering the tactical battlefield.

The heavy hitters in cyberwarfare, such as the National Security Agency, say that any cyber-network attack for the foreseeable future will have to be analyzed for secondary or cascading network effects and approved by Washington and the NSA.

However, such restrictions are often quickly ignored in wartime. During the North Vietnamese army (NVA) 1972 offensive in South Vietnam, the signals intelligence organization at Phu Bai cut a hole in the security fence so they could feed real-time information to an artillery unit next door. They soon were cutting off intercepted NVA command-and-control signals in midsentence. That kind of intelligence-tactical cooperation has improved over the years, but it is still spotty.

Now the weapon of interest is cyber-attack instead of artillery fire.

"There is a lot of contractor hype," says a longtime U.S. Air Force airborne electronic attack specialist. "Most of what is described as combining jamming and cyber-attack is nothing more then the subtleties of smart jamming.

"Technology enhancement efforts have been ongoing for many years with retrofits into existing systems and application to the [U.S. Navy's] nascent Next-Generation Jammer program," he says. "The challenge is providing 'mission management' of the multitude of collectors and jammers on the battlefield to avoid electronic fratricide," he says. "Someone has to decide whether it makes more sense to exploit, spoof, jam or kill the signal."

There's another complicating factor: Fewer and fewer airmen, specialized in electronic attack, will be flying over the battlefield.

Aircrews in tactical electronic attack aircraft have dropped from four members in the EA-6B Prowler to two in the EA�‑18G Growler. Soon the number will drop to one in the F-35 and then to none in unmanned air vehicles and unmanned combat aircraft with an electronic attack (EA) payloads.

"So who is going to be controlling the EA activity?" says Dennis Hayden, director for information operations and electronic attack at Northrop Grumman. The F-35 will be "almost an unmanned [airborne electronic attack] platform. For a pilot[-only aircrew], an expendable [EA] weapon or a UAV, you need some type of coordinated battle management approach. Of course [automated decision aids can be used] from the ground, back home or from a flying platform that are automated [onboard], offboard or a combination."

It is a given that when conducting cyber-attack or exploitation, the best access is through an Internet connection, say advocates of the intelligence-first approach.

"If this nation does Internet attack, the majority of it will be done from Washington and [NSA at Ft. Meade]," says a senior industry executive and former NSA official. "The only time you need to involve the [military] services is when you need RF injection."

That means that a radio frequency signal - specially modified to exploit or damage an enemy network - is packaged in a data stream that is fired into an antenna that is connected to the target network.

"There are some cases where you will need it, but I don't think it will be a major player [except at the] tactical level," he says. "If you are going to attack a computer, it's probably part of a command-and-control system. At least for the short and medium term, that will be engineered from Washington because of the need to deconflict all of those types of attacks [and] understand the effects. While I think the jammer capabilities that the services are developing will potentially be useful [for cyber-operations], I don't think it will be used a lot now."

"The first step in getting to that organizational structure is to decide who's in charge," says Vice Adm. Steve Stanley, director of force structures, resources and assessment for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "That's what Cyber Command does. We will then take direction from that commander, through the combatant commander, in this case Strategic Command, to define the way ahead." [Elghum/AviationWeek/22March2010] 

New Technology To Aid Military Surveillance. The military is about to launch a new technology that it says will dramatically improve the way troops in Afghanistan use massive stores of video surveillance footage collected around the clock in combat zones.

Dubbed "Valiant Angel," the new capability employs several advances already in use in the civilian world by TV broadcasters and Google. It's made up of a system of computer servers that will allow the military to store far more photographs and video footage than before, as well as software that will give intelligence analysts and troops in the field far greater access to the footage.

For years, the United States has used cameras mounted on aircraft and on the ground to collect surveillance for intelligence purposes. As the amount of footage has grown, the military has struggled to sift through and make use of it all.

Officials said Valiant Angel will change that.

It will allow intelligence analysts and field commanders to log, edit and search video archives to find exactly what they're looking for. They'll be able to tag clips with keywords and with information about the footage's time, location and importance.

They'll even be able to draw directly on digital surveillance images and circle key portions, the way television sportscasters mark on-screen stills during games.

All of the information will be saved for later searches. Valiant Angel also condenses digital images so that low-bandwidth users - such as a soldier in a remote province using a laptop and a 56k modem - can access them.

The system is now being tested at a technology experimentation center in Suffolk run by the military's Joint Forces Command.

It was largely developed by Lockheed Martin and will be sent to Afghanistan soon, said Justin Thurber, operations officer for the Valiant Angel program.

Thurber, who is a civilian employee of Joint Forces Command, offered several examples of how the new capability might be used by troops in Afghanistan and other conflict zones.

A unit about to go on patrol could use the system to pull up all surveillance footage taken in the past week along roads they plan to travel. After a homemade bomb attack, soldiers could search video archives for images of the explosion site to determine how and when the bomb was planted. Analysts could gather footage of all recent bombings to look for trends.

"Gone are the days when we can let data like this fall through the cracks to the cutting room floor, never to be seen or used," Thurber said. "The whole idea of Valiant Angel is to make the video that we're already collecting as useful as possible."

The system also will allow field commanders and analysts to sign up to receive automatic alerts when new footage that matches their interests enters the system.

"If all you care about is your 30-block piece of the war, you can look only at that footage," Thurber said.

He added that the software is easy enough to use that anyone familiar with computers and the Internet should be able to pick it up quickly and without much training.

Air Force Col. George Krakie, who is the deputy intelligence director at Joint Forces Command, said the new system was developed at the request of leaders at U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. They wanted a quick, practical way to get surveillance footage to as many field troops as possible, without requiring them to carry any new equipment.

Krakie said he thinks the project will soon have achieved that goal. By summer, officials expect that anyone with access to the military's computer network in Afghanistan will also have access to Valiant Angel.

"It's going to make a big difference," Thurber said.

The military signed a $29 million contract to begin working on Valiant Angel with Lockheed last August. Krakie said the reason the project has gotten off the ground so fast is that it includes almost no new technology; most of it is already in use in the commercial sector.

"All we did is package it so it fits our environment," Krakie said.  [Reilly/PilotOnline/18March2010]

UN Urges Colombia to Tighten Control on Spy Agencies. Colombia must exercise strict control over its state intelligence agencies to avoid illegal wiretapping of judges, journalists, rights workers and opposition politicians, the United Nations said.

Colombia was rattled last year by a scandal involving DAS state security agents bugging the telephones of Supreme Court judges, reporters and critics of President Alvaro Uribe, a U.S. ally who steps down this year after two terms in office.

The U.N. "calls on the government to ensure that all intelligence services respect human rights and are subject to strict civilian and legal controls," U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay's office said in an annual report.

"In Colombia, the intelligence agencies basically have no control over them. There was no democratic control that worked," Christian Salazar, U.N. human rights commissioner for Colombia, told reporters in Bogota.

In addition to the Department of Administrative Security, or DAS, Colombia also has intelligence services for the branches of the armed forces, the police and the attorney general's office.

Several high-ranking officials from the DAS were fired after the scandal, which prompted President Alvaro Uribe to call for the agency to be disbanded in favor of a smaller, more efficient body. [Acosta&Markey/Reuters/25March2010] 

Romanian Intelligence Service Collects 45 Percent of Intelligence from Human Sources. According to the head of the Romanian Intelligence Service, the SRI, 45 percent of the intelligence gathered by the agency is from human sources, less than 20 percent from technical sources, 10 percent is from cooperation and exchanges with other services and 25 percent from analysis and open sources.

The SRI is also said to have developed new intelligence capabilities in the CYBERINT area, technical expertise and also open sources.

SRI director Maior said that 2009 was the year of international cooperation. 'We really are today a prestigious international intelligence service which activity has been particularly commended by NATO and European Union officials. We adopted a multi-annual conception for our field and steered toward boosting the substance of our cooperation with Euro-Atlantic partners and toward contributing to multinational intelligence processes and initiatives,' said Maior.

He added that SRI turns 20 in two days and that 'this anniversary has a double significance, as it marks 20 years in business and turning away from the past with a generational replacement. Two thirds of the current SRI staff were aged below 18 at the December 1989 Revolution and the National Intelligence Agency is now considering young people born after 1989.

The SRI chief also said that the SRI is 'a strong, well-structured service that proved its political independence and neutrality in 2009,' a fact that was also mentioned by President Traian Basescu, who attended the activity report meeting. [Financiarul/25March2010] 

CIA 'Could Face Court' Over Pakistan Drone Raids. The US government's refusal to offer a legal rationale for using unmanned drones to kill suspected militants in Pakistan could result in CIA officers facing prosecution for war crimes in foreign courts, a legal expert has told lawmakers.

"Prominent voices in the international legal community" were increasingly impatient with Washington's silence on the CIA's bombing raids in Pakistan and elsewhere, Kenneth Anderson, a law professor at American University, told a congressional panel on Tuesday.

Lawyers at the US State Department and other government agencies were concerned that the administration has "not settled on what the rationales are" for the drone strikes, he said.

"And I believe that at some point that ill serves an administration which is embracing this," said Anderson.

The law professor said he believes the drone strikes are legal under international law, based on a country's right to self-defense, and urged the US administration to argue its case publicly.

President Barack Obama has spoken about taking the fight to the enemy and denying safe havens to extremists, and US officials privately tout the drone raids against Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders along the Pakistan border as highly effective.

But the administration declines to discuss the raids openly and has yet to publicly declare the legal justification for hunting down terror suspects in Pakistan and around the world.

"Now, maybe the answer is: This is all really terrible and illegal and anybody that does it should go off to the Hague. But if that's the case, then we should not be having the president saying that this is the greatest thing since whatever. That seems like a bad idea," Anderson said.

The congressional hearing broached a sensitive subject that is usually discussed by lawmakers and officials in closed sessions out of public view.

Human rights activists and some legal experts charge the drone strikes in Pakistan, outside of a traditional battlefield, amount to extrajudicial executions.

In written testimony, Anderson told the subcommittee of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee that officials and legal advisers at the CIA or the national security council who create "target lists" could face possible charges abroad over the drone war.

"It is they who would most likely be investigated, indicted, or prosecuted in a foreign court, as, the US should take careful note, has already happened to Israeli officials in connection with operations against Hamas," he wrote.

"The reticence of the US government on this matter is frankly hard to justify, at this point," he added.

The drone strikes have surged since Obama took office more than a year ago and have become the weapon of choice in Washington's fight against Al-Qaeda, despite concerns over civilian casualties and public anger in Pakistan.

Representative John Tierney, chair of the subcommittee on national security, said that the drone war raised an array of unanswered questions, including "if the United States uses unmanned weapons systems, does that require an official declaration of war or an authorization for the use of force?"

The American Civil Liberties Union last week filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit demanding the State Department and other agencies disclose the legal basis for carrying out assassinations overseas with unmanned aircraft.

The lawsuit asks for information on when, where and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, according to the ACLU.

Unmanned aircraft are also used for strikes in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but those raids - carried out on a recognized battlefield by the military and not by the CIA - do not raise the same legal dilemmas, experts said.

The military has elaborate procedures to ensure bombing raids are carried out in line with international law and carefully vetted by commanders, with military lawyers providing advice, said Peter Singer, author of "Wired for War."

"The challenge is the use on the intelligence side," said Singer.

It was unclear if CIA civilian officers had the same training and experience to conduct an air war and adhere to international law, he said, adding that little was known about the spy agency's drone campaign. [AFP/25March2010] 

Russia Jails Officers For Spying For Georgia. Two Russian officers were sentenced by a military court today to prison terms of 13 and 15 years for passing military secrets to Georgia ahead of the 2008 war between the ex-Soviet neighbors.

A Georgian citizen was also sentenced to 11 years after being convicted of heading a spy ring based in the southern city of Vladikavkaz after traveling to Russia on a false passport, the North Caucasus Military Court said in a statement.

The three passed state secrets to the Georgian government in 2007 and 2008, the court said.

It said the spy ring was broken up after Russian forces crushed an assault by Georgia government troops on the breakaway South Ossetia region and drove deep into the U.S.-supported nation in a five-day war in August 2008.

Russia and Georgia traded espionage accusations as tension increased before the conflict.

Russian officers Khvichi Imerlishvili and Marlen Bogdanov were found guilty of passing information about Russian military installations, intelligence operations and the location of peacekeeping forces, the court said in a statement. [RFERL/26March2010]

Accused Spy Stashed Money in Swiss Banks. The man accused of selling secrets about the B-2 bomber to China hid the proceeds from the transactions by directing the payments to secret Swiss bank accounts of foundations he set up in Liechtenstein, the government said in recently filed court documents.

Noshir Gowadia, 66, a former engineer with defense contractor Northrup Corp., is facing charges that he sold classified B-2 bomber technology to the People's Republic of China, tried to sell the technology to Switzerland, Israel and Germany, money laundering and filing false tax returns.

Trial is scheduled to begin next month and expected to run into summer.

The government said it found evidence of the Swiss bank accounts when federal agents raided Gowadia's Maui home on Oct. 13, 2005. However, because of restrictive disclosure laws in Switzerland and Liechtenstein, the government said it did not receive the Swiss bank records until December 2008 and the Liechtenstein foundation records until last month.

Gowadia worked for Northrup from 1968 to 1986, during which time he helped develop the B-2 bomber's unique propulsion system. After his employment with Northrup ended, Gowadia continued his relationship with the U.S. military as a private contractor.

However, following some angry dealings with the Air Force and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1993, Gowadia began to seek and solicit business internationally, the government says.

Between 2003 and 2005 Gowadia made six secret trips into mainland China and exchanged numerous communications to help Chinese defense engineers design a cruise missile that is able to evade air-to-air, heat-seeking missiles, according the federal indictment against him.

