Section I - INTELLIGENCE HIGHLIGHTS

FBI's Senior Intelligence Officer Details Domestic Terror Strategy. In St. Louis this week to instruct local businesses on how to look out for domestic Islamic terrorists, the FBI's senior intelligence officer says the key to finding a would-be attacker before he strikes is three pronged.

Dr. Chafiq Moummi calls it the "domestic security trinity:" federal and local law enforcement and the Muslim community. Dr. Moummi says Muslims have a unique opportunity to see the early stages of radicalization. "They understand the religion, they understand the tradition of Islam," he explained. "So it's easy for them to pick up if someone in the community is becoming radicalized."

Dr. Moummi says the most easily radicalized Muslims are recent converts and those who have a renewed passion for the religion. So Moummi says federal and local law enforcement have to build a trust with the Muslim community. Dr. Moummi also says that because Muslims are more assimilated into American culture, it is easier for law enforcement to interact with them here, than it is in Europe. 

St. Louis Special Agent in Charge (SAC) Roland Corvington says the local FBI recently met with 20 Imams and will meet with them again soon. "The FBI collectively has a very strong community outreach," Corvington said. "We spend a lot of time engaging various communities for the sole purpose of trying to keep America safe." [Kelly/KMOX/4June2010]

Yemen Holds Security-Risk Australian Woman. A political storm is brewing in Australia over whether the government declaring an Australian woman a national security risk led to her arrest in Yemen.

Shyloh Jayne Giddins, a Muslim convert who has lived with her daughter Ameena, 5, and son Omar, 7, in Yemen since 2006, was interviewed May 14 by Yemen's National Security Bureau in Sanaa.

Two days later she was arrested along with two Bangladeshi women, one of whom has since been deported.

Giddins's children are under house arrest in the family's Sanaa apartment.

Yemeni authorities haven't said what charges Giddins may face or how long she will be detained. But she is suspected of having links to al-Qaida.

An Australian Embassy official in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, traveled to Sanaa to visit Giddins in jail.

During Australian senate committee hearings this week it was learned that the head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, David Irvine, had Giddins's passport canceled April 10 for what were called "national security reasons."

But a spokeswoman for Foreign Affairs Minister Stephen Smith refused to say what those reasons were or whether his department provided information to Yemeni authorities prior to her arrest.

"It seems highly suspicious that the Australian government some eight weeks ago canceled Giddins's passport and then three weeks after that Yemeni security have decided to arrest and detain her," Giddins's Australian lawyer, Stephen Hooper, said.

Abdul Rahman Barman, Giddins's lawyer in Yemen and a member of the human rights group Hood, said too often poor intelligence information is to blame for the wrong people getting arrested in Yemen.

"In light of wrong U.S. intelligence information, people get arrested without any legal justification. Dozens of innocent people are being arrested and accused of working for, or belonging to, al-Qaida," he said.

Hood has demanded that Yemeni authorities immediately release Giddins, who is in Yemen legally. Police have promised to allow a German friend of the mother to take the children into her home, Barman said.

Hood is a non-governmental, not-for-profit organization set up in 1998 by lawyers, people working in the media and some government members of the Yemeni parliament.

Giddins's parents said they were concerned for their daughter and grandchildren. They have been in touch with consular officials, who are lobbying for the return of the children's passports and their return to Australia.

Giddins was born in a small town in New South Wales and moved to Sydney 10 years ago to work as a nanny. She met a man called Mohamed Touma and they married after she converted to Islam.

But she separated from Touma and moved to Yemen with her children and has been teaching English at a Sanaa university. [UPI/4June2010] 

U.S. 'Secret War' Expands Globally as Special Operations Forces Take Larger Role. Beneath its commitment to soft-spoken diplomacy and beyond the combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration has significantly expanded a largely secret U.S. war against al-Qaeda and other radical groups, according to senior military and administration officials.

Special Operations forces have grown both in number and budget, and are deployed in 75 countries, compared with about 60 at the beginning of last year. In addition to units that have spent years in the Philippines and Colombia, teams are operating in Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia.

Commanders are developing plans for increasing the use of such forces in Somalia, where a Special Operations raid last year killed the alleged head of al-Qaeda in East Africa. Plans exist for preemptive or retaliatory strikes in numerous places around the world, meant to be put into action when a plot has been identified, or after an attack linked to a specific group.

The surge in Special Operations deployments, along with intensified CIA drone attacks in western Pakistan, is the other side of the national security doctrine of global engagement and domestic values President Obama released last week.

One advantage of using "secret" forces for such missions is that they rarely discuss their operations in public. For a Democratic president such as Obama, who is criticized from either side of the political spectrum for too much or too little aggression, the unacknowledged CIA drone attacks in Pakistan, along with unilateral U.S. raids in Somalia and joint operations in Yemen, provide politically useful tools.

Obama, one senior military official said, has allowed "things that the previous administration did not."

Special Operations commanders have also become a far more regular presence at the White House than they were under George W. Bush's administration, when most briefings on potential future operations were run through the Pentagon chain of command and were conducted by the defense secretary or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"We have a lot more access," a second military official said. "They are talking publicly much less but they are acting more. They are willing to get aggressive much more quickly."

The White House, he said, is "asking for ideas and plans . . . calling us in and saying, 'Tell me what you can do. Tell me how you do these things.' "

The Special Operations capabilities requested by the White House go beyond unilateral strikes and include the training of local counterterrorism forces and joint operations with them. In Yemen, for example, "we are doing all three," the official said. Officials who spoke about the increased operations were not authorized to discuss them on the record.

The clearest public description of the secret-war aspects of the doctrine came from White House counterterrorism director John O. Brennan. He said last week that the United States "will not merely respond after the fact" of a terrorist attack but will "take the fight to al-Qaeda and its extremist affiliates whether they plot and train in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and beyond."

That rhetoric is not much different than Bush's pledge to "take the battle to the enemy . . . and confront the worst threats before they emerge." The elite Special Operations units, drawn from all four branches of the armed forces, became a frontline counterterrorism weapon for the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. [DeYoung&Jaffe/WashingtonPost/3June2010]

South Korean General Questioned in Spy Case. South Korea's military is investigating a general suspected of leaking secrets to a former spy for Seoul who then sold the information to North Korea, officials and media reports said.

The army general, who wasn't identified, allegedly handed over a military operations plan for coping with emergencies in North Korea drawn up by South Korea and the U.S.

The security breach apparently occurred a few years before the current spike in tensions over North Korea's alleged sinking of a South Korean warship in March which killed 46 sailors. The former spy, who worked for South Korea in the 1990s, has been arrested and accused of passing military secrets to the North between 2005 and 2007.

It said the former spy had served in the military and met the general there, but gave no further details about their relationship.

Officials at the Defense Security Command and the National Intelligence Service confirmed that the general was being investigated in the case. The officials, speaking on customary condition of anonymity, declined to give further details about the probe because it was ongoing.

Officials at Seoul's Central District Prosecutors' Office did not immediately comment.

North Korea denies involvement in the sinking of the Cheonan warship, which has highlighted the South Korean military's need to sharpen its defenses. South Korea plans to hold military drills with the U.S. in the Yellow Sea - off South Korea's west coast - in the middle of this month, followed by anti-submarine drills with the U.S. in either late June or early July, the Defense Ministry said.

The United States is considering dispatching the aircraft carrier USS George Washington to the area where the Cheonan sank, U.S. defense officials have said.

In Geneva this week, North Korean Deputy Ambassador Ri Jang Gon repeated threats that current tensions could easily explode into armed conflict.

"The present situation of the Korean peninsula is so grave that a war may break out any moment," he said at the 65-nation Conference on Disarmament.

North Korea's Foreign Ministry on Friday repeated its demand that North Korean inspectors be allowed to visit Seoul and review the results of a multinational investigation into the Cheonan's sinking.

The ministry also hinted that North could take an unspecified "ultra-hard reaction" if the U.S. and its followers take the matter to the U.N. Security Council, the North's official Korean Central News Agency said.

The ongoing tensions were widely expected to give South Korea's ruling party - which supports a tough policy on North Korea - a boost in local elections Wednesday. But President Lee Myung-bak's party won only six of 16 key mayoral and gubernatorial posts.

North Korea relished the defeat. "The election results are the South Koreans' stern punishment and an iron hammer against the party of Lee Myung-bak's traitors who are running amok," its official Korean Central News Agency said late Thursday. [Kim/WashingtonPost/4June2010]

Ohio Couple Arrested on Terror Conspiracy Charges. A couple were arrested Thursday on charges they conspired to provide thousands of dollars to a Mideast terrorist group, federal authorities said.

Hor Akl and his wife, Amera Akl, were taken into custody after an FBI informant provided them with $200,000 in cash, which they were preparing to hide in a vehicle that was to be shipped to Lebanon, prosecutors said.

The Akls planned to conceal up to $500,000 so the money could be given to Hezbollah on behalf of anonymous donors in the United States, a court complaint said.

The U.S. government lists Hezbollah as a terrorist organization and blames it for numerous attacks on Israel. Hezbollah has been trying to reinvent itself as a more conventional political movement in Lebanon.

The Akls, both 37 years old, face numerous charges, including conspiracy to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization, which carries a maximum sentence of up 15 years in prison and a fine of $500,000 upon conviction.

Telephone messages seeking comment were left Thursday at the office of the public defender assigned to the case and at the home of the Akls, who will remain in custody until a detention hearing Tuesday.

Prosecutors said Hor Akl traveled to Lebanon in March to arrange the delivery of money. He returned to the United States claiming that he had met with Hezbollah officials, the complaint said.

The Akls expected to receive a fee or commission for arranging the transfer of funds, prosecutors said.

"Those who willfully work to fund terror with U.S. dollars must understand that the FBI works even harder to ensure that they fail," said C. Frank Figliuzzi, a special agent in charge of the FBI's Cleveland office.

The Akls are dual citizens of the United States and Lebanon, the complaint said.

Hor Akl works at a Toledo bar with his brother-in-law. He told the FBI informant that his brother-in-law, who's unnamed in the complaint, operated a Lebanon recreation club used frequently by Hezbollah to conduct meetings, prosecutors said.

Authorities have not said whether more charges are expected in the case. [ABCNews/3June2010] 

US Cyber Command Chief Warns of �Remote Sabotage.' The top US cyberwarrior said that Pentagon networks are probed over six million times a day and expressed concern about a rise in "remote sabotage" attacks on computer systems.

General Keith Alexander, head of the newly created US Cyber Command, also said developing a real-time picture of threats to US military networks and the rules to fight back would be among the priorities in his position.

Alexander, who also heads the National Security Agency, the super secret US surveillance agency, said Pentagon systems are "probed by unauthorized users approximately 250,000 times an hour, over six million times a day."

In his first public remarks since assuming command of US Cyber Command two weeks ago, Alexander said the US military "depends on its networks for command and control, communications, intelligence, operations and logistics."

"We at the Department of Defense have more than seven million machines to protect linked in 15,000 networks," he said in a speech to cybersecurity experts and reporters at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"Today our nation's interests are in jeopardy," Alexander said citing "tremendous vulnerabilities" and threats from a "growing array of foreign actors, terrorists, criminal groups and individual hackers."

"Cyberspace has become a critical enabler for all elements of national and military power," Alexander said. "Our data must be protected."

The four-star general said denial of service attacks on Estonia and Georgia in 2007 and 2008 were aimed at temporarily shutting down computer networks but new threats have emerged.

"There are hints that some penetrations are targeting systems for remote sabotage," he said. "The potential for sabotage and destruction is now possible and something we must treat very seriously."

Alexander said the military and the government needed to increase their ability it see what is happening on computer networks in real-time.

"We have no situational awareness, it's very limited," he said. "We do not have a common operating picture for our networks.

"We need real-time situational awareness on our network to see where something bad is happening and take action there at that time," he said. "We must share indications and warning threat data at net speed."

Alexander also that more precise rules of engagement were needed over how to respond to cyberattacks on the United States.

"We have to establish clear rules of engagement that say what we can stop," he said.

"We have to look at it in two different venues - what we're doing in peacetime and in wartime," he said. "Those things that you do in wartime, I think, are going to be different from what you do in peacetime."

A Russian proposal to create a cyberwarfare arms limitation treaty could be "a starting point for international debate" but "at levels above me," he said.

Alexander also said that the NSA, whose warrantless wire-tapping program has been ruled illegal by a US judge, takes civil liberties and privacy "very seriously" and is subject to strict oversight by Congress and the courts.

"We have a lot of lawyers at NSA," he said. "My responsibility as director of NSA is to ensure that what we do comports with the law.

"Every action that we take we have legal reviews of it all the way up or down," Alexander said. "I doesn't mean we won't make a mistake.

"The hard part is we can't go out and tell everybody exactly what we do because we give up capability that may be extremely useful in protecting our country and our allies," he said. [Lefkow/AP/3June2010] 

New 'Operation Condor' Trial Starts in Argentina. Five former intelligence and military officials in Argentina have gone on trial on charges of murdering 65 people.