Gowadia also sent classified information to a Swiss government official in 2002 in a proposal to develop infrared reduction technology for a military helicopter, and sent classified information to foreign businessmen in Israel and Germany in proposals to develop the same kind of technology for commercial aircraft, the indictment says. [StarBulletin/27March2010] 

Ex-FBI Agent Nada Prouty Fights to Restore Reputation. She worked inside Yemen in 2000 after terrorists bombed the USS Cole, killing 17 American sailors. She helped nab Zayd Hassan Safarani for a 1986 hijacking in Pakistan that killed 22 passengers. And she spearheaded the investigation into the 2002 assassination of USAID diplomat Laurence Foley in Jordan.

But today, the 40-year-old says she is unemployed, shunned by neighbors and regretting that she pleaded guilty in 2007 to federal charges that caused her to forfeit her citizenship and be branded as a Hizballah mole. The feds found out about her while investigating her brother-in-law, prominent Detroit-area restaurateur Talal Chahine, on tax evasion charges.

"It makes me sick that anyone would think I would do anything to harm the United States," said Prouty, a Lebanese immigrant who is going public to try to clear her name. and regain her citizenship. CBS's "60 Minutes" aired a segment on her tonight.

The Justice Department makes no apologies: "Prouty represented a national security vulnerability that required immediate action."

Prouty says her life has been a series of humiliations since she pleaded guilty in Detroit in 2007 to citizenship fraud and illegally accessing an FBI computer system to obtain information about family members and a Detroit-based Hizballah investigation.

After being fined $750, stripped of her citizenship - but given no jail time - Prouty said she returned home to suburban Washington, D.C., where immigration agents locked her up and threatened immediate deportation - even though a federal judge in Detroit had put her removal on indefinite hold to prevent the former FBI and CIA operative from falling into enemy hands.

Prouty, who is married to a State Department employee and has two children, said agents told her to return for later visits with her bags packed, ready for removal.

She said her bank closed her accounts after deeming her a security risk. And she said she can't travel more than 50 miles from home without written approval from federal authorities.

But she said the worst humiliation was being branded by bloggers and newspapers as "Jihad Jane" and "Hezbo mole," a reference to Hizballah, which the U.S. calls a Lebanese terrorist group.

"I would never betray my country," said Prouty, a Lebanese immigrant who hired a Downriver man to marry her in 1990 so she could become a U.S. citizen and qualify for lower college tuition.

Prouty went on to obtain two accounting degrees and jobs at the FBI and CIA where, colleagues say, she repeatedly risked her life for the U.S. and won accolades for her work.

Prouty concedes that she engaged in a sham marriage. She called it a "dumb decision" by a 19-year-old immigrant who foolishly listened to others.

But she said she did not improperly access an FBI computer system:

- in 2000 to check for information about herself, her sister, Elfat El Aouar, and El Aouar's husband, Talal Chahine, the La Shish restaurant chain owner who fled to Lebanon in 2005 to avoid income tax evasion charges. Federal prosecutors said Chahine lied for Prouty to help her obtain her citizenship and get a job at the FBI. They said he is a Hizballah supporter, which Chahine denied.

- in 2003 to obtain information about a Detroit-based Hizballah probe. They said she also took home an unknown quantity of classified information.

Prouty said she pleaded guilty to the charges because federal prosecutors in Detroit put the screws to her.

"Everything you can possibly think of I was threatened with, including deportation to Lebanon," she said. "Given all the pressure that was put on me, I had to make a decision about the destruction of my friends and family members or plead guilty and move on."

Prouty said she never accessed any FBI files she wasn't supposed to see.

She said she ran queries a month after her sister and Chahine married because she had a duty to report potential security problems to the FBI. She said she accessed the Hizballah file in the course of official duties and recalls taking home classified information only once - with a supervisor's approval.

Prouty said she tried to disclose her fraudulent marriage to an FBI applicant coordinator in Philadelphia in 1997, but was told not to bring it up. The coordinator wouldn't comment on Prouty's claim and neither would her superiors.

The CIA sent a letter to prosecutors in 2008 saying it had polygraphed her and "did not identify any information that Mrs. Prouty cooperated or engaged in unauthorized contact with a foreign intelligence service or terrorist organization."

U.S. District Judge Avern Cohn cited the letter and glowing character references by her former colleagues at her sentencing in 2008 where he criticized the U.S. Attorney's Office for fueling sensational news media coverage of her case.

Cohn concluded that Prouty had rendered extraordinary service to the U.S. and never compromised herself.

Prouty's lawyer, Mark Zaid of Washington, D.C., said prosecutors railroaded her.

"Just about everything they suspected about her from the outset was either completely unproven or completely false," Zaid said.

Zaid said he is preparing to sue bloggers and news media outlets who that persist in calling Prouty a Hizballah spy and is contacting members of Congress and the Obama administration in hopes of restoring her citizenship or permanent resident status.

He also is making her available for interviews like the one tonight on "60 Minutes."

The Justice Department defended its prosecution.

"It appears that Prouty today seeks to cast herself as a victim of the U.S. government and the subject of an overzealous prosecution," it said in a statement. "The only victim in this case was the U.S. government, which was repeatedly defrauded by Prouty and risked compromise because of her illegal acts."

Federal law officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to speak publicly about the case, said Prouty never offered any plausible explanation for the computer queries.

They said Prouty has lied so often - to obtain her citizenship, to divorce her first husband and to land jobs at the FBI and CIA, which hire only U.S. citizens - it's difficult to know where the truth begins.

U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Brighton, a member of the House Intelligence Committee and a former FBI agent who has been briefed about Prouty, said he doesn't believe her.

Like federal law enforcement officials, Rogers said he believes Prouty passed classified information to Chahine - which Prouty denies. He also doesn't believe the computer inquiries were legitimate.

"She could have had a very distinguished career," he said. "She was given a huge opportunity, and to turn around and stab her country in the back is absolutely unconscionable."

Prouty's former colleagues said prosecuting her deprived America of her valuable Arabic language and cultural skills in the war on terror.

"This was a significant loss," said Robert Grenier, a retired 27-year CIA veteran and former director of its CounterTerrorism Center. "Her background, her knowledge of the Arab culture and her linguistic capabilities made her a rare commodity." [Ashenfelter/Freep/28March2010] 

Feds Thinking Outside the Box to Plug Intelligence Gaps - Studying Avatars in Computer Games. Three recent events - the foiled Christmas Day bombing of a Detroit -bound airliner, the Dec. 30 assassination of seven CIA officers and contractors by a Jordanian double agent in Afghanistan and the difficulties that U.S. Marines in Marjah, Afghanistan , have encountered - all have something in common: inadequate intelligence.

To lower the odds of similar troubles in the future, the government has launched a swarm of spooky, out-of-the-box research projects known collectively as the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity.

"The intelligence community needs to place bets on high-risk, high-payoff research that might not work, (but if it did) would give us an overwhelming intelligence advantage over future adversaries," IARPA director Lisa Porter said in an interview at her sparkling new headquarters just outside Washington in College Park, Md. "We need to fundamentally change the way we do business."

Porter's boss, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair , said that IARPA's task was to be "an intellectual ferment or primordial stew out of which great things will come." He wants Porter's researchers to "generate revolutionary capabilities that will surprise our adversaries and help us avoid being surprised."

IARPA is modeled after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency , which has conducted far-out research for the Defense Department since 1958. DARPA's many innovations include the Internet, GPS and robotic vehicles.

Founded two years ago, IARPA has contracted with about 75 university research laboratories and 50 technology companies, large and small, to work on innovative solutions to future intelligence needs. More contracts are coming soon, Porter said.

Some IARPA projects have a distinct science-fiction feel.

One program, Reynard, for example, has signed contracts with five research teams, mostly from major universities, to develop systems to observe "avatars" - animated computer images - that take part in popular "virtual world" games such as Second Life and World of Warcraft.

Such games have more than half a billion players around the globe, according to Reynard program manager Rita Bush . Players include many young Muslim men.

The idea is to study how these avatars - like those in the hit movie "Avatar" - behave and communicate with one another for insights into how real-life people in hostile cultures think and act.

IARPA officials think that analyzing avatars' behavior in a "virtual world" can produce useful insights into the nationalities, genders, approximate ages, occupations, education levels, even the ideologies of their creators in the "real world." Players also use avatars to communicate with one another.

"One of the goals of this program will be to understand how terror groups might use such virtual worlds to communicate," said V.S. Subrahmanian , the director of the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland , who isn't connected with IARPA.

"This is a laudable goal. However, it is also a major challenge," Subrahmanian said in an e-mail message. "To identify how terrorists communicate in a VW (virtual world) requires the ability to first identify which conversations are in fact legitimate or normal and which ones are suspicious. This is hard to do."

"If it weren't hard, we wouldn't be doing it," Porter said. "Failure is OK. We can learn from failure."

Another IARPA project, named ICARUS, will attempt to model the way human brains make sense of a bewildering mass of data. The ALADDIN project is meant to pick out key items in the tsunami of video images that spy agencies collect. A program called TRUST will try to help intelligence officers determine who can be trusted and who can't.

Although IARPA resembles DARPA , there are important differences. DARPA research is aimed at pressing military needs, with a timeline of a year or so. IARPA is designed to help the intelligence community solve long-range problems.

It probably will take five to seven years before the CIA , the FBI, the National Security Agency or other intelligence agencies benefit from IARPA's projects, Porter said.

The ALADDIN project is intended to help intelligence analysts cope with the thousands of video images that pour into their offices each day from unmanned aerial vehicles, on-the-ground surveillance and other sources in danger zones.

"We get way too much video," Porter said. "We have time to look at only a small portion of it. ... We want an automatic tool that looks at 100 percent of the videos and identifies things of interest."

An ALADDIN system could "automate lower-level tasks, such as detecting tiny changes in images that a human might miss or take a lot of time to detect." she said. "Machines are good at that."

The TRUST program differs radically from traditional lie detectors, or polygraphs, which measure people's heart rates and perspiration to see whether they're lying. Instead, a TRUST goal is to measure subconscious biological signals in one's own body.

"We generate signals in ourselves when we first meet people," Porter said. "There's been a lot of research on this."

Porter said a TRUST program might have helped save the CIA officers whom a Jordanian double agent betrayed and killed in Afghanistan last year.

Still another program, called Knowledge Discovery and Dissemination, might have helped detect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian bombing suspect who's alleged to have nearly caused a tragedy on Christmas Day in spite of a raft of clues, which weren't put together in time.

IARPA claims that KDD projects could improve massive databases that don't mesh well with one another, allowing key connections to go undetected.

In the Christmas bombing case, "the dots simply were not connected," Russell Travers , a deputy director at the National Counterterrorism Center, told the Senate Judiciary Committee last week at a hearing on the incident. "The U.S. government needs to improve its overall ability to piece together partial, fragmentary information from multiple collectors."

IARPA's ICARUS program will exploit the latest research by neuroscientists on how the human brain operates.

"Recent advances in our understanding of brain function ... have laid the groundwork for an ambitious new effort to understand human sense-making," according to IARPA's description of ICARUS.

For example, Juyang Weng , a Michigan State University expert on how robots learn from experience, attended an ICARUS information session in January and intends to submit a proposal to IARPA. He told the group that he's already working to develop machines that demonstrate "brain-like sense-making and reasoning."

"The subject of ICARUS is very challenging, but doable based on the latest breakthroughs," Weng said in an e-mail message. "The machine 'brain' must be autonomously developed so that it can accumulate experience from rich real-world experience."

Similarly, computer giant IBM's "Blue Brain" project aims eventually to use supercomputers to "replicate an entire brain," project director Henry Markham told a computer technology conference last year in Long Beach, Calif.

Computer scientists Robert Sloan and Gyorgy Turan , of the University of Illinois at Chicago , won a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop methods to build "common-sense knowledge bases" that can evolve as they take in new information. [Boyd/Mcclatchy/29March2010]

Ageing UK Spies Unable to Use the Internet. Having battled Islamic extremists, Irish Republican terrorists and Russian spies, some of the veteran intelligence officers of MI5 are encountering a foe they cannot master: information technology.

The Security Service is launching an unprecedented round of redundancies to improve the overall level of computer skills among its staff.

Despite an expanding budget, MI5 is laying off employees in order to hire new intelligence officers and support staff with better command of information technology and other "deployable" skills.

The redundancy program has set tongues wagging in Whitehall, with civil servants in other departments joking about a "James Bond generation" of elderly spies being put out to pasture because they can't use the internet and don't understand the world of Twitter or Facebook.

The plan was disclosed by Jonathan Evans, the director-general of MI5.

He told a Parliamentary committee that he is concerned that his agency's overall IT skills are not up to scratch, leading him to get rid of some employees.

"I think some of the staff perhaps aren't quite the ones that we will want for the future," Mr. Evans told the Intelligence and Security Committee.

As a result, a program of "both voluntary and compulsory redundancies" is being introduced.

Whitehall officials said the MI5 redundancy program was aimed at altering the skills profile of the organization and increasing the number of its staff that can be deployed on active operations.

Only a small proportion of the service's staff will affected by the lay-offs, it is understood. But redundancies will be made across the organization and not confined to specialist IT staff.

MI5 currently has around 3,500 officers and is on course to have 4,100 by next year, double its size in 2001. Many of the new recruits are in their 20s and 30s attracted by high-profile advertising campaigns and - in part - the BBC drama Spooks. [Telegraph/28March2010] 

Section II - CONTEXT & PRECEDENCE

National Civil War Museum Exhibits Spies Among Us Through September 6.  An exhibit "Spies Among Us: Espionage in the Civil War" takes a look at military and civilian intelligence during the Civil War at the National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It runs March 24 through Sept. 6.

The exhibit will focus on the scouts or spies who included soldiers, women and African Americans. "The best and most effective spies of the Civil War were really never known, as a result of poorly kept records and because many spies operated under various assumed names," said Brett Kelley, curator of collections at the museum.

The exhibit will open 5:30-7:30 p.m. Tuesday with a wine and cheese reception. Speaker will be Donald Markle, an alumnus of the Civil War institute at Gettysburg College and author of "Spies and Spymasters of the Civil War."

The museum is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. daily. Tickets are $9 for adults, $8 for seniors and $7 for students. [Gleiter/Patriot-News/22March2010]

GCHQ: Spooks in Socks and Sandals. Tucked away on the outskirts of Cheltenham is a vast circular structure wrapped in razor wire. Getting inside requires passing through layer after layer of ever-tightening security. Everyone in the town knows what it is - Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) - but few secrets of its work emerge.

With about 5,500 employees, GCHQ is Britain's largest but least well-known intelligence agency. Its mission is to eavesdrop on global communications, hunting for the terrorist phone call, Taliban radio traffic or a telling email from a foreign government.

GCHQ operates in a hermetically sealed bubble of security. But the building - known as the doughnut because it is round with a hole in the middle - is open and airy. Casually dressed people stroll down the main thoroughfare, "the street", chat in coffee bars or work in open-plan offices. Signs for "serious crime" and "Asia-Pacific team" hint at the breadth of their work.

Intruders are unusual in this closed world. As I am escorted around, a voice comes across the PA system: "Blinds facing 'the street' in blocks A and B should be closed immediately." A glance through a window might reveal something secret.

GCHQ's director, Iain Lobban, is keen to show that it is accountable to the public but warns: "I don't want to tell you precisely what I can and can't do in terms of exploiting communications because I would see my adversaries... move to different communications behavior."

When friends from their university days start bragging about earning City bonuses, the young GCHQ staffers have to keep silent about their own work. But there are compensations. "They talk about the big deals they've struck," says Will, a twenty-something who works on the "weapons" team, which provides information for the military, "and you've watched the news and know you've had something to do with what's happened."

About a third of GCHQ's effort is now devoted to counterterrorism. The linguists are at the front end of the intelligence gathering process, sitting with their headphones on to translate the communications of a particular target.

A young female Arabic linguist found that eavesdropping on unfolding events took a while to get used to. "I don't think you would be human if you didn't go home at night and you couldn't switch off," she says.

The linguists work closely with analysts. But it is not quite like on television, a member of the counterterrorist team explains. "If you watch Spooks, a bit of intelligence will come in and instantly everyone will know what the significance of that bit of intelligence is and they'll be straight out the door. And in actual fact intelligence comes in and it is very rarely you'll actually get that key bit of intelligence. Most of the time it's just a building block, another piece of the puzzle."

The linguist agrees: "I think there's this perception that one day you are going to come in and there's: 'This is where the bomb will be at this time.' And it's absolutely not like that."

GCHQ's work is often masked. One time it did make the news was in the run-up to the Iraq war, when a message from its US counterpart, the National Security Agency, was leaked to the press. The Americans wanted help in spying on diplomats as a possible vote on a second United Nations resolution approached. Katharine Gun, a Mandarin linguist, was sacked for the leak but not prosecuted.

Lobban says there are "avenues" for staff to go down if they are uncomfortable with their work. "I wouldn't listen to anything that I really didn't think was justified," one linguist told me. An analyst said he had felt no problem telling his manager that he was unhappy with a particular operation.

GCHQ focuses on global rather than domestic communications and reports to the foreign secretary. It has long worked closely with MI6, and relationships with MI5 have become closer recently. Both agencies joke about GCHQ's alleged lack of dress sense. "The first thing we need to do is take you to a proper tailor," a suave MI6 officer is said to have told a GCHQ officer arriving on a faraway bugging mission.

"We can occasionally come over as nerdy or geeky," Cheltenham's properly attired director concedes.

"There are a couple of socks-and-sandal-wearing mathematicians," says a nonsandal-wearing analyst, Joanna. "But to do this job you do have to be reasonably normal and outgoing. It is not just you sitting alone with a computer. You do have to talk to lots of people."

Joanna's job is to crack codes. These appear on her screen as an endless series of ones and zeroes. Decrypting them is not, she explains, a matter of supercomputers churning through every combination until they come up with the answer. They would take decades to crack the most complex codes. Instead mathematicians work with computer engineers and software developers to try to find creative ways of unlocking coded communications. This often means looking for mistakes in exactly the same way that their forebears did at Bletchley Park during the second world war.

What is it like when you crack a code? "It just feels amazing," Joanna says with a laugh. "You feel like you've won."

This kind of code-breaking requires a particular type of creativity as well as teamwork, she adds. "Every time you solve one of these things it is more complicated than the last time, so it is not something you can predict. Every time you find something, some way of doing it, you can add that to a computer program to try to check the next time. But it is not like you can write a computer program to make those mental leaps for you."

As well as breaking codes, GCHQ has an increasingly close relationship with the armed forces. Military commanders are briefed at Cheltenham before their deployment, and GCHQ staff are sent out to work with them, providing intelligence and feeding their needs back to Cheltenham.

Staff embedded with the armed forces call in by webcam to a huge video wall at Cheltenham. Their locations range from the Ministry of Defense in Whitehall to a container that passes for an office in Kandahar, Kabul or Helmand province as well as other, more secret, locations. Rachel has already done two tours in Afghanistan as a GCO, or government communications officer, and is preparing for a third. Her task there is to produce a daily intelligence file for her commander and to sound the alert if an urgent intercept comes in.

"I would go to the brigadier when I had particularly pertinent intelligence that he needed to see there and then... say there's a new threat that the commander wants information about how to counter or there's a new device being used in IEDs," she says.

The dangers of this work are evident from a walk through the grassy open-air space in the middle of the building. There, in one corner, is a memorial to the small number of staff who have died in service. The names show that more fatalities have come in Afghanistan in recent years than anywhere else. [TimesOnline/26March2010]

Inside Man. Senator Dianne Feinstein was furious. Somebody was going to pay.

"I was not informed about the selection of Leon Panetta to be the CIA director," the California Democrat said coldly, standing in a marble corridor just off the Senate floor.

It was January 6, 2009. Barack Obama's team was reaching for the levers of the intelligence bureaucracy.

By God, she hadn't gotten to be the first woman to chair the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, a last bastion of old bulls, by being pushed around. And she sure wasn't going to be rolled by the national-security guys around Obama, an Illinois politician who had shown almost no interest in foreign affairs during his four years in the US Senate.

Did they really want Leon Panetta, a former California congressman whose intelligence experience amounted pretty much to sitting in on CIA briefings as President Bill Clinton's chief of staff?

And that was before Osama bin Laden and 9/11, before the Iraq weapons-of-mass-destruction fiasco, secret prisons, renditions, warrantless wiretapping, the invasion of Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, and waterboarding. And before the CIA was once again snarled in controversy, its officials hauled before oversight committees - like Feinstein's - to explain missing torture videotapes.

Fine, Feinstein decided, you can have Panetta. But there's a price. "My position has consistently been that I believe the agency is best served by having an intelligence professional in charge," she told reporters.

A professional - not a politician. There would be no Panetta without a professional backing him up - and Feinstein had one professional in mind: Steve Kappes.

Who? Stephen R. Kappes, the spy agency's deputy director, was a 27-year veteran of the CIA's Operations Directorate, one of those who worked on "the dark side," in the memorable characterization of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Kappes's name, let alone his face, was unknown outside of Washington's national-security matrix. And yet within days, official Washington would be treated to the spectacle of a CIA nominee repeatedly pledging to retain a heretofore-anonymous subordinate as the condition for getting the number-one job.

Kappes had earned the appreciation, if not the affection, of Hill Democrats in 2004 by embarrassing Porter Goss, the Florida Republican congressman and chair of the House Intelligence Committee whom President Bush had picked to tame the "liberal" CIA. Rather than fire a deputy who had clashed with one of the "Gosslings," as Goss's conservative aides were dubbed by the dark-side crowd, Kappes loudly quit. His deputy, Michael Sulick, followed him out the door.

They returned in 2006, when General Michael Hayden, who succeeded Goss, introduced Kappes to the assembled CIA employees as his new deputy. The staff gave him a standing ovation.

In the days leading up to Panetta's confirmation hearing, Feinstein and other Democrats repeatedly called Kappes the agency's indispensable man.

"Leon Panetta is an outstanding public servant, and I intend to support his nomination for CIA director," Evan Bayh of Indiana, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said. "We should respect the judgment of President-elect Obama and his commitment to do what's right for our country.

"At the same time," Bayh continued, "I have very high regard for Steve Kappes. I've been in some extremely sensitive meetings involving matters of life and death and have been impressed by his competency. I hope we can convince both Mr. Panetta and Mr. Kappes to work together at the CIA for the sake of our country's national security."

Panetta was convinced - not that he had a choice. Even before he took the witness chair, he evoked Kappes's name a half dozen times.

"If confirmed, I will have three immediate priorities," he said. "First, along with my deputy, Steve Kappes, I plan to review all Agency operations... I will have a full partner in Steve Kappes... Few people in the United States government have as much intelligence experience as Steve...."

And so on. [The complete article is available in the April issue of Washingtonian.] [Stein/Washingtonian/25March2010]

Section III - COMMENTARY

A Spy Unsettles US-India Ties, by M K Bhadrakumar . News that the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had reached a plea bargain with David Coleman Headley, who played a key role in the planning of the terrorist strike in Mumbai in November 2008 in which 166 people were killed, has caused an uproar in India.

The deal enables the US government to hold back from formally producing any evidence against Headley in a court of law that might have included details of his links with US intelligence or oblige any cross-examination of Headley by the prosecution.

Nor can the families of the 166 victims be represented by a lawyer to question Headley during his trial commencing in Chicago. Headley's links with the US intelligence will now remain classified information and the Pakistani nationals involved in the Mumbai attacks will get away scot-free. Furthermore, the FBI will not allow Headley's extradition to India and will restrict access so that Indian agencies cannot interrogate him regarding his links with US and Pakistani intelligence.

In return for pleading guilty to the charges against him Headley will get lighter punishment than the death sentence that was probably most likely.

Headley's arrest in Chicago last October initially seemed a breakthrough in throwing light on the operations and activities of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the Pakistan-based terrorist organization, in India. But instead the Obama administration's frantic efforts to cover up the details of the case have been taken to their logical conclusion.

The plea bargain raises explosive questions. The LeT began planning the attack on Mumbai sometime around September 2006. According to the plea bargain, Headley paid five visits to India on reconnaissance missions between 2006 and the November 2008 strike, each time returning to the US via Pakistan where he met "with various co-conspirators, including but not limited to members of LeT".

The plea bargain simply refers to the Pakistani handlers of Headley as A, B, C and D. But who are they? We will never know.

The LeT's close links with Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) are legion and it is inconceivable that such a massive operation - with huge international ramifications and the potential to trigger war with India - could have been undertaken without the knowledge of the ISI, headed by General Ashfaq Parvez Kiani, the present army chief, from October 2004 until October 2007.

The plea bargain says chillingly that after Headley's fifth visit to India, "Lashkar [LeT] Member A advised defendant [Headley] of a number of details concerning the planned attacks, including that a team of attackers was being trained in a variety of combat skills, the team would be traveling to Mumbai by sea and using the landing site recommended by the defendant, the team would be fighting to the death and would not attempt to escape following the attacks."

Yet, the operative part of the plea bargain not only rules out Headley's extradition to India but does not show that Headley gave any kind of formal commitment to the FBI to subject himself to interrogation by the Indians. He has merely agreed to give testimony in any foreign judicial proceeding that is held in US territory.

In essence, the Americans are saying that they will tell the Indians what Headley is saying and there is no need to interrogate him face-to-face. This is diametrically opposite to the US's approach to the Lockerbie trial after a bombed Pan Am flight crashed into the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988. Altogether 270 died. Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, a Libyan, was convicted of involvement in the bombing.

Again, the plea bargain confirms that Headley had a criminal record in the US from 1989 as a conspirator to import heroin and spent a total of six years in prison as a result of four convictions. He was later recruited as an agent by US drug-enforcement authorities, who after the 9/11 attacks in the US coordinated closely with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The plea bargain details that while working as an American agent Headley attended at least five "training courses" conducted by the LeT in Pakistan, including sessions in the use of weapons and grenades, close-combat tactics and counter-surveillance techniques, from February 2002 until December 2003.

Training courses in April and in December 2003 were each of three months' duration and in such close proximity to the 9/11 attacks that it stretches credulity to believe the CIA didn't care to know what their agent was doing in the LeT training camps.

Today, the heart of the matter is how much did the CIA know in advance about the Mumbai terrorist strike and whether the Obama administration shared all "actionable intelligence" with Delhi?

A senior Indian editor wrote, "Headley ... was convicted on drug charges and sent to jail in the US. We know also that he was subsequently released from jail and handed over to the Drug Enforcement Administration, which said that it wanted to send him to Pakistan as an undercover agent. All this is a matter of public record. What happened between the time the US sent Headley into Pakistan and his arrest at Chicago airport a few months ago? How did an American agent turn into a terrorist? The US will not say."

Yet, cooperation in the fight against terrorism lies within the first circle of US-India strategic cooperation. The Mumbai attacks led to unprecedented counter-terrorism cooperation between India and the US - "breaking down walls and bureaucratic obstacles between the two countries' intelligence and investigating agencies", as a prominent American security expert, Lisa Curtis, underscored in US congressional testimony on March 11 regarding the Mumbai attacks and Headley.