They are accused of kidnapping, torturing, and killing left-wing activists under the country's military rule between 1976 and 1983.

Human rights groups hope the trial will shed light on Operation Condor, a joint effort among South American military rulers aimed at suppressing opposition.

The five have denied the charges.

They include two former intelligence officers, Honorio Martinez Ruiz and Eduardo Ruffo, former Gen Eduardo Cabanillas, former Col Ruben Visuara, and former military intelligence agent Raul Guglielminetti.

A sixth man, former Vice Cmdr Nestor Guillamondegui, was excused from the trial on health grounds, court officials said.

They said his health would be monitored to determine if he could face trial at a later date.

The men are accused of having run a notorious detention centre in Buenos Aires.

More than 200 people are believed to have been kidnapped and taken to the secret prison, known as Automotores Orletti.

Most of the detained were from Uruguay, but survivors say it also housed prisoners from Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia and Cuba.

Condor was devised in 1975 by military officials from Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay.

Its aim was to silence the opposition by sending teams into other countries to track, monitor and kill dissidents.

A prosecutor said what happened at Automotores Orletti was "calculated and planned and amounted to a death sentence" for the prisoners.

Marcelo Gelman, the son of Argentine poet Juan Gelman, was one of those detained in the clandestine prison in 1976. His body was later found in a cement-filled drum dumped in a river.

His wife, Maria Claudia Garcia, was pregnant when she was abducted. She was taken to Uruguay, where she disappeared.

Their daughter, Macarena Gelman, was raised by a police officer in Uruguay. She says she will testify at the trial, which is expected to last months.  [BBC/2June2010] 

U.S. Backs Talks on Cyber Warfare. The chief of the Pentagon's new cyber-security command endorsed talks with Russia over a proposal to limit military attacks in cyberspace, representing a significant shift in U.S. policy.

The U.S. has for years objected to Russian proposals to establish a kind of arms-control treaty for cyber weapons, arguing that international cooperation should first focus on reducing cyber crime. Russia has been working to marshal support for a United Nations treaty to limit the use of cyber weapons, such as software code that could destroy an enemy's computer systems.

"What Russia's put forward is, perhaps, the starting point for international debate," Gen. Keith Alexander said Thursday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. "It's something that we should, and probably will, carefully consider."

In the past, the U.S. has also frowned on Russian proposals because a treaty wouldn't necessarily prohibit countries from using third parties to conduct cyber warfare. Cyber-security specialists say Russia and China rely on proxy groups to conduct attacks on enemies, as Russia allegedly did in 2008 against Georgia. China and Russia deny such accusations.

The Obama administration has begun to reconsider its position on the issue as it emphasizes engagement with U.S. adversaries across a range of national-security issues.

Administration officials have made low-level overtures to Russian officials in the last couple of months, according to people familiar with the matter. Russian officials also visited the U.S. late last year to meet with State Department, Homeland Security and law-enforcement officials to discuss cyber-security matters.

Gen. Alexander's remarks were the first public comments from a U.S. official indicating a new openness to negotiations. "We do have to establish the lanes of the road" for what governments can and can't do in cyberspace, he said. The administration should take the Russian proposal and use it to develop a counterproposal, he added.

"It shows a major shift in administration thinking and could be interpreted as an overture" to the Russians, said James Lewis, who directed an influential cyber-security report for CSIS.

Gen. Alexander's comments could help tamp down concerns many foreign governments have privately expressed regarding the intentions of the Pentagon's new Cyber Command, Mr. Lewis said. Some fear it will be a mechanism for the U.S. to dominate cyberspace. The U.S. has said the Cyber Command is primarily focused on protecting military networks and conducting military operations in cyberspace.

Gen. Alexander, who also serves as director of the National Security Agency, sought to allay similar concerns about the Cyber Command's impact on domestic privacy.

Cyber Command, if asked, would provide "support" to the Department of Homeland Security to protect networks running the government or key infrastructure, he said. The military also has a strong interest in ensuring the security of some private networks, such as power, because 90% of the military's power is provided by the private sector, he said.

Privacy concerns "are valid," he said, but the public shouldn't be worried about NSA working closely with Cyber Command because NSA officials are trained to follow "robust and rigorous procedures" to protect Americans' privacy.

He acknowledged the need to earn public confidence, noting that he has four daughters who are heavy Internet users, and he wants to protect their privacy, too. "The real key to the issue is: How do we build the confidence that we're doing it right with the American people, Congress and everyone else?" he said. "That's going to be the hard part."

The government too has to work hard to protect its cyber secrets. The government was spurred to improve protections for its military networks, Gen. Alexander said, after a series of breaches of classified systems in 2008. In comments after his speech, he also acknowledged for the first time publicly, that the military's Joint Strike Fighter weapons program had been infiltrated and data had been stolen. The Wall Street Journal reported that breach last year. [Gorman/WallStreetJournal/3June2010]

Wall Street Technology Well Suited to Intelligence Work. In the wake of the credit crunch, public service - once an unlikely option for Wall Streeters - seemed like a good idea. The opportunity was not lost in the intelligence community. Last year, the CIA turned up its recruiting efforts, running a host of Web, print and radio ads. "Economics, finance, and business professionals: If the quest for the bottom line is just not enough for you, the Central Intelligence Agency has a mission like no other," said one recent radio advertisement. "Make a difference in your career and for your nation."

The effort paid off, as thousands of resumes poured in. At the technical level, there is clearly a lot of synergy between Wall Street and the intelligence community.

Consider high-frequency trading. Wall Street firms and the vendors that sell to them have made enormous strides when it comes to processing transaction at mind-boggling speeds. That raw speed is of critical interest to the intelligence community. So we're getting a sort of reverse spillover effect. Government technology advances in the past filtered over to civilian products and services; the best example is the Internet, originally a creation of DARPA. Now high frequency-oriented firms are finding their technology in demand by government agencies. At the same time, firms that were stated to serve the government are branching into Wall Street applications.

In some cases, the same technology powering high-speed trading is also powering super-fast scans of Internet messages. The Wall Street Journal notes that Mercury Computer Systems is one "of the vendors that equips the Air Force's Predator drones with embedded computer systems that power the vehicle's image-taking sensors. The defense-oriented company's computer system crunches real-time data similarly to systems developed by Redline Trading Solutions, a financial-technology firm spun off by former Mercury employees in June 2008." Exegy started in government security and then introduced its trading product in 2007.