To quote Curtis, "Most troubling about the Headley case is what it has revealed about the proximity of the Pakistani military to the LeT."

Curtis put her finger spot on the US government's deliberate policy to view the LeT through the prism of India-Pakistan adversarial ties. This is despite all evidence of the LeT's significant role since 2006 as a facilitator of the Taliban's operations in Afghanistan by providing a constant stream of fighters - recruiting, training and infiltrating insurgents across the border from the Pakistani tribal areas.

The US policy is impeccably logical. It prioritizes the securing of Islamabad's cooperation on what directly affects American interests rather than squandering away Pakistani goodwill by Washington covering for the Indians.

This political chicanery lies at the core of the unfolding Headley drama. What emerges, even if one were to give the benefit of the doubt to the CIA, is that Headley was its agent but he possibly got involved with Pakistan-based terrorist organizations and became a double agent.

No doubt, the US administration is behaving very strangely. It has something extremely explosive to hide from the Indians and what better way to do that than by placing Headley in safe custody and not risk exposing him to Indian intelligence?

The speculation gaining respectability in Delhi is that Washington knew in advance about the Mumbai attack and deliberately chose not to pass on details to Delhi.

Indeed, Washington knew of Headley's repeated missions to India from 2006 but did not share the information with the Indians. Headley, in fact, visited Mumbai once even after the city was attacked.

Clearly, the Obama administration was apprehensive that Headley might spill the beans if the Indians got hold of him and the trail could then lead to his links with the CIA, the LeT and the Pakistani military. And where would that leave the US?

Obama is obviously in no position to "pressure" the Pakistani military leadership. The US's obsession is to somehow end the fighting in Afghanistan before the US presidential election campaign commences in 2012. The extent to which the US is beholden to the Pakistani military today is apparent from the about-turn lately by even a self-styled "agnostic" like the AfPak special representative, Richard Holbrooke, about the Pakistani military leadership's commitment to the fight against terrorism.

All said, however, the Americans seem to count on their skill to manipulate the Indian elite. Robert Blake, the US assistant secretary of state for South Asia who used to be the deputy head of the US Embassy, visited Delhi last week on a damage-control exercise. He huddled with the Indian corporate sector, which is hugely influential with the political class.

However, will the strategy of leveraging the pro-US lobby in Delhi work this time to ease the strain in the US-India "partnership"? The Mumbai terror attack left deep scars in the Indian public psyche. For the first time in recent years, the Indian public has closed ranks with prevalent opinion in Pakistan that sees the US as a diabolic, self-centered power, which double-crosses its partners, friends and allies in single-minded pursuit of its interests.

This perception has consequences for the democratically elected government in Delhi. The big question is whether the ruling party in India can any longer afford to be seen sharing Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's robust enthusiasm for a US-centric foreign policy.

It has been a devastating blow to Manmohan's personal prestige that the FBI's plea bargain deal unfolded in the week he had earmarked for the tabling of legislation in parliament that would facilitate the entry of American companies into the Indian market for nuclear commerce.

Manmohan's visit to Washington to attend a nuclear summit hosted by Obama on April 12 was expected to give a fillip to US-India ties, but Headley haunts the ambience surrounding that visit.

The Headley case exposes the fallacies underlying India's foreign policy ever since Manmohan assumed office as prime minister in 2004 - that "strategic partnership" with the US could be central insofar as contacts with Pakistan were best conducted under the US watch and Delhi's interests as an emerging power lay in harmonizing with US regional policies.

A rethink on foreign policy has now become almost inevitable. Delhi recently rolled out the red carpet to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Delhi may now seriously engage Tehran, despite Manmohan's manifest indifference toward India-Iran ties. The prime minister will find it even harder now to "operationalize" the India-US nuclear deal of 2008, due to an inability to legislate a liability bill that the US nuclear industry seeks as a pre-requisite for doing business in India.

To what extent US expectations to corner a big share of India's arms bazaar are going to be realized is unclear, no matter the clout of US arms manufacturers with the Indian military community. All eyes in Delhi are trained on the US-Pakistan strategic dialogue in Washington on Wednesday in which Kiani is expected to pitch for a long-term strategic partnership between the two countries that duly recognizes Pakistan's pivotal role in US policies.

Most certainly Delhi can be expected now to work full throttle to resist the US-Pakistani game plan to engage the Taliban and to reintegrate them in Afghan power structures. The Headley saga underscores that the US-Pakistan axis in Afghanistan carries lethal potency for India's national security interests.

[Ambassador M. K. Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.] [Bhadrakumar/ATimes/22March2010] 

An Ex-CIA Spy Explains Iran's Quest for Nuclear Weapons, by Reza Kahlili. Muslims use the word haram to describe any act forbidden under the rules of Islam. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, recently declared that Iran could not possibly be working on a nuclear bomb because doing so would be haram.

"We have often said that our religious tenets and beliefs consider these kinds of weapons of mass destruction to be symbols of genocide and are, therefore, forbidden," he asserted in February. "This is why we... do not seek them."

At a time when President Obama and Western allies are confronting Iran over its suspected nuclear program, some in the West took solace in the supreme leader's assurance. Such solace is foolhardy.

First, Mr. Khamenei does not hold a sufficient position to declare any act as haram. Only a mujtahid, an Islamic scholar, has such authority.

However, when Khamenei was appointed as supreme leader in 1989, he was not considered qualified to be a mujtahid, let alone an ayatollah. He attained the title of ayatollah virtually overnight amid a highly disputed succession process.

Second, Khamenei ignores the fact that, in the mid-1980s, Mohsen Rezaei, then chief commander of the Revolutionary Guards, got Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's permission to develop nuclear bombs. As a CIA agent in the Revolutionary Guards then, I learned of this nascent effort and reported it to my handlers. The Iranians approached several sources, including Abdul Qadeer Khan, father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb. His account of Iran's bid to buy atomic bombs from Pakistan was reported very recently.

That Khamenei has chosen to conceal Iran's nuclear program shouldn't be surprising. He also claims that the Iranian government doesn't condone torture, that the recent Iranian election was just and proof that his nation is a real democracy, and that Iran is not involved in terrorism.

Islamic teaching considers the spilling of blood during the Islamic month of Muharram to be haram. Yet that didn't stop the regime's troops from slaughtering unarmed protesters last year on Ashura, one of Shiite Islam's holiest days.

Khamenei considers the Koran to be the ultimate source of guidance. One Koranic tenet is that you should deceive your enemies until you are strong enough to destroy them. Khamenei is employing this when he makes his declarations to the West.

Within Iran, radical Islamists have grown in power since Grand Ayatollah Khomeini's death in 1989. Even Khomeini - an extremist by any reasonable definition - saw them as too fanatic and tried to keep them in check.

These radicals belong to a secret society called the Hojjatieh. It's essentially a cult devoted to the reappearance of the 12th imam, Mahdi, and Islam's conquest of the world. To achieve that end, the radicals believe they must foment chaos, famine, and lawlessness, that they must destroy Israel, and that world order must come to an abrupt halt. Long ago, my best friend and commander in the Revolutionary Guards reminded me of a hadith, a saying from the prophet Muhammad, about Imam Mahdi: "During the last times, my people will be afflicted with terrible and unprecedented calamities and misfortunes from their rulers, so much so that this vast earth will appear small to them. Persecution and injustice will engulf the earth. The believers will find no shelter to seek refuge from these tortures and injustices. At such a time, Allah will raise from my progeny a man who will establish peace and justice on this earth in the same way as it had been filled with injustice and distress."

The Hojjatieh see any movement toward peace and democracy as delaying Mahdi's reappearance.

Although he strenuously denies it, Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi reportedly sits at the top of this secret society. He is an influential member of the Assembly of Experts (the body that chooses the supreme leader), an adviser to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the founder of the Haghani School that teaches the most radical Shiite beliefs.

The teachers and students of this school run some of the most important political and security institutions in the Iranian government, including the Ministry of Intelligence, which is involved in organizing death squads against the opposition and coordinating terrorist activities against the West.

Ayatollah Janati, the powerful chairman of the Guardian Council, is also associated with the school. Yazdi, Janati, and Mojtaba Khamenei (Ayatollah Khamenei's son) were central to President Ahmadinejad's fraudulent reelection last June and the suppression of the opposition, and they are directing the supreme leader regarding the nuclear program.

It is difficult for the West to understand this ideology. We find it astounding that Iranian leaders seem to be instigating an international confrontation. But we can't afford the luxury of confusion.

We can't allow Khamenei's statements to deceive us. Whether it is haram or not, Iran is almost certainly developing nuclear weapons, and an Islamic Republic of Iran with atomic bombs would strongly destabilize the world.

The choices are clear: We can either rise up to our principles and defend the aspirations of the Iranian people for a free and democratic government, or we can continue with our vacillation and indecision, allowing Iran to become a nuclear-armed state.

Instead of counting on watered-down United Nations sanctions, the West should cut off all diplomatic ties with Iran, close down all airspace and seaports going to or from Iran, sanction all companies doing business with Iran, and cut off its gasoline supply. We should then demand an immediate halt to all Iranian nuclear and missile delivery activities and the right to peaceful demonstration and freedom of speech for all Iranians. And if that fails, a military action should be in the cards. [Reza Kahlili is a pseudonym for an ex-CIA spy who requires anonymity for safety reasons. "A Time to Betray," his book about his double life as a CIA agent in Iran's Revolutionary Guards, will be published by Simon & Schuster on April 6.] [Kahlili/CSMonitor/24March2010] 

Security Watch: Beware the NSA's Geek-Spy Complex, by Noah Shachtman. Early this year, the big brains at Google admitted that they had been outsmarted. Along with 33 other companies, the search giant had been the victim of a major hack - an infiltration of international computer networks that even Google couldn't do a thing about. So the company has reportedly turned to the only place on Earth with a deeper team of geeks than the Googleplex: the National Security Agency.

Most of us know the NSA as the supersecret spook shop that allegedly slurped up our email and phone calls after the September 11 attacks. But NSA headquarters - the "Puzzle Palace" - in Fort Meade, Maryland, is actually home to two different agencies under one roof. There's the signals-intelligence directorate, the Big Brothers who, it is said, can tap into any electronic communication. And there's the information-assurance directorate, the cybersecurity nerds who make sure our government's computers and telecommunications systems are hacker- and eavesdropper-free. In other words, there's a locked-down spy division and a relatively open geek division. The problem is, their goals are often in opposition. One team wants to exploit software holes; the other wants to repair them. This has created a conflict - especially when it comes to working with outsiders in need of the NSA's assistance. Fortunately, there's a relatively simple solution: We should break up the NSA.

Here's the problem: Say you're a Google customer - and who isn't, really? You want to know that Google is safeguarding your data and your privacy. Trouble is, when Google calls the NSA, everyone watching sees it as a package deal. The company wants geeks, but it runs the risk of getting spies, too. The NSA's wiretapping directorate has a vested interest in keeping company information at least slightly open in case they need to take a look someday - the NSA is, after all, the agency that tapped AT&T switching stations (OK, OK, allegedly). So if Google appeals to the NSA, it could poison its relationship with its customers (and compromise your personal information, to boot). The NSA and Google can pinky-swear that they'll never ever put a back door in Gmail, but intelligence agencies aren't known for keeping their promises.

A broken-out bureau - call it the Cyber Security Agency, or CSA - that didn't include the spooks would obviate this conflict. "A separate information-assurance agency," says Michael Tanji, a 21-year veteran of intelligence services, including the NSA, "will have a greater level of acceptance across the government and the private sector."

That acceptance is vital - because the dotcom and dotgov universes are already having to rely on the NSA, no matter what the drawbacks are. The Defense Department turned to the director of the NSA to head its new Cyber Command. The Department of Homeland Security routinely turns to the NSA for cybersecurity help. Technically, rendering this aid isn't the NSA's job, says Richard Bejtlich, a former Air Force cybersecurity officer now with General Electric. "But when you're in trouble, you go to the guys who actually have a clue."

An independent CSA would be trusted more widely than Fort Meade, improving collaboration among cybersecurity geniuses. It was private researchers and academics who led the effort to corral the ultrasophisticated Conficker worm. And the National Institute of Standards and Technology worked on federal desktop security. A well-run, independent CSA would be able to coordinate better with these outside entities.

The idea of splitting up the NSA's geeks and spies has come up before. It's one of the reasons that the NSA's directorates have separate budgets and separate congressional oversight. But a previous push to break them up was dismissed - because back when mail was paper and banking was done with a teller, the lines between codebreaking and codemaking were fuzzy and the benefits of a trusted network protector were less clear. But that was then. Today, as unsafe as electronic information is in a world of hackers and Internet worms, it's even more unsafe locked inside the Puzzle Palace. [Shactman/Wired/24March2010]

Caution Lights for the Military's "Information War," by David Ignatius. It has become commonplace since Sept. 11, 2001, to speak of the "war of ideas" between Muslim extremists and the West. But there has been too little attention paid to the U.S. military's mobilization for this war, which is often described by the oxymoronic phrase "information operations."

To populate this information "battle space," the military has funded a range of contractors, specialists, training programs and initiatives - targeted on the hot wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the broader zone of conflict in the Middle East and Central Asia. Gen. David Petraeus, the Centcom commander who oversees that region, has been one of the military's most vocal proponents of aggressive information operations.

The potential problems were highlighted on March 14, when the New York Times revealed that a Pentagon official from the "strategic communications" realm had funded contractors to gather intelligence in Afghanistan. Last week also brought a report by The Post's Ellen Nakashima that the military, in an offensive information operation, had shut down a jihadist Web site that the CIA had been monitoring for intelligence purposes. In both cases, it seemed the military was wandering into the covert-action arena traditionally reserved for the CIA.

This murky area should be marked with a flashing yellow warning light, meaning: "Slow down!" The United States should be careful about encouraging, in effect, the militarization of information - and it should be especially cautious when these efforts bleed into the intelligence world. We are a nation that has prospered uniquely from open, untainted information flows. As I watch the covert contractors get their arms around this topic, it makes me nervous.

An early alarm was sounded last year by Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In an article in the Joint Force Quarterly, he wrote: "It is time for us to take a harder look at 'strategic communication.' Frankly, I don't care for the term... It is now sadly something of a cottage industry."

Mullen's critique was amplified this week by a senior military official, who argued that these information operations had become "public affairs on steroids" with what he said was only "limited oversight." He explained: " 'Strategic communication' has an air of respectability to it that propaganda and influence do not. The problem is that it's a slippery slope, because the information environment is so instantaneously global today... You put something out there and it goes worldwide in a flash, making each influence activity suspect to a much wider and more skeptical audience."

Defense Secretary Bob Gates this week ordered a quick, two-week assessment of Pentagon information operations programs. Gates said he "would have concerns" about "contractors collecting intelligence on the battlefield."

There's a gusher of money available to fund these loosely monitored operations. For the current fiscal year, Congress approved a budget of $528 million for information and for psychological-warfare operations (psy-ops). For next fiscal year, the Pentagon budget request is $384 million.

You can get the flavor of these activities by trolling the Internet. You will find an array of contractors offering their expertise in everything from "cultural engagement" to "clandestine operations." It's a world of PowerPoint presentations about how to spread pro-American messages while rebutting and demoralizing the enemy.

A February 2006 report on information operations by the military's joint staff defined the goal as "to influence, disrupt, corrupt or usurp adversarial human and automated decision-making while protecting our own." An October 2003 Defense Department "Information Operations Roadmap" noted in an appendix that one component could be "Radio/TV/Print/Web media designed to directly modify behavior." This doesn't sound much like Petraeus's frequent and appropriate invocation: "First with the truth."

Problems arise in part because activities are lumped together. Take Afghanistan: Rear Adm. Gregory Smith has a budget of roughly $100 million to support the information operations he commands, which include about $30 million for psy-ops, $30 million for reporting on local "atmospherics," $10 million for public affairs and another $30 million for smaller programs.

Smith told me by telephone from Kabul: "I have tried to bring a more disciplined view of what IO is, and make certain that we do not have activities bleeding into one another." His bosses at the Pentagon need to make sure that these necessary controls are, in fact, in place. This is an area where too much money and too little oversight have produced an information morass. [Ignatius/WashingtonPost/23March2010] 

CIA and Yemen Playing a Doubles Game, by Jeff Stein. If Yemen seems like a terrorist playground today, the answer might be that its top intelligence service is run by jihadis.

According to a report in the reliable Paris-based Intelligence Online newsletter, White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, "who has traveled twice to Yemen in the last six months, has been told by his advisers that Yemen's Political Security Organization has been infiltrated at the highest levels by jihadists active in the country."

A Brennan spokesman declined to comment on the report, which most likely originated in the region. But it came as no surprise to a top former CIA counterterrorism official, who said with a chuckle: "that report is stating the obvious."

"In 2006," the IO newsletter continues, "Political Security let Nasser al-Wahayshi, the former secretary of Osama bin Laden, and a dozen of his associates escape from prison in Sanaa. The escapees are believed to have established jihadists camps in the province of Chabwa, to the east of Sanaa. Political Security is run by Ghaled al-Qimch, President Ali Abdallah Saleh's trusted right hand man."

All this may be obvious, indeed, but it raises all sorts of troubling questions about Yemen, a virtual arms and manpower supply depot for al-Qaeda's assault on Saudi Arabia and the rest of the region.

"Last October," my Post colleague David Ignatius reported Friday, "the Yemeni government came to the CIA with a request: Could the agency collect intelligence that might help target the network of a U.S.-born al-Qaeda recruiter named Anwar al-Aulaqi?"

Aulaqi, Ignatius reminds us, is linked to the Fort Hood shootings and the recruitment of Nigerian underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab:

"On Nov. 5, U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Hasan killed 13 of his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, Tex.; Hasan had exchanged 18 or more e-mails with Aulaqi in the months before the shootings, according to the Associated Press. Then, on Christmas Day, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian who had been living in Yemen, tried to blow up an airliner bound for Detroit; he is said to have confessed later that Aulaqi was one of his trainers for this mission," Ignatius wrote.

The Yemenis wanted CIA help to get Aulaqi, Ignatius writes. His sources told him:

"The primary reason was that the agency lacked specific evidence that he threatened the lives of Americans - which is the threshold for any capture-or-kill operation against a U.S. citizen. The Yemenis also wanted U.S. Special Forces' help on the ground in pursuing Aulaqi; that, too, was refused."

But given the jihadist inclinations of some elements of the PSO, it's also an intriguing possibility that the CIA suspected the Yemenis were playing a double game - angling for clues about sensitive sources and sophisticated electronic methods the Agency is using to pursue al-Qaeda in the region.

A Yemeni official acknowledged to me Friday that the PSO has had security problems, noting that 11 "junior officers" were prosecuted for their role in the 2006 jail break.

"It's a poor country," where even intelligence officers are susceptible to bribes, said the official on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.

The problems began back in the late 1980s-early 1990s, he said, when the PSO recruited Yemeni veterans of the Afghan war against the Soviets.

"It was a double-edged sword," he said. Some remained jihadis, others would eventually help the PSO penetrate terrorist cells.

"We're addressing this," he added. "We've demoted and shuffled people around" and taken other measures to tighten security.

Indeed, in recent months Yemen and U.S. security services have dramatically ramped up their counterterrorism cooperation while, behind the scenes, they each play a double game.

If the Yemen scenario sounds familiar, it's because U.S. intelligence grapples with similar challenges today in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Indeed, throughout the Vietnam War, the CIA and military intelligence services had to work with South Vietnamese security services they knew had been thoroughly penetrated by the communists.

That's why the CIA runs on two tracks in Yemen and virtually everywhere else around the world, including most allied countries.

On one track it works with the host country's intelligence and military services.

On the other, it goes alone. [Stein/WashingtonPost/28March2010] 

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

Books

Humanitarians in Hostile Territory: Expeditionary Diplomacy and Aid Outside the Green Zone, by Peter W. Van Arsdale and Derrin R. Smith. [Available May, 2010]
More than ever, humanitarian aid workers and diplomats are engaging with vulnerable populations in areas once considered too dangerous to touch. Drawing on decades of on-the-ground experience in
conflict environments around the world, Van Arsdale and Smith offer this important and revealing guide to the ethics, theory, and practice of work outside so-called Green Zones of safety. On behalf of governments or NGOs, on missions ranging from complex humanitarian emergencies to post-war reconstruction, social scientists in interdisciplinary teams are operating in settings where the line between civilian and military projects is increasingly blurred. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the realities of these new humanitarianisms and for the fields of international relations, anthropology, development studies, and peace studies.

"This represents innovative work that is making a difference. Whether affiliated with NGOs, IGOs, government agencies, or academic institutions, humanitarians will benefit greatly."
- Jos� Ramos-Horta, President of the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste and 1996 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

"Many of us believe we have a moral imperative to help those in need, and so it follows that this humanitarian obligation doesn't stop at the 'green zone'. How then do citizens safely and effectively step into unsafe territory to better assist the most vulnerable populations? Van Arsdale and Smith have studied and actually provided assistance in conflictive and post-conflictive areas since 1975. With the highest ethical standards, they report on what works and doesn't, using examples from their own overseas experience in hostile environments, to bring together current best practices when working at the civilian-military interface. The authors explain the essential need for collaboration and coordination of government and non-government organizations to promote human rights and dignity worldwide. They give the foreign assistance worker pragmatic and ethical guidance for a unified effort so that life affirming services can be provided wherever they are needed."
- Linda Roan, President, eCrossCulture Corporation
[LeftCoastPress/March2010]

Jobs

Senior Intelligence Analyst (SALARY 150-200k) + Hedge Fund Bonuses (Possibly up to 700k ALL IN w/bonus)

Great opportunity for a Sr Intelligence Analyst with a Global Hedge Fund located in the Tri-State area. This firm has more 300 employees and $20 billion dollars under management. 

* Conduct intelligence research and analysis for investment purposes
* Responsible for collecting, analyzing and developing intelligence on the emerging trends, patterns and issues
* Strong understanding of the industry & knowledge of the key players in specific regions
* Experience in Corporate Information Gathering
* Land Analyst Specialist

We are looking for someone who is in the business of information; former Intelligence professionals highly desired!!

The ideal candidate will have a strong analytical mindset, cross border connections and extensive investigations experience.

If interested in this opportunity, or for more information, please call me direct at 917 206 1784 or email me the most recent copy of your resume attached as a Word Document to Jschwartz@adviceny.com  Any referrals, direction, or advice would be very helpful. Thank you. 

Jesse Schwartz, Advice Personnel, Inc, 230 Park Avenue, Suite 860, New York, NY 10169, Main: 212-682-4400 x129, Direct: 917-206-1784, Fax: 212-697-0343,jschwartz@adviceny.comwww.adviceny.com

Disney Company Seeks Senior Analyst, Global Intelligence and Threat Analysis, anticipates and assesses threats that could harm, or make vulnerable, The Walt Disney Company (TWDC), its employees, guests, or assets and establishes and oversees various special security programs designed to do the same. The analyst reviews information from open/public sources, official sources, and professional contacts, and conducts timely, accurate, relevant, and creative assessments of international security issues. He or she produces a range of written and verbal analyses for employees and management of the Company, supporting or driving the Company’s security and crisis management operations. The Sr. Analyst/Program manager is also responsible for such ongoing enterprise-wide projects as the Company’s Traveler safety program, Community Watch program, Global Security website content and management, Analyst Training program, Global Security’s Annual Report, and other projects involving enterprise-wide outreach on security issues.

PRINCIPAL ACCOUNTABILITIES:

• *Monitors open source media, homeland security and law enforcement bulletins, and information from professional contacts for international, national, and local intelligence that may affect the security of TWDC. The analyst will be a subject matter expert on issues such as counterterrorism, travel security, and international affairs.
• *Understands TWDC worldwide interests, including assets and ongoing activities, productions, etc. Anticipates scenarios, analyzes information, and produces written and verbal assessments and warning forecasts for Disney Global Security management and other appropriate TWDC consumers. Assessments will be assigned or self-initiated. Recommends strategies to mitigate security risks as appropriate or required.
• *Develops and delivers various products within the Company’s Traveler safety program, Community Watch program, Analyst Training program, Global Security’s Annual Report, and other enterprise wide security projects.
• *Coordinate program content and communication among various TWDC business units as well as with domestic and international units within Global Security.
• *Administer, coordinate and develops content for the Global Security website.

KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS:

• *Demonstrated ability to thrive in a creative, innovative, and highly collaborative work environment.
• *Internet fluency and knowledge of Macintosh and Microsoft-based applications.
• *Knowledge and understanding of analysis on international security issues, including though not exclusively related to terrorism.
• *Demonstrated research and critical thinking skills to identify, collect, synthesize, and evaluate large amounts of data and draw logical and actionable conclusions.
• *Ability to work on multiple projects under pressure of tight deadlines and high, exacting standards
• *Ability to coordinate and communicate effectively across a wide variety of business units.
• *Technical ability in web site construction/editing/developing helpful

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• *Bachelor’s degree required; field of study such as political science, international relations, national security studies, journalism preferred
• *Five-to-seven years analytic experience with an intelligence agency, law enforcement organization, the military, or the private sector
• *Strong written and verbal English presentation skills; other languages desirable, but not required
• *Strong professional ethics and ability to maintain absolute discretion, confidentiality, and trust
• *Foreign area knowledge and understanding of contemporary affairs gained through study, travel, or work abroad
• *US Government security clearance (at least Secret-level) desirable
• *Relocation to Burbank Corporate Headquarters required

Further information at this link: http://tinyurl.com/ycbkqyw

Obituaries

Baroness Park of Monmouth, the "Queen of Spies." Baroness Park of Monmouth, who died on March 24 aged 88, was one of Britain's most remarkable spies; her distinguished career in the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) culminated in her appointment as Controller Western Hemisphere in 1975, the highest post ever occupied by a woman; she retired early from SIS in 1979, having been elected Principal of Somerville College, Oxford, where she remained until 1989. 

When Daphne Park was revealed as the face of British Intelligence by Panorama in 1993, many were surprised to find that the James Bond of the public imagination bore a greater resemblance to Miss Marple: a woman whose genial, maiden aunt exterior belied a doughty, pugnacious character. Her drink of choice was Earl Grey tea, "stirred not shaken", as she put it.

But as one of the first women to do a fully operational job throughout her SIS career, Daphne Park demonstrated that a woman could be an immensely competent officer on the ground. Extracting information in the middle of an African jungle or burning top secret documents (and then hiding the ashes in her knickers) were simply part of the job. Though she once talked her way out of being lynched by a mob, she did not dream of carrying a gun.

Nor was she treated as an honorary man. Though formidable, she was quite capable of using her femininity to her advantage. During her time as consul-general in Hanoi in 1969, the confidential talks she enjoyed with the Soviet ambassador owed something of their success to his chauvinistic attitudes towards women. She was, however, realistic about her capacity to conduct "honeytrap" operations, noting: "Do I look like Mata Hari?"

As a woman who listed "difficult places" as a recreation in Who's Who, Daphne Park made something of a career out of some of the world's worst trouble spots, and her thirst for adventure drove her to turn down safer and more financially rewarding jobs early on in her career.