StreamBase Systems went the other route. It started with a data-processing platform widely used on Wall Street and then moved into intelligence work. So there's a lot of traffic both ways, it would appear. The more lucrative work at the rank-and-file level, of course, is on Wall Street. To maintain technical talent in some areas, the CIA has actually been forced to allow employees to moonlight on Wall Street. [Kim/FierceFinanceIT/2June2010] 

Crumbs Cost UK Spy His Parole. A Russian arms control researcher serving a 15-year sentence for spying for Britain and the United States has been turned down for parole after prison guards found breadcrumbs on his bedside table.

Igor Sutyagin, who has already spent more than 10 years in jail, was also reprimanded for speaking to his wife on another prisoner's mobile phone and for walking across the prison yard without a guard, despite being given permission.

A court in northern Russia ruled last month that the violation of prison rules was evidence that "he has not mended his ways" and should be kept behind bars.

Sutyagin, who is serving the longest sentence for espionage since the collapse of the Soviet Union, continues to maintain his innocence and has been declared a political prisoner by Amnesty International.

An analyst at a Moscow think tank, Sutyagin, 45, was arrested in 1999 and charged with selling information on Russian nuclear submarines and missile warning systems to a British company.

The FSB, the former KGB, claimed that Alternative Futures, a London-based consultancy, was a front for British and American intelligence. The claim was never proved but Sean Kidd and Nadia Locke, the two Britons who met Sutyagin, disappeared after his arrest.

Sutyagin established that the information he passed to them was entirely drawn from open sources, mainly foreign magazines. He never had access to classified information.

"I'm not guilty," Sutyagin said at his trial in 2004. "My only guilt is that I had contacts with foreigners." He was paid �14,000 by Alternative Futures.

In 2001 Sutyagin's father traveled to London to ask the Blair government for help. He pleaded with officials at the Foreign Office for the prime minister to take up the case with Vladimir Putin, then Russia's president. "I turned to Britain because the FSB claimed that's where the foreign intelligence officers my son was supposed to have spied for were based," said Sutyagin. "Sadly, nothing came of it." [Franchetti/TimesOnline/6June2010]

Afghan Interior Minister, Spy Chief Quit in Wake of Attacks. Afghanistan's spy chief and interior minister resigned, taking responsibility for failing to prevent an attack on a government conference held in Kabul last week.

President Hamid Karzai said in a statement that Interior Minster Hanif Atmar and General Director for National Security Amrullah Saleh provided explanations for the security breach that were "not satisfactory."

Both men were considered close to the U.S., and had earned a reputation for being reformists in a government widely regarded as ineffectual. Saleh has a close relationship with the CIA that dates back to Afghanistan's civil war in the 1990s.

The resignations come at a delicate time. Amid a spike in violence, the U.S. is deploying 30,000 new troops to bolster the international military presence in Afghanistan. One of the principal goals of the surge is to better train and equip the country's fledgling police forces, which fall under the Ministry of Interior.

Karzai's government, meanwhile, is attempting to lay the groundwork for an armistice with the Taliban and other armed groups. Last week's reconciliation conference, known as a "peace jirga," was marred by a series of attacks during Karzai's opening remarks.

The Taliban took responsibility for the rocket attacks and gunfight that unfolded Tuesday morning near the tent where 1,600 delegates from around the country met. The delegates, who were appointed by Karzai's government, backed the president's peace plan, but failed to come up with a detailed strategy to negotiate a truce.

Karzai said he appointed Deputy Interior Minister Munir Mangal as interim minister and Ibrahim Spinzada, an engineer, as the new spy chief. [Londono/WashingtonPost/6June2010] 

Quiet Headley Frustrates NIA Team in the US. So, David Coleman Headley is not talking. Sources say the Indian interrogation team in Chicago is "feeling frustrated" in the two days that it has questioned the man convicted for providing the key logistical inputs for the Mumbai carnage of November 26, 2008.

According to sources, Headley's repeated response to questions fielded by the three-member National Investigation Agency (NIA) team is: "Following the advice of my lawyer, I am invoking, with respect, my right to the Fifth Amendment and say no further in this matter." This amendment, part of the original Bill of Rights, guarantees that no person in a criminal case, including non-citizens, can be compelled to be a witness against themselves.

On March 18, 2010, Headley was spared the death penalty in exchange for pleading guilty to 12 counts of terror charges, including plotting the 26/11 Mumbai attacks at the behest of Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Tayyeba (LeT) and conspiring to target a Danish newspaper. The plea agreement between Headley and the US Attorney for Northern District of Illinois, Patrick Fitzgerald, carefully outlined his rights to get a fair sentence, in exchange for his cooperation with the US officials, as well as to "fully and truthfully testify in any foreign judicial proceedings held in the US by way of deposition, videoconferencing or letters rogatory." Indeed, Headley agreed to have his sentencing postponed till after the cooperation had concluded.

Sources in New Delhi said there was never any chance that Headley would cooperate with India. According to them, the unexplained aspects of the case and the plea bargain that got Headley off the hook can all be attributed to his relationship with the US Drug Enforcement Administration's (DEA) Special Operations Division.

The DEA is a major department of the US government, with extensive powers of arrest and detention and maintains its own intelligence capabilities, though it cooperates extensively with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency.

The SOD-Headley relationship began in 1988 when a German customs agent at Frankfurt asked a young Pakistani-American, Daood Gilani, to step aside and be searched while transiting to Pakistan. The customs agent found 2-kg of heroin under a false bottom. The DEA agent, Derek Maltz, who was stationed there was called in and he took the decision to recruit Headley.

Over the next few years, though he was in and out of jail and drug rehabilitation, Headley was in touch with Agent Maltz and the DEA. In 2002, in one of his numerous trips to Pakistan he came in touch with the LeT and according to his interrogation reports, he attended LeT camps in February and August 2002 and thrice in 2003. In February 2006, he changed his name from Daood Gilani to Headley.

The DEA claims that the relationship ended in 2003. But according to what the FBI has told their Indian counterparts, their relationship with Headley continued right up to March 2008, when he was already neck-deep in the Mumbai conspiracy.

The FBI began to panic when in 2008-09, Headley made two trips to North Waziristan and established contacts with Ilyas Kashmiri, al Qaeda's point man there. He was put up to this by Abdur Rehman Hashim Syed, a colonel in the Pakistan Army who is either serving or retired, or claims to be so.

The al Qaeda's aim was to use Headley to organize the attack on Jyllands Posten newspaper offices in Denmark for their alleged crime of publishing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

After he was arrested in October 2009, Headley threatened to reveal his links with the DEA and this is the reason why the entire US system from the Attorney General Eric Holder downwards have worked to sweep all the muck under the carpet. [IndiaToday/6June2010]

Silver Spring Resident Sentenced for Leaking FBI Secret. Those who know Shamai Leibowitz of Silver Spring, Md. describe him as a doting father, enchanting Torah reader and, above all, a trusted member of the community.

But a recently revealed other side to Leibowitz's life has some reacting with disbelief and shock.

Last week, Leibowitz, 39, the Shabbat Torah reader at Har Tzeon-Agudath Achim, a Conservative synagogue in Silver Spring, was sentenced to 20 months in prison for leaking classified government documents to a blogger last year while serving as a linguist for the FBI.

The episode has sent the family into a Kafkaesque nightmare full of legal, financial and familial hardships, according to Leibowitz's wife, Hagit, who penned a missive last month to U.S. District Judge Alexander Williams Jr., asking for a lenient jail sentence.

"There are no words to describe the trials and tribulations that I went through in the past year," wrote the Judaics and Hebrew teacher at the Hebrew Day Institute in Rockville. "Since the investigation began, my life has been turned upside down and my family has been in constant upheaval."

While most of those contacted were reticent to speak publicly, citing the sensitive nature of the case, the synagogue's rabbi, Reuben Landman, said he was surprised by how the court proceedings played out.

Details surrounding the case are murky, as federal prosecutors have refused to reveal exactly what information was contained in the leaked documents or the identity of the blogger who received them.

The judge, in a peculiar twist, revealed in court last week that even he hadn't been privy to many details, including the nature of the disclosed information and its national security impact.

"The court is in the dark," Williams, who declined comment for this article, said at the sentencing hearing last week, according to an article by Politico. "I'm not a part and parcel of the intricacies of [the alleged national security threat] ... I don't know what was divulged, other than some documents."

Observers say they find this admission slightly odd, if not flat-out disturbing.

Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld of the Orthodox Ohev Shalom-The National Synagogue in Washington described Leibowitz, a native Israeli who moved to the area in 2004, as "a person of deep integrity."

Herzfeld went on to lament the manner in which both the prosecution and court handled the case.

"I don't think we have anywhere near the whole story in this case," Herzfeld said, pointing to what he sees as a "troubling trend" in the way Jews have been treated by the American justice system. "Just because [Leibowitz] pled guilty doesn't mean there's nothing to be concerned about in this matter."

Others expressed concern about whether the punishment fits the crime.

According to Politico, Leibowitz's 20-month sentence is among the harshest ever doled out to a government employee accused of leaking classified information to a reporter.

"I'm shocked," said Rabbi Herzel Kranz of the Orthodox Silver Spring Jewish Center, explaining that the news reports he has read leave "very serious questions to be asked."

"This is not the America I know," Kranz said. "How can you be sentenced for a crime when the judge doesn't know what the crime is?"

In January, Landman wrote to Assistant U.S. Attorney Steven Dunne, a prosecutor in the case, to ask for compassion. He argued that Leibowitz already has suffered much "public humiliation" and that his family has been "ruined financially" by soaring legal fees.

The rabbi's plea as well as those of some 10 community members who wrote the court on Leibowitz's behalf seem to have helped somewhat, as Williams decided to defer Leibowitz's sentence for slightly more than 60 days so that the family can prepare for his departure, according to Landman. He noted that both the judge and government decided to waive all financial penalties that could have been leveled in the case.

Members of Leibowitz's synagogue and the wider Jewish community have on several occasions provided the Leibowitz family with financial assistance for mounting legal bills. In addition, the shul has allowed the family temporarily to live free of charge in a shul-owned guest house located near the synagogue, according to a source familiar with the synagogue's inner workings.

For his part, Leibowitz is remaining mum about the genesis of his crimes, according to Landman, who described his congregant as "a very caring person, [and] a person of conscience."

Leibowitz did not respond to a request for comment last week, but he did express regret for his actions in a May 21 letter to the judge. He also sought to explain why he misguidedly chose to become a media informant.

Leibowitz's lawyer, Robert Bonsib, also declined to elaborate on the case, saying, "It's not appropriate to comment except for what was said in open court."

"While working at the FBI, I came across information that troubled me very much and caused me to make a bad decision," Leibowitz wrote. "I allowed my idealism and misguided patriotism to get ahead of me... I made a mistake but only because I believed it was in the best interests of the American people."

One reason the case may have garnered so much attention, Landman noted, is likely because Leibowitz comes from a relatively famous family. His grandfather, Yeshayahu, was an Israeli philosopher and scientist known mostly for his controversial views on halachah, Jewish law, and politics. The family's prominence may be "one of the factors that played a role in the government's decision" to pursue the case against Leibowitz, Landman said, explaining that a high-profile case can act as a deterrent to other would-be leakers.

No stranger to expressing himself publicly, Leibowitz has maintained a personal blog, "Pursuing Justice," since 2007. On it, he riffs freely about politics, the law, religion and other topics.

In one posting from May 25, Leibowitz writes about the legal protections afforded to federal whistleblowers.

The Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998 "is critical to preventing abuses of power in the intelligence community and upholding the rules of law," wrote Leibowitz, who, among other posts, formerly served as a fellow for the New Israel Fund. "Because intelligence agencies operate in the dark and their activities are classified, there is danger that they will abuse the broad powers given to them and violate the constitution."

Leibowitz also raised some eyebrows in 2002, when he compared convicted Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti to Moses; Leibowitz was a member of Barghouti's defense team.

"According to some lawyers, he should be called a terrorist, but according to Exodus, he is a freedom fighter," Leibowitz said, according to an October 2002 report by The New York Times.

Sources indicate that his participation in that case caused some in the local Orthodox community to shun him.

His own synagogue, however, seems to have nothing but praise and support for the family.

"There's a lot of sympathy for the family," said J. Merle Shulman, an 80-year-old congregant who characterized the whole situation as "absolutely shocking." [JewishTimes/5June2010] 

Obama Names Ex-General Clapper As New Spy Chief. President Barack Obama named retired air force general and veteran intelligence expert James Clapper as his new spy chief in a drive to improve troubled US intelligence gathering.

Clapper was nominated to replace retired navy admiral Dennis Blair as director of national intelligence. Blair quit last month after a string of security lapses including the failure to detect the Christmas Day airline bomb plot.

"With four decades of service to America, Jim is one of our nation's most experienced and most respected intelligence professionals," Obama said as he announced the nomination in the White House Rose Garden.

He described Clapper as "eminently qualified" and someone who also "understands the importance of working with our partners in Congress."