She was posted to the Belgian Congo in 1959, where the subsequent granting of independence produced one of the principal crises of the Cold War years. Here, Daphne Park dealt with the inevitable death threats and lawlessness of society with habitual sangfroid. On one occasion, when living alone, she chased off an intruder by leaning out of her window and shouting: "I am a witch! And if you don't instantly go away your hands and feet will fall off!"

One of her greatest strengths was her ability to attract and win over the most influential people, her natural ebullience and charm providing her own best cover. In Africa, she succeeded in forging strong friendships with local leaders despite their instinctive political dislike and fear of the colonial powers. On arriving in the Belgian Congo, she insisted on being housed alone on the commuter route into town while other Europeans cowered in a safeguarded quarter. Before long, she was entertaining Africans with early morning tumblers of whisky on her veranda, and by the time independence came, she knew the prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, and half his cabinet.

Her acts of courage reaped rich rewards. She once smuggled Lumumba's private secretary to safety in the boot of her little Citroen 2CV. "[The car] was excellent cover," she said. "Nobody ever takes 2CVs seriously. But that's not why I had it - if they'd let me loose in anything bigger I'd have been lethal. My director once told me the bravest thing he'd ever done in his life was to be driven round by me." Lumumba's secretary subsequently became head of the Intelligence Service in the new government, and one of the most useful sources in Daphne Park's career.

On another occasion she was driving a Land Rover when she saw a machete-wielding mob coming towards her. She jumped out, stuck her head under the bonnet and told her potential attackers: "Thank goodness you've come along - I think I have a problem with my carburettor." The men laid down their weapons and offered their assistance.

"I always looked just like a fat missionary, which was very useful," she said in later life. "Missionaries get around, you know."

Daphne Margaret Sybil D�sir�e Park was born in Surrey on September 1 1921. Her father, John Alexander Park, had contracted tuberculosis as a young man and been sent to Africa on a "cure". Settling there, he moved from South Africa to what was then Nyasaland, where he became an intelligence officer in the First World War, worked as a tobacco farmer and then moved to Tanganyika as an alluvial gold prospector. Six months after her birth, Daphne travelled to Africa with her mother, Doreen, to join him there.

The family home was a mud hut without running water or electricity. Daphne pegged her first gold claim aged three, finding a single nugget which she then lost. She had no formal education until the age of 11, when she walked three days to the nearest road and hitched a lorry ride "through a cloud of locusts" to Dar es Salaam.

There she "switched on my first electric light and pulled my first loo chain" and sailed back to England to attend the Rosa Bassett school in Streatham. She would never again see her brother, David, who died aged 14. As for her parents, it would be another 15 years before she laid eyes on them.

Her unconventional upbringing had shielded her from British prejudices, and she never felt disadvantaged by her gender or her lack of money. Determined to be a diplomat, she convinced her county council to create a special scholarship enabling her to take up her place to read French at Somerville College, Oxford. But on graduating in 1943, she turned down jobs in the Treasury and the Foreign Office to make a direct contribution to the war effort.

Daphne Park was summoned for interview at FANY (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry - which had evolved to undertake unconventional tasks among the Services). There she was vetted for her usefulness in encryption but became the first person ever to fail the final examination, by providing an over-elaborate response to a question about ciphers. Fortunately, her paper found its way to the head of coding at the Special Operations Unit, who put her on his staff. It was the beginning, as she admitted, of her "very interesting war".

After a period instructing a range of agents in the use of codes, Daphne Park was promoted to the rank of sergeant and sent to Milton Hall in Leicestershire, where she helped to train the Jedburghs, special teams formed to support the Resistance in Europe. She was, however, sacked for insubordination after she told a senior officer he was incompetent, and in 1945 went to work as a briefing and dispatching officer in North Africa.

Daphne Park's wartime activities in SOE left her deeply compromised in Europe and disqualified her from entry into the Service. Instead, bitterly disappointed, and still a FANY officer, she was sent to Vienna in 1946 to set up an office for FIAT (Field Intelligence Agency Technical), directing the search for Axis scientists who had been involved in interesting projects during the war and were wanted for interview by the British. Her assistance to SIS secured her an interview back in London. She was duly offered a job and entered the Service in July 1948, the time of the Berlin airlift.

Her work in Vienna strongly influenced her career. The kidnapping of scientists by the Soviets in the postwar years and the disappearance of Poles and Czechs she had trained during the war made Daphne Park determined to discover more about the communist regime. After two years in London, she went to Cambridge to learn Russian, and in 1954 - after a two-year stint in Paris working undercover as part of the UK delegation to Nato - she was appointed second secretary at the Moscow embassy.

Daphne Park arrived in the Soviet Union in the immediate aftermath of the Korean War. Stalin had died the previous year, Beria had been shot and the Bulganin-Khrushchev thaw was beginning. The Soviet Union was opening up, and she travelled widely, reporting on all aspects of Soviet life. Once, during the Suez crisis, when Britain was under attack at the UN, demonstrators swarmed angrily up to the British embassy. As the riot unfolded, the embassy's military and naval attach�s, in full uniform, approached a Russian officer who was observing the destruction. They saluted him and said: "The ambassador would be obliged to know when this demonstration will end, as he is having guests for luncheon." According to Daphne Park, the reply came: "This spontaneous demonstration of the people's wrath will end at a quarter to one precisely."

Her tradecraft was impeccable. SIS had taken on the case of a Russian spy in Canada who had been turned by the Canadians but then recalled to the Soviet Union. There were fears that he had been compromised, and he was instructed to appear, alone, in a particular Moscow street at a particular time carrying a shopping bag in his left hand. Daphne Park was sent to the rendezvous. When he arrived with the bag in his right hand, and in the company of a woman, she correctly surmised that he was indicating that he had indeed been compromised.

In September 1969, following her postings to the Congo and to Zambia (in 1964), Daphne Park was appointed Consul-General in Hanoi, listed as "the worst mission in the world" by inspectors in 1956. "It was an uncomfortable life, and extremely unhealthy," she said. "My house was full of rats."

Daphne Park's attempts to get to know the Vietnamese were constantly frustrated: she was refused a language teacher and even a bicycle. She did, however, establish informal relationships with the Provisional Revolutionary Government representative in North Vietnam (although the PRG was not officially recognised by the British) and the Soviet Ambassador, and obtained important information about the political climate and psychology of the Vietnamese.

Daphne Park always felt, contrary to popular opinion, that defeat and the subsequent spread of communism through Indo-China could have been avoided had American troops held out. "The writing might have been on the walls in the South, but it was on the North Vietnamese walls too. If the Americans hadn't succumbed to the tremendous pressure at home, history might have been different."

Her final foreign posting, as charg� d'affaires to Outer Mongolia, was in 1972. She spent the rest of her career in London.

In 1979, retiring two years early from the Service, Daphne Park was elected Principal of Somerville College, where she was known to students as "Daffers". Although she had emerged unscathed from some extremely tricky diplomatic situations, she had more difficulty coming to terms with Oxford's procedural codes, and the burden of her responsibilities was increased by a sudden deterioration in her mother's health.

Though some were critical of her early performance as Principal, she made an enormous contribution to the college. In spite of her age, she was aware of the world her undergraduates faced and worked tirelessly to forge links between Somerville and the world of industry, garnering subsidised lectureships and fellowships.

She set up the Open Evening for Industry for second-year undergraduates, providing them with information about careers and useful contacts. She identified the need for extra funding and launched the Somerville Appeal in 1983. She was appointed Pro Vice-Chancellor of Oxford in 1985.

Her enthusiasm for each project infected those around her, and her encouragement and generosity were unstinting. Her former secretary recalls Daphne Park dispatching her housekeeper on more than one occasion with a Thermos of soup to comfort some ailing don.

Nor were her commitments limited to the university. She was a BBC governor between 1982 and 1987 under the then Director-General, Alasdair Milne, who identified her as a hardline opponent in his memoirs. Always outspoken, Daphne Park argued that the BBC should be run more efficiently, and she made a strong stand against the controversial Real Lives documentary about the IRA and Loyalist extremists.

Among her many other post-SIS activities, she was chairman of the Legal Aid Advisory Committee to the Lord Chancellor between 1985 and 1991 and a member of the British Library Board from 1983 to 1989.

She was appointed OBE in 1960 for her protection of British subjects in time of danger in the Congo, and appointed CMG in 1971 for her service in Hanoi.

In 1990 she was created a Life Peer. In the House of Lords - which she toured in a motorised wheelchair - she became a firm friend of another formidable Cold War spy, Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale. In her working life, Lady Park said, she had "abhorred Communism", calling it "a wicked, evil regime. It rests on terror."

She contrasted the threat of communism of her day with the new dangers posed by Islamic extremists: "There is quite a difference between our government saying: 'We wish to know in advance the undeclared intention of government X' and 'We want to know that next week somebody like the Shoe Bomber is going to pop up'. To this end, she defended proposals to increase the period in which terrorist suspects could be held without charge from 28 to 42 days, saying: "The nature of the threat has become far more complex."

She admitted that, during her career as an agent, she had been terrified on several occasions. "There are frightening moments and there are moments when you should have been frightened but weren't," she said. "I do not have courage, but I do have a mixture of curiosity and optimism." Despite the awful sights to which she had been witness, Daphne Park continued to display that optimism in her final years. "This is a marvellous world," she said. "I wish I could go on and on."

Daphne Park never married: "I had four or five love affairs, like most people - but only one that really mattered, and that ended in death, unfortunately." [Telegraph/28March2010] 

R. H. "Mike" Stockbridge: Intelligence Officer. Together with Paddy Leigh Fermor, Xan Fielding and George Psychoundakis - the "Cretan Runner" - "Mike" Stockbridge's name will live long in the annals of the resistance to the often brutal German occupation of Crete during the Second World War. An academic by inclination and background, he proved a highly successful gatherer of intelligence while under constant threat of discovery or betrayal of his pretence of being a village schoolmaster. His loyalty to the Cretan Andartes Resistance fighters was absolute, as was theirs to him.

Ralph Hedley Stockbridge, always known as "Mike" on a personal whim, was born in 1917. He was educated at the Perse School, Cambridge, where he gained a scholarship to read classics at Peterhouse, providing him with a foundation for modern Greek and its Cretan dialect. He enlisted into the Field Security Service in 1940 and was posted to the Middle East as a linguist. Mussolini's attack on Greece in October and the spirited resistance his army and air force encountered led Winston Churchill to brood on a possible British initiative in the Balkans. Among the measures set in train was the dispatch of Stockbridge - ostensibly as a civilian - to Heraklion on Crete.

The German invasion of Greece in April 1941 resulted in the British and Commonwealth troops, who had arrived in March, being hustled out of the country in three weeks. Some 28,000 took refuge on Crete and were deployed to defend the island, primarily against German invasion by sea. The parachute and glider-borne main assault threw the defenders off balance and they never recovered. Stockbridge accompanied the survivors to Egypt. He lost no time in requesting a return to the island and exploited his contacts in Heraklion as a means of gaining intelligence of the German occupying force and its intentions. He was put in touch with the Inter-Services Liaison Department, the cover name for the Secret Intelligence Service MI6 office at GHQ in Cairo. In company with Captain Jack Smith-Hughes of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), he was landed in October by the submarine Thunderbolt. In Cairo and elsewhere, SOE and MI6 had a troubled relationship, but the two got on well.

At that low point in the war for Britain, intelligence on German intentions in the eastern Mediterranean and the Levant was of acute importance. Greece and Crete were key sources for this, leading MI6 and SOE to send agents into both countries. But the opportunities for SOE-inspired subversion and sabotage were limited by geography and the threat of high reprisals against the civilian populations.

Both MI6 and SOE were heavily reliant on the Cretan Resistance, the Andartes. Writing about them after the war, Stockbridge acknowledged: "Everything depended throughout on their magnificent loyalty. Without their help with guides, informants and suppliers of food, not a single one of us would have lasted twenty-four hours."

Commissioned in the field - a concession MI6 and SOE enjoyed - in January 1942, Stockbridge declined an offer of return to Cairo for a break. Four months later, the situation worsened under German pressure and he was betrayed and evacuated to Egypt. There his service on Crete was recognized by the award of his first Military Cross. He was insistent that he could re-establish himself on Crete and, in early 1943, he and John Stanley, his wireless operator, were put ashore by submarine.

From that point, Stockbridge was the senior MI6 officer on Crete. Basing themselves on Rethymnon, he and Stanley focused their attention on gathering intelligence in the central and eastern parts of the island, leaving Fermor to concentrate on his work for SOE. Hunted by the German occupying force, they were constantly on the move but, protected by the Andartes, they evaded capture while remaining in touch by radio with their headquarters in Cairo.

In his book Hide and Seek , Fielding wrote: "Of all the British agents on the island, Stockbridge was the most subtly disguised. He washed and shaved carefully at least once a week, wore shoes rather than boots, an overcoat and horn-rimmed spectacles. His appearance, stumbling walk and mannerisms where exactly those of what he was pretending to be: a village schoolmaster."

Yet in his own account, Stockbridge said: "When passing through any checkpoint, the German security police must have been blind not to see me trembling."

The risk of violent German reaction against the Cretan population increased in April 1944, when Fermor and Billy Moss abducted the commander of the German 22nd Division, Major-General Kreipe, and smuggled him off the island. None was taken, it is thought, in recognition that the kidnap had been a strictly military affair. The same could not be said of the Andartes attacks on German convoys and installations in July and August 1944 that led to the burning of 30 villages and execution of more than 1,000 Cretans.