Obama urged lawmakers in the US Senate to swiftly approve Clapper's nomination, noting he had previously been confirmed to senior positions on four previous occasions.

"Given the importance of this position, the urgent threats to our nation and Jim's unique experience, I urge the Senate to do so again and as swiftly as possible," he said.

"This nomination can't fall victim to the usual Washington politics."

At the ceremony, Clapper said that he was "humbled, honored, and daunted by the magnitude of the responsibilities of the position of DNI."

The director of national intelligence (DNI) oversees the 16 agencies that make up the US intelligence community, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA).

The post was introduced after September 11, 2001 amid deep concern over the systemic lapses ahead of the attacks on the United States, and then the botched intelligence over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Clapper is currently undersecretary of defense for intelligence - the top intelligence post at the Pentagon - as well as the director of defense intelligence, which reports directly to the DNI.

One defense official said Clapper enjoys strong backing from Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Clapper has been nicknamed "the Godfather of HUMINT" - using human contacts for gathering intelligence in addition to high-tech methods like satellite imagery or intercepting communications.

If confirmed, he would become the fourth director of national intelligence since the cabinet-level position's creation five years ago.

The defense official said the administration encountered some resistance initially in Congress over the nomination but he believes key lawmakers have come around in support.

But senior lawmakers expressed their concern over the nomination.

On Friday, as news of the impending announcement leaked, Senator Kit Bond, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement that he would not back Clapper.

"He lacks the necessary clout with the president, has proven to be less than forthcoming with Congress, and has recently blocked our efforts to empower the DNI, which is why at this time I'm not inclined to support him," he said.

House intelligence committee ranking minority member Pete Hoekstra said in a statement that he would oppose the nomination, in part because Clapper "does not have the clout or independence to be the voice that provides an alternative to the Obama administration's prosecute after-the-fact approach to terror."

According to Hoekstra, relations between the White House and Congress "on national security matters have fallen to new lows," and he said that Clapper "has blocked my communications with elements of the intelligence community, and he has been evasive and slow to respond to questions and letters from members of the committee."

But Senator Joe Lieberman, an independent who co-authored legislation in 2004 to create the position, applauded Obama's choice, noting Clapper's "vast experience in the intelligence community," his "proven record as an administrator" and someone who "has always been a proponent of a strong DNI."

Clapper retired from the US Air Force in 1995 after a 32-year career, and spent many of the following years working for private defense contractors and teaching.

But he has also held key intelligence posts, including from 2001 to 2006 as the first civilian head of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which collects and analyzes data from commercial and government satellites or aircraft.

Outgoing retired admiral Blair and other intelligence agencies were fiercely criticized for failing to connect information about a Nigerian man suspected of bringing an explosive device in his underwear onto a US-bound passenger jet on Christmas Day, as well as for other intelligence failures over planned attacks on New York City. [Mathes/AP/5June2010]

Trial for Cuban Militant Set for Jan. 11. A federal judge has scheduled a January trial for anti-Castro Cuban militant Luis Posada Carriles.

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone ordered a Jan. 11 start for Posada's trial on perjury, obstruction and naturalization fraud - charges stemming from information he gave the government in his immigration proceedings.

Posada is a former CIA operative linked to a 1976 bombing that killed 73 people aboard a passenger aircraft.

He was indicted last year on charges that he lied in 2005 to the Department of Homeland Security about his involvement in a series of 1997 bombings in Cuban tourist areas. One man died in those attacks.

Posada was previously scheduled to go to trial on the immigration-related charges in March, but the trial was postponed and related court records were sealed. The judge said Wednesday that she wants no further delays.

Posada's legal troubles are likely to continue after the U.S. trial.

Venezuela has sought his extradition in connection with the airliner bombing, and Panama wants him extradited to face charges that he plotted to kill Fidel Castro in 2000 during a visit to Panama.

Posada has denied the allegations. [ElPasoTimes/4June2010] 

Section II - CONTEXT & PRECEDENCE

The 'Top Secret' Identity of Gayle Fallon. She's described as a no-nonsense negotiator representing the largest teachers union in the state. But before being an advocate for teachers, Gayle Fallon had another identity, a secret identity.

Fallon is known as a fighter for teachers. As president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, she's used to giving an earful to the HISD superintendent and board of trustees.

But over 40 years ago, Fallon was fighting a different battle.

"When I worked there, we were not allowed to tell people who we worked for," Fallon said.

Fallon worked as a code breaker for the National Security Administration. With a top secret classification, Fallon translated and broke coded communications captured during the Vietnam War, a process, that in 1966, meant lives were at risk every minute it took to break the enemy code.

"Every one of us had an experience when we walked away from one - and then came back and translated it and missed the attack," Fallon said, "And at that point, you sit there and go, oh my God, there are people that died because I took an extra half hour."

A haunting image, Fallon says, that took decades to reconcile.

"It took a long time before I could go to the wall, because I didn't know if I was responsible for any names on it," she said.

Her incredible journey started in the summer of love, while students were protesting in the street. Fallon was a newlywed and a student at American University when she was recruited by the NSA. A crumpled certificate shows she earned 'Basic Vietnamese Reading,' an accomplishment that wasn't her idea.

"They came up with the idea of language school, and I pointed out my language aptitudes are not great, and they pointed out they didn't care," Fallon said.

She says she sat in class eight hours a day for six months and learned Vietnamese. Meanwhile, the NSA kept close tabs on who she socialized with, as well as other aspects of her life.

"They asked if my sex life was satisfactory," Fallon said and laughed. "I said, 'Yeah, I'd been married for a year. It's fine. We're still getting along.'"

But it was her top secret job that also bothered her. Fallon did not support the government's war effort and troop escalation. She quit after two years.

Fallon, like so many young people of the day, expressed her feelings by writing songs.

Today, she's a devoted grandmother and dog lover. She's also learned to deal with lingering guilt from her days as a code breaker.

"You can only sit there and balance it with the lives you saved, because when we could predict an attack, we saved a lot of lives," she said.

Times and technology have changed since the 60s. Much of the work Fallon did as a code breaker is done now with computers. And there's still a lot from those days she still can't talk about because the information may be classified. [ABC/4June2010]

CIA Pilot's Missions Kept Secret Until 1991. Ben Van Etten worked for Air America, the CIA's secret civilian airline that operated from 1950 to 1975 in Southeast Asia.

Had Ben Van Etten's helicopter been filled with a different cargo, the story might not have turned out well.

But the day in 1970 he and another Air America employee, flight mechanic Manu Latloi, ran out of fuel over Burma, their H-34 was packed with 1,200 pounds of canned meat.