These actions had not been instigated by MI6 or SOE, as both organizations had by then recognized that the key issues were intelligence gathering and preparations for a peaceful transfer of control to the legitimate Greek authorities when the Germans surrendered. Stockbridge was awarded a bar to his Military Cross in late 1944 yet remained on the island until the end of the war in Europe, when he was made an honorary citizen of Rethymnon.

Invited to join MI6 permanently, he served in Salonika at the time of the Greek civil war of 1946 to 1950, for six years in Athens and also in Egypt and Syria, before retiring at the statutory age of 55 in 1972. Subsequently, he was for six years the bursar of St Faith's preparatory School in Cambridge.

His first marriage, to Margaret Garnett, was dissolved in 1962 and he married Kathleen Price in 1963. He is survived by his second wife, a son and daughter from his first marriage and two daughters from his second.

R. H. "Mike" Stockbridge, MC and Bar, intelligence officer, was born on April 18, 1917. He died on March 10, 2010, aged 92. [TimesOnline/15March2010] 

Research Requests

Colleagues of William Berlin. My father, William A. Berlin, was a member of AFIO up to his death in February 1990. Many of his former military/embassy colleagues were members too and I would LOVE to see if they are still alive to ask them some questions about their time with my Dad overseas. I realize you cannot give me their names butPLEASE forward my request to the members and ask them to PLEASE PLEASE contact me if they knew my father. I went to one of your luncheons with my father and know you have a big group. You have permission to give everything in this email (my name, address, etc) to them!

TIME SENSITIVE: Is there ANY WAY to find out from some central office in the government somewhere the address my parents lived in while working in Berlin, Germany in early 1950's? My mother is going there next week (March 31,2010) and wanted to try to visit her old house but since we moved since my father died we can't find our scrapbook and since she is 90 she can't remember exactly.

Thank you SO MUCH!

Two specific members I am looking for are Edward McGettigan ("Mac") around 1989 he still lived in Goodwin House East in Alexandria Virginia but moved out and I lost his address. (His wife's name was Tatina)
Bill Tyng--around 1989 I THINK he was an episcopal minister in Maryland but lost his address.

Gratefully, REPLIES TO: Trudi Berlin Hays, 1006 Merlins Court, Herndon, VA 20170, 703-326-0882, lovetosing@verizon.net

SoHo Arts Publication Researching Story on "Artistic Spies" - If you're creative, please share your story and samples of artwork with this culture-oriented New York publication. The SoHo Journal has asked if we know of current/former Intelligence Officers who have produced works of art which they might share with SoHo Journal readers. They would like to hear the role art has played in your life -- avocationally and in any ways it also helped you do the serious business of spying -- or escape from some of its many rigors. If you wish to show them that Intelligence Officers are well-rounded and highly creative [beyond the oeuvre of effective pocket litter and flawless NOC foreign credentials], reach out and contact Donald Clark MacPherson at sohojournal@gmail.com To learn more about the journal, visit: www.sohojournal.com The journal will respect all limits needed on privacy and identification,

Announcements

Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) Roundtable Hosted by LexisNexis. LexisNexis will host its first Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) Roundtable at the National Press Club on April 26, 2010.

The program will include introductory remarks by Doug Naquin, Director of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's Open Source Center, followed by a "perspectives panel" discussion with leading OSINT and analytical experts from academia and the private sector. In addition to Director Naquin, the panel will include former Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and Production, Dr. Mark Lowenthal, and Ron Marks who is a Senior Vice President with Oxford Analytica. The "perspectives" discussion will be based on the future of OSINT as a recognized discipline in strategic and tactical national security decision-making.

The LexisNexis OSINT Roundtable was created to make a public space for discussion about the government's needs for Open Source Intelligence and to facilitate relationships between government officials and private sector leaders; in order to foster an increasingly responsive open source intelligence infrastructure that meets the needs of national security decision makers.

Further information will be posted at www.lexisnexis.com/osint .

Coming Events

EVENTS IN COMING TWO MONTHS....

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

• Monday, 5 April 2010; 6:30 pm - Washington, DC - "An Evening with Nigel West: Secrets from the Cambridge Spies" at the International Spy Museum
• Wednesday, 14 April 2010; 6:30 pm - Washington, DC - "Striking Remotely: Predator Drones" at the International Spy Museum
• Thursday, 15 April 2010; noon - 1 pm - Washington, DC - "Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy" at the International Spy Museum
• Wednesday, 5 May 2010; 6:30 pm - Washington, DC - "Abduction, Black Site Prisons, and the CIA: Extraordinary Rendition Today" at the International Spy Museum
• Thursday, 6 May 2010; 12 noon – 1 pm - Washington, DC - "On the Front Lines of Cyber War with Richard A. Clarke" at the International Spy Museum
• Monday, 10 May 2010; 6:30 pm - Washington, DC - "Our Man in Havana" at the International Spy Museum
• Thursday, 13 May 2010; 10 am - 2:30 pm - Washington, DC - "Codebreaking in World War II: The Inside Story" at the International Spy Museum
• Thursday, 20 May 2010; 6 pm - Washington, DC - "Goldfinger" at the International Spy Museum

Wednesday, 31 March 2010, 8 p.m. - Coral Gables, FL - AFIO Miami Chapter hosts Keith Thomson in special reading "Once A Spy" and a special presentation on Microdrones -- or did you think it was an ordinary insect on your ceiling? Thomson will read from his spy novel: Once A Spy, at Books & Books in Coral Gables. The Microdrones [professional unmanned aerial vehicles] have offered to debut their 2.5LB drones beforehand for AFIO members, as well. Microdrones have been used to extraordinary success by police in the UK (FAA regulations are thwarting their use in the U.S.; meanwhile radio-controlled helicopters and airplanes up to 55LBs have essentially no restraints). Clearly an event not to miss. For further information contact chapter President Tom Spencer at trsmiami@aol.com

THURSDAY, 1 April 2010 - Tysons Corner, VA - National AFIO Luncheon featuring Seymour Hersh and Marc Thiessen.

Full details are here.

Wednesday, 7 April 2010, 6 p.m. - Las Vegas, NV - AFIO Las Vegas Chapter Meeting features Matthew Zucker, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. Topic: “Mexican Drug Cartels.” Employed with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) for 12 years, Officer Matthew Zucker is currently serving as a TAC Officer assigned to the Detention Services Training Division. While assigned to the LVMPD Detention Services Division Intelligence Section, Officer Zucker worked issues involving Hispanic Gangs, Black Gangs, White Gangs, Prison Gangs, and Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. He compiled a certified training class entitled “Introduction to Surenos” which has been taught to approximately 10,000 police and corrections officers nationwide. He has been a featured speaker at three consecutive LMPD Gang Conferences, the Virginia Gang Conference, American Jails Conference, Southern Nevada Gang Symposium, the National Latino Peace Officers Conference, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATF) Hispanic Agent Association Conference, Federal Law Enforcement Analysis Training, and the LVMPD Sheriff’s Recruitment Council.
Location: Nellis Air Force Base Officers' Club. Guest names must be submitted to me by 4:00 p.m., Monday, March 29th. Join us at 5 p.m. in the "Check Six" bar area for liaison and beverages.
If you plan to attend, RSVP with names by 4 pm, Monday, March 29th. Entrance to the Base for your guest(s) cannot be guaranteed if I don't have their names
(unless they already have military ID to enter the base). (The deadline to submit names of guests is by 4:00 p.m March 29, 2010)
All guests must use the MAIN GATE located at the intersection on Craig Road and Las Vegas Blvd. 5871 Fitzgerald Blvd.
Bring your spouse and/or guest(s) to dinner as well as our meeting, but remember to submit your guest(s) names to me be the stated deadline above.
You may email at BentleyM@nv.doe.gov or call me anytime at 702-295-1024 if you have any questions. We look forward to seeing you!

Tuesday, 13 April 2010, 5 p.m. - Hampton Roads, VA - The AFIO Norm Forde Hampton Roads Chapter - to hear Carl Finstrom on Stella Polaris. AFIO member Carl Finstrom will present, "Stella Polaris: The Exfiltration of Finnish COMINT Material"- The evacuation of the Finnish Intelligence Service from Finland to Sweden in Sep 1944.
Finstrom is an AFIO Member and Past President, Christopher Wren Association. Stella Polaris was the code name for a secret plan developed by the Finnish Intelligence Service for their evacuation to Sweden in the final phase of World War Two. The plan was coordinated with the Swedish counterpart intelligence organizations in June 1944 after the Soviets resumed a massive offensive. By the end of June there was a real danger of a Soviet breakthrough and Soviet occupation of Finland. The Finns sought to relocate their intelligence assets to neutral Sweden so that they could continue the fight working with a significant Finnish stay-behind force. Finns stored weapons and ammunition at hundreds of locations to support a stay-behind force of at least 50,000 resistance personnel. The Stella Polaris story is of great interest to cryptologic historians. The story of the evacuation of the Finnish Military Intelligence Branch from Finland to Sweden after the signing of the ceasefire with the USSR in Sept 1944 is perhaps the most extraordinary event in the history of communications intelligence
Free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served. RSVP: Melissa Saunders at mwsaunders@cox.net
Location: Main meeting room at Tabb Library, York County. Directions: From Norfolk take I-64 West. Merge onto US-17 North via Exit 258B toward Yorktown. Follow US-17 North approximately 2.2 miles to Victory Blvd/VA-171 East. Turn right onto Victory Blvd/VA-171 East. Turn right at the next traffic light onto Hampton Hwy/VA-134 South. Turn right at the next traffic light onto Long Green Blvd. Tabb Library is on the immediate right. It is across the street from the Victory YMCA.
From Williamsburg take I-64 East. Merge onto Victory Blvd/VA-171 East via Exit 256B. Follow Victory Blvd/VA-171 East approximately 2 miles. Turn right onto Hampton Hwy/VA-134 South. Turn right at the next traffic light onto Long Green Blvd. Tabb Library is on the immediate right. It is across the street from the Victory YMCA.

Tuesday, 13 April 2010, 1130 hrs - Tampa, FL - The AFIO Suncoast Chapter will hold its Spring meeting and luncheon on "Current Challenges to America's Historical Strengths in the Intelligence Community" featuring Walter Andrusyszyn. Check-in registration will commence at 1130 hours, opening ceremonies and lunch& Business Meeting at noon, followed by our speaker, Walter Andrusyszyn who will be discussing the consequences of global/U.S. debt; Middle East; Russia and Eastern Europe; NATO/EU; China and the proliferation of nuclear weapons with a favor of the White House and State Department. A full Luncheon with normal salad, rolls, dressing of choice, coffee and tea, and desert, will be served for the usual $15, all inclusive. We will have the wine and soda bar open at 1100 for those that wish to come early for our social time. We recommend you not miss this luncheon and presentation.
Reply ASAP, with your name and any guests accompanying you, to: Bill Brown at billbrown1@tampabay.rr.com
Your check payable to 'Suncoast Chapter, AFIO' (or cash) should be presented at time of check-in for the luncheon. Should you not have 'bumper stickers' or ID card for access to MacDill AFB, please so state in your response. Be sure to include your license number, name on drivers license and state of issue for yourself and for any guests you are bringing on base. And don't forget, all of you needing special roster gate access should proceed to the Bayshore Gate entrance to MacDill AFB (need directions, let us know). The main gate will send you to the visitor‘s center and they will not be able to help you get past security, unless you are just asking for directions to the Bayshore Gate.
We look forward to your response -- hopefully also seeing you at the O'Club at the April 13th luncheon.
Walter Andrusyszyn has been an Adjunct Professor of International Business at the College of Business Administration of the University of South Florida, where he began teaching in spring 2007. From January to May 2009 he was temporarily assigned as Deputy Permanent Representative to the U.S. Mission to NATO. He joined the Plastipak Packaging Company in January 2004 following a career in the U.S. Government. He retired from public service at the end of 2003, after serving at the White House as the Director for Northern and Eastern European Affairs in the National Security Council (he became Director in November 2001). Having entered the Foreign Service in 1980, he served in Stockholm (1980-82) and in East Berlin (1982-84) before returning to Washington to be the Desk Officer for Grenada and the Windward and Leeward Islands of the Caribbean (1985-1987). In 1987-1988 he was Special Assistant to Assistant Secretary Rozanne Ridgway in the Bureau of European and Canadian Affairs. He then served in Bonn as the Bonn Group Representative, responsible for Berlin and Four Power rights during Germany's reunification. In 1990, he headed the Political-Military unit at the American Embassy in Bonn.
Andrusyszyn became the Desk Officer for Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia in 1992. In 1994, he returned to Bonn to head the unit reporting on domestic political events in Germany. In October 1995, he was assigned to the American Embassy in Sarajevo where he served during the Dayton Peace Talks and for the first months of IFOR deployment. For his efforts to gain the release of an imprisoned American journalist held by Bosnian Serb authorities, Mr. Andrusyszyn received the Secretary's Award for Heroism. In April 1996, he was assigned to Stockholm as Political Counselor. In August 1997 he was appointed Charge d’Affaires at the American Embassy in Tallinn, Estonia and in July 1999, be became director of the Office of European Security and Political Affairs, responsible for NATO and the OSCE. In September 2001 he was named the Director of the Task Force on Terrorism in response to the September 11 attacks.
Born in Blackburn, England in 1951, Mr. Andrusyszyn emigrated to the U.S. in 1957 and was raised in New York City. A graduate of New York University (1973), he attended the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (1973-1975). He continued his studies in Germany and also worked as a local employee for the Sri Lanka Embassy in Bonn (1977-78).

Wednesday, 14 April 2010, 11:30 a.m. - Scottsdale, AZ - AFIO Arizona Luncheon on "Current Perspective on Pakistan-Afghanistan-India Issues." Where: McCORMICK RANCH GOLF COURSE,7505 McCormick Parkway, Scottsdale AZ 85258 ~ Phone 480.948.0260
Speaker: Prof Phil Jones, Director, Global Security/Intelligence Studies, Embrey-Riddle Aeronautical, Prescott, Arizona Campus, on “Current Perspective on Pakistan-Afghanistan, Pakistan-India Issues.” Phil Jones is a former national intelligence analyst and an international security expert with extensive field experience in political and security risk studies. He has also served as security manager for an international corporation and management services for corporate clients. He has done extensive field work for World Bank clients in international development projects and is an expert on South Asia. Professor Jones will focus on timely Pakistan-Afghanistan, Pakistan-India issues.
RESERVATIONS: WE WILL NEED FOR EVERY MEETING an RSVP no later than 72 hours ahead of time; in the past, not reserving or cancelling without prior notice (72 hours prior to the meeting) created much grief for those of us organizing the meeting and dealing with the personnel! WE ARE charged for the no-shows and please remember, we are a small organization with a humble coffer! We would therefore APPRECIATE that you all respond to this email to confirm your presence (or not). Our meeting fees will be as follows: $20.00 for members, $22 for non-member guests.
Email Simone simone@4smartphone.net or simone@afioaz.org or call and leave a message on 602.570.6016

15 April 2010, 12:30 p.m. - Las Angeles, CA - The AFIO L.A. luncheon hosts Marthe Cohn - "Behind Enemy Lines: A French Spy Inside Nazi Germany."
Marthe Cohn was a member of the French First Army intelligence service during World War II and made many covert trips inside Nazi Germany. During her presentation, she will recount her missions as a French Jewish spy and how she disguised herself as a young nurse to find information about German troop movements and alert Allied commanders. Her book, Behind Enemy Lines, an outstanding memoir, is the story of an ordinary human being who, under extraordinary circumstances, became the hero her country needed her to be. Nine years ago she was awarded the Medaille Militaire, a relatively rare medal awarded for outstanding military service and given, in the past, to the likes of Winston Churchill.
She has appeared at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. and on CSPAN2.
Lunch will be served at 12:30 PM at the LMU campus for a cost of $20. Please RSVP via email AFIO_LA@Yahoo.com by no later than April 9, 2010 if you would like to attend the meeting. If directions are needed please forward an email request.

Friday, 16 April 2010 - Austin, TX - CIA Invites AFIO Members to the CIA - LBJ Library Conference on STRATEGIC WARNING and The ROLE OF INTELLIGENCE - Lessons Learned from the 1968 Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia. Full details at top right column of this issue of the Weekly Notes.

20 April 2010 - Arlington, VA - The Defense Intelligence Forum meets at the Alpine Restaurant, 4770 Lee Highway, Arlington, VA 22207. The speaker will be Colonel Mark S. Wilkins, US Army, who will speak on Latin American security issues.

Col Mark Wilkins, a Foreign Area Officer, is Chief of the America Division, J5 JCS.  He has been Defense and Army Attaché in Columbia, and Ecuador.  He has served as Chief of the Office of the Defense Representative in Costa Rica and commanded US Military Groups in Nicaragua and Guatemala. He has been Operations Officer for the Advanced Foreign Counterintelligence Training Center, senior military analyst in DIA's Latin American Division, and Director of Intelligence for Special Operations Command South. In Honduras, he supported U.S. military operations in Central America.  He is a graduate of the Venezuelan Battalion Command and Staff School and has a Masters Degree in Latin American studies from the University of Florida.
This forum will follow a modified Chatham House rule.  You may use the information, but with the exception of speaker's name and subject, you may make no attribution.
Pay at the door with a check for $29 per person payable to DIAA, Inc.  Check-in starts at 1130, lunch at 1200.  Make reservations by 14 April by email to diforum@verizon.net.  Give names, telephone numbers, email addresses, and choices of chicken al limone, veal marsala, salmon, or pasta primavera.  Pay with a check.  THE FORUM DOESN'T TAKE CASH!

23 - 25 April 2010 - S. Portland, ME - The New England Chapter of the Naval Cryptologic Veterans Association (NCVA-NE) holds a spring Mini-Reunion at the Marriott at Sable Oaks.  For additional event information, call (518) 664-8032 or visit website. 

26 April 2010 - Washington, DC - Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) Roundtable Hosted by LexisNexis. LexisNexis will host its first Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) Roundtable at the National Press Club
The program will include introductory remarks by Doug Naquin, Director of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's Open Source Center, followed by a "perspectives panel" discussion with leading OSINT and analytical experts from academia and the private sector. In addition to Director Naquin, the panel will include former Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and Production, Dr. Mark Lowenthal, and Ron Marks who is a Senior Vice President with Oxford Analytica. The "perspectives" discussion will be based on the future of OSINT as a recognized discipline in strategic and tactical national security decision-making.
The LexisNexis OSINT Roundtable was created to make a public space for discussion about the government's needs for Open Source Intelligence and to facilitate relationships between government officials and private sector leaders; in order to foster an increasingly responsive open source intelligence infrastructure that meets the needs of national security decision makers.
Further information will be posted at www.lexisnexis.com/osint

28 April 2010, 6:30 p.m. - Coral Gables, FL - The AFIO Miami Chapter hosts dinner with CIA Clandestine Services Officer. Save the date for a special dinner meeting with a member of the Clandestine Service, CIA. We will be discussing the mission and how we can help. This will be an opportunity to invite trusted members of the business community. Details to follow. Inquiries to trsmiami@aol.com

28 April 2010, 6:00 p.m. - Washington, DC - The Goethe Institute will host a presentation and discussion of the film "The Lives of Others" about the surveillance society of East Germany during the Cold War.

If interested in attending this free cinema presentation and discussion, send your RSVP to: rsvp@washington.goethe.org  or by phone to: 202/289-1200 extension 170.  Please note that the film discussion is scheduled to begin AFTER the film. The entire film will be shown, followed by discussion. To accept: rsvp@washington.goethe.org

30 April 2010, 9 a.m. - 6 p.m. - Washington, DC - "The Stasi and its Foreign Intelligence Service" - Free Workshop by CWIHP and GHI.  
The German Historical Institute and The Cold War International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars hosts one day workshop on the STASI. This CWIHP-GHI workshop will be held at the Woodrow Wilson Center, One Wilson Plaza/1300 Pennsylvania Avenue N.W. in Washington. There will be four panels with leading American, German, British and Canadian historians working on the Stasi and HVA: Panel 1: The Stasi and East German Society; Panel 2: The Stasi and the East German State and the SED (communist party); Panel 3: The HVA and KGB; and Panel 4: The HVA and the West, which will deal mainly with East German espionage in West Germany.
PROGRAM: Friday, April 30 (Woodrow Wilson Center) The Stasi and East German Society, with Uwe Spiekermann, GHI; Jens Gieseke, Zentrum f�r Zeithistorische Forschung, Potsdam, and Gary Bruce, Waterloo University, Canada. David Bathrick gives commentary.
The Stasi, the SED, and the GDR State - a panel with Christian Ostermann, Woodrow Wilson Ctr, Walter S��, Birthler Agency, Berlin, and Jefferson Adams, Sarah Lawrence College.
Keynote Address: “The Stasi Legacy in Germany’s History” by Professor Konrad Jarausch, University of North Carolina
The HVA and KGB panel with Mircea Munteanu, Woodrow Wilson Ctr, Benjamin Fischer, formerly CIA History Staff, Washington, DC and Paul Maddrell, Aberystwyth University. Comment by Oleg Kalugin, KGB (ret)
The HVA and the West panel with R. Gerald Livingston, GHI, Georg Herbstritt, Birthler Agency, Berlin and Kristie Macrakis, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dirk Doerrenberg, formerly Bundesamt f�r Verfassungsschutz.
A luncheon keynote address on the Legacy of the Stasi in German History will be delivered by Professor Konrad Jarausch of the University of North Carolina's History Department.
AFIO members are invited to participate in the discussion following panelists' presentation. but asked to register with the Wilson Center in advance, identifying themselves as AFIO members. No fee for participation is required. REGISTER by e-mail at the following address: coldwar@wilsoncenter.org.
Contact persons at the Wilson Center: Mircea. Munteanu, CWIHP Deputy Director (Mircea.Munteanu@wilsoncenter.org) or Tel: 202/69-4267, or Timothy McDonnell (Timothy.McDonnell@wilsoncenter.org). A full program outline can be provided by the Wilson Center contact persons.

Saturday, 1 May 2010, 1000 - 1430 - Salem, MA - The AFIO New England Chapter hear Ed Barr on "The State of HUMINT in CENTROM Area of Operations." Edward J. Barr, Esq. is a colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve and has served as an advisor to the United Nations and as a liaison to foreign governments. As a senior intelligence officer, Ed has worked with all major intelligence agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the National Security Agency (NSA). He helped create an executive-level masters degree program at the Department of Defense's Joint Military Intelligence College (JMIC) and served as the program's first Marine Corps faculty member. He has served in countries throughout Southeast Asia and the Middle East to include Afghanistan, Iraq, and Djibouti. Ed has just ended an active duty period where he served as US Central Command’s senior counterintelligence and HUMINT officer, responsible for intelligence operations in 27 countries.
The May 1st chapter meeting will be held at the Salem Waterfront Hotel located in Salem MA. The hotel web site is here: http://www.salemwaterfronthotel.com/. For directions to the hotel look here: http://www.salemwaterfronthotel.com/location.html
Information about Salem MA and local hotels can be found here: http://salem.org/
Our schedule is as follows: Registration & gathering, 1000 - 1130, membership meeting
1130 – 1200. Luncheon at 1200 followed by our speaker, with adjournment at 2:30PM.
Note, as this meeting is a one-day event we have not made any hotel arrangements.
For additional information contact us at afionechapter@gmail.com
Advance reservations are $25.00, $30.00 at the door - per person.
Luncheon reservations must be made by 23 April 2010.
Mail your check and the reservation form to:
Mr. Arthur Hulnick, 216 Summit Avenue # E102, Brookline, MA 02446, 617-739-7074 or hlnk@aol.com

20 May 2010, 11:30 am - Colorado Springs, CO - AFIO Rocky Mountain Chapter at the Air Force Academy, Falcon Club features Mark Pfoff of the El Paso Sheriff Office, "Computer Forensics and all things Digital." RSVP to Tom Van Wormer at robsmom@pcisys.net

JULY EVENT in IRELAND, REQUIRING PLANNING NOW....

11-13 July 2010 - Dungarvan, Ireland - 2010 Analytic Best Practices Conference by Mercyhurst College Institute of Intelligence Education. Event to be at Dungarvan Town Hall Theatre. Mercyhurst College's Institute for Intelligence Education hosts this special event which focuses on intelligence issues from a global perspective.
The conference will converse and discuss analytic best practices using panels of leading practitioners in the fields of medicine, law, finance, technology, journalism and the sub-disciplines of national security, law enforcement, and business.
This year the event will explore the nature of analysis and its application in various disciplines, building bridges between analytic practitioners and scholars within those disciplines, and exploring best practices in teaching analytic methodologies.
Intended takeaways for attendees include a deeper and broader appreciation of the value of different analytic methods borrowed as “best practices” from other disciplines, as well as instruction.
Speakers will include The Hon. Tom Ridge, Dennis Dirkmaat, Liam Fahey, Catherine Lotrionte, William McGill, Justine Marut Schober, Mark Williams, Anthony Campbell, Justyna Krajewski, Don McDowell, Chris Pallaris, Randy Pherson, Jim Poole, Barry Zulauf.
For additional information or questions, please contact:
Mr. Robert Heibel, Executive Director, Institute of Intelligence Education at Mercyhurst College at 1 (814) 824-2117 or rheibel@mercyhurst.edu
Mrs. Michelle Henderson, Mercyhurst College, 1 (814) 824-2131 at mhenderson@mercyhurst.edu
Mrs. Heather Tate, Instructional Systems Designer, Mercyhurst College, 1 (814) 824-3121 or at htate@mercyhurst.edu
REGISTRATION: Opens March 1, 2010. FEE: $195 attendee; $75 spouse/guest.
FULL DETAILS and REGISTRATION:
https://www.regonline.com/dungarvan_conference_2010

PLAN NOW FOR THIS UPCOMING SPYCRUISE�....

13 - 20 November 2010 - Ft. Lauderdale, FL - SPYCRUISE to Grand Turks, Turks & Caicos; San Juan, PR; St. Thomas, USVI; and Half Moon Cay, Bahamas - with National Security Speakers Discussing "Current & Future Threats: Policies, Problems and Prescriptions."

This National Security Educational Lecture/Seminar co-sponsored by the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies (CICENTRE) and Henley-Putnam University, being held aboard Holland America's M.S. Eurodam features some top intelligence experts, as follows:
Porter Goss, Former Director, CIA
Gen. Michael Hayden, Former Director of CIA and NSA
Peter Brookes, Heritage Foundation Fellow, Former CIA Operations Officer
Michael Braun, DEA Operations Chief, Retired, Managing Partner, Spectre Group Intl
Dr. Michael Corcoran, President, Henley-Putnam University
Major General Paul E. Vallely, U.S. Army Retired
Clare Lopez, Retired CIA Operations Officer, Ci Centre Professor; VP, Intelligence Summit
SPACE IS LIMITED - Reserve your stateroom now for this EIGHT DAY cruise/conference.
RESERVATIONS: www.DFunTravel.com or call 1-888-670-0008.
Fees are remarkably reasonable for an eight day cruise: $1,199 inside cabin; $1269 Ocean View Cabin; $1449 Verandahs; $1979 Suites. Price includes program, taxes, port charges and gratuities.
Colorful brochure here.

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

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