"I don't think they knew what to do with us," said Van Etten, a Wilmington resident.

Air America was the CIA's secret civilian airline that operated from 1950 to 1975 in Southeast Asia. The airline also worked for clients including USAID to help refugees and the State Department's Requirements Office which supported the Laotian army with logistics.

Pilots' jobs included transporting diplomats in and around Vietnam, delivering food and other supplies to isolated villages and, if they happened to be in the area, rescuing U.S. military personnel who were shot down or crashed in the dense jungle.

At first, Van Etten's captors seemed very interested in the two Uzi sub-machine guns kept in the helicopter. He told them that the guns were for survival situations in case of crashing.

Latloi could not speak English well, though, and he told them they were "to kill rabbits."

"Of course, they made a big deal of it, 'Oh, well you mean Americans and Thais kill rabbits with machine guns,' " Van Etten said.

Burmese army soldiers took the Uzis, emptied their magazines of bullets and lined the 60 rounds up on a table like dominos. Then they had Van Etten and Latloi pose in front of the set up for a photograph. The Burmese kept them for about two weeks, interrogating Van Etten, but treating him and Latloi well. After that, a couple barrels of fuel were brought in and they were released.

Stories like these, once kept quiet by an unspoken, unwritten rule, will be passed along freely during the Living History Forum segment of an Air America Association reunion. The event is open to the public and will be held at 1:30 p.m. Saturday at the Hilton North Raleigh Hotel, 3415 Wake Forest Road in Raleigh.

"It was interesting flying. It was exciting. We worked in Laos where the weather was always bad, we had very few (navigational) aids, a lot of enemy anti-aircraft, of course. One of our jobs was to go along the Ho Chi Minh Trail and try to prevent what we could, by using the Laotian army and CIA case projects to try to stop that flow on the Ho Chi Minh Trail," he said. "And we did for awhile. For the dollars that were spent it was probably well worth it during those Vietnam years."

Later it would be revealed that Air America lost about 260 people in accidents and fighting situations.

Since 1991, when the U.S. government decided to officially recognize their service, these civilian pilots have been free to talk about their experiences. Because they were not officially in the military, they were not permitted to be recognized on the Vietnam War Memorial wall. So they formed their own memorial at the University of Texas at Dallas in Richardson.

And some, like Van Etten, have begun to write down their life stories for a public that often does not know they even existed. "We were not supposed to talk about how we got paid, for one thing. We got special money for rescues and stuff, and that was supposed to be kept secret," he said. "Or if it was a special mission we couldn't talk about that. But other than that, it was probably just a tacit agreement that we would not talk." [Hotz/StarNews/3June2010] 

Counter-Terror Adviser John Brennan: A Forceful Voice on Obama's Security Team. When President Obama wanted an investigation into the intelligence failures that led to the attempted airline attack on Christmas Day, he turned to the man who has emerged as one of his most trusted advisers: John O. Brennan.

Within two weeks, Brennan had produced a sharply written report that caught other intelligence heads by surprise - and caused an uproar in some quarters for its harsh assessment of intelligence agencies' performance. Moreover, Brennan showed the final draft to his colleagues just hours before it was to be made public, a move that his critics said was an example of his tendency to exert tight control.

Eventually, one of the casualties of the report would be Adm. Dennis C. Blair, who was forced out as director of national intelligence last month. But the report and its aftermath also demonstrated the skillful maneuvering of Brennan, who after being forced to withdraw from consideration for CIA director in 2008 has transformed his role into that of the president's closest intelligence adviser.

His dominance complicated efforts to find a new director of intelligence: Who would want the job if Brennan is already doing it?

The answer, Obama said Saturday, is retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper Jr., whose nomination he announced in a Rose Garden appearance. Obama said Clapper "possesses a quality that I value in all my advisers: a willingness to tell leaders what we need to know even if it's not what we want to hear."

If confirmed, Clapper faces a series of substantial tests. He will have to strengthen an agency whose mission and authority have been called into question; win the confidence of lawmakers skeptical of another intelligence chief with a military background; and, perhaps most important, develop a strong relationship with one of Obama's top lieutenants, Brennan.

For all the near-misses on his watch, including the failed bombing of Times Square, Brennan has grown only more powerful within the White House, according to numerous officials. His allies - and there are many - say he is abundantly competent with a reassuring style. Critics - many of them close to Blair - say Brennan's 25-year career at the CIA has made him too sympathetic to the agency, skewing the new balance that was supposed to emerge with the intelligence reforms that followed the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Nearly all agree, though, that Brennan has built a high-voltage security hub in the White House, one that far outmuscles that of his predecessors. From a windowless, lower-level West Wing suite that he shares with Denis R. McDonough, the chief of staff to the National Security Council, Brennan has frequent access to the president.

"Brennan is really doing the job of the DNI," one senior intelligence official said.

Brennan, 55, spent most of his career at the CIA. He speaks Arabic and once served as CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia.

But he is as comfortable among politicians and agency heads as he is in the intelligence world. For several years, he was principal briefer to President Bill Clinton. He also served as a senior aide to then-CIA Director George J. Tenet, putting him at the highest rungs of the agency.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, he was tapped to create a new counterterrorism center outside the CIA, a precursor to the National Counterterrorism Center, or NCTC. He earned Obama's trust during the 2008 presidential campaign as an adviser on security policy and terrorism. But after being considered to lead the CIA during the transition, he was forced to withdraw after liberals objected that he had acquiesced to the CIA's harsh interrogation policies during the Bush administration.

Brennan, stung by the accusations and insistent they were untrue, resolved to serve the Obama administration, anyway. His performance in an unconfirmed role over the past year and a half impressed Obama further still, making Brennan an "invaluable go-to person," in the words of one senior official who has not always agreed with him.

Administration officials reject suggestions that Brennan has become a de facto DNI, nothing that he does not perform the job's core function, managing the broader intelligence community. But they acknowledge that Brennan, along with McDonough and others, have kept a tight rein on the administration's message, barring Blair, CIA Director Leon Panetta and other top officials from meeting with reporters or appearing on television news shows, even when their agencies are in the headlines.

White House officials said they simply do not believe that intelligence chiefs should be put in the position of having to answer policy questions in public.

Several national security officials praised Brennan for running a tight intelligence ship without strangling the agencies. David Kris, assistant attorney general for national security, said the Justice Department does "not feel controlled or micromanaged." He acknowledged only one exception: When the White House assumed jurisdiction in the decision over where to try the self-declared plotter of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

"I think the White House generally and Brennan in particular have been very respectful of the law enforcement prerogatives the A.G. enjoys," Kris said.

After a young Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to down an airliner before landing in Detroit, Brennan ran the moment-by-moment coordination for a White House that had never before faced such a security crisis. With much of the administration away on vacation, he filled the vacuum, officials said. And when the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter, later came under fire for going on a ski trip instead of staying in Washington, Brennan took the blame, saying he had told him to do so.

Obama soon directed Brennan to conduct an internal review of the intelligence breakdowns leading up to the unsuccessful attack.

When the report was released to the public Jan. 7, officials said, heads of various agencies - especially the office of the DNI, the NCTC, CIA and State - were furious that they were being blamed for failing to connect pieces of intelligence about Abdulmutallab, officials said. One U.S. intelligence official said that Obama's announcement of the findings had to be delayed two times that afternoon as Blair and other top intelligence officials raised objections and pointed to what they said were mistakes in the report.

Executives "got it at 11 a.m.," the official said. "It was all a surprise. Not only was it a stinging rebuke, but it had factual errors in it."

At least one senior intelligence official lauded Brennan for producing a review that was "extraordinarily candid," even if it did leave Cabinet members feeling "very defensive, very challenged about the way that they did their jobs."

"Everybody wanted to make sure their ox wasn't gored, and to some extent, everybody's ox was gored," the official said. "That's a balance. You want to have a real report? Or you want everybody to be happy?"

Senior White House advisers acknowledged that they fielded vociferous complaints, especially from Leiter and Blair. But they defended the decision to exclude the intelligence officials from the internal probe and said it had little bearing on Blair's role as DNI, which by then was already in jeopardy. Obama had requested a review that was "done independently and objectively," one official said.

"The president didn't say, 'Dear executive branch, dear [counterterrorism] community, do a review, an assessment of your work,' " one senior White House official said.

In any case, officials note, the report was largely validated last month by a similarly harsh review by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. [Kornblut&Miller/WashingtonPost/5June2010] 

Gates Praises Clapper, Says Top Military Intel Chief Can Work With Agencies, Congress. Defense Secretary Robert Gates praised the selection of Gen. Jim Clapper to become the next director of national intelligence, telling reporters that the one man he chose to bring with him to the Pentagon is "the consummate intelligence professional."

Clapper "has the respect of virtually everybody in the community," Gates said aboard a flight from Singapore to Azerbaijan. Gates said he has known Clapper for 20 years and he has all the qualities required to do the job well.

"What is really key for success in leading the intelligence community and for the DNI, in my view, is not only long experience and familiarity with the intelligence world, but the temperament to have the kind of constructive, positive chemistry with the other leaders of the intelligence community. And General Clapper has that kind of chemistry, has had it all along," Gates said.

President Obama nominated Clapper on Saturday for the post responsible for oversight of 16 intelligence agencies that many have criticized as too unwieldy and large for one person to undertake. Adm. Dennis Blair resigned from the job last month, taking the fall for several intelligence failures that led to the failed Christmas Day and Times Square bombings.

But several Washington insiders said Blair's departure also represented a failure to heal scars from conflicts with CIA Director Leon Panetta, who comes from a political background and was considered better able to navigate Washington. Blair was reportedly also disappointed with the lack of backing from the White House on several issues.

Some lawmakers - like Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein and ranking minority member Kit Bond - say they prefer a DNI who does not come from a military background, but has some clout in Washington.

CIA Director Leon E. Panetta on Saturday praised the selection of Clapper.

"Jim Clapper has directed two intelligence agencies and has led the Pentagon's intelligence efforts. Few people have more intelligence experience than Jim Clapper. The men and women of the CIA look forward to working closely with him in his new role to strengthen America's national security," he said in a statement.

Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., also said that Clapper is not forthcoming enough and doesn't believe Congress should have an oversight role for intelligence.

In 2004, when the position was created, Gates was offered the job but turned it down, and wrote an editorial criticizing its creation.

But on Sunday, he said lawmakers on the Armed Services committees have never complained about Clapper's "forthcomingness," and the general "has a strong, long record not only of adherence to congressional oversight but support of it and enthusiastic cooperation." [FoxNews/6June2010] 

Section III - COMMENTARY

Where Are the Gitmo Goatherds?, by Marc A. Thiessen. For years the left has spun the myth that hundreds of Guantanamo detainees are really innocent goatherds and dirt farmers wrongly swept up in the war on terror. In an interview last year, Admiral A.T. Church III - the former Navy inspector general who investigated detainee treatment at Guantanamo - told me this charge was "bull crap." As Church put it, "There may have been a couple of those, but most of these guys would slit your throat in a second. Most of them are very dangerous guys."

Now an official investigation conducted by the Obama administration - and unanimously approved by departments of Defense, State, Justice and Homeland Security, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence - has concluded that Church was right.

On Friday, while most Americans headed to the beach, the Obama administration unceremoniously released the Final Report of its Guantanamo Review Task Force. The task force found that of the 240 detainees at Guantanamo when Obama took office, roughly 10 percent "played a direct role in plotting, executing, or facilitating" terrorist attacks against U.S. targets. Another 20 percent had "significant organizational roles within al-Qaeda or associated terrorist groups" including "individuals responsible for overseeing or providing logistical support to al-Qaeda's training operations in Afghanistan; facilitators who helped move money and personnel for al-Qaeda . . . and well trained operatives who were being groomed by al-Qaeda leaders for future terrorist operations." Another nearly 10 percent "occupied significant positions within the Taliban regime" or insurgent networks "implicated in attacks on Coalition forces." About 55 percent were rank and file "foreign fighters with varying degrees of connection to al-Qaeda , but who lacked a significant leadership or other specialized role." Only 5 percent did not "fit into any of the above categories."

In other words, 95 percent of those held at Guantanamo are confirmed terrorists.

Amazingly, the press played the report as a vindication for the Obama administration. The headline in Saturday's Washington Post read: "Most detainees low-level fighters." Well, if that was the real news, why wasn't the Obama administration trumpeting the results from the rooftops? Why did they leak the report on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend, when the White House typically tries to bury bad news?

Because the report is bad news for the Obama administration and its allies on the left.

For one thing, it means Liz Cheney was right - the folks she dubbed as al-Qaeda lawyers really are al-Qaeda lawyers. The task force "assembled large volumes of information from across the government . . . [and] examined this information critically" - even accepting "written submissions made on behalf of individual detainees by their counsel or other representatives." After an exhaustive review, the Obama administration determined that 95 percent of the al-Qaeda bar's clients are in fact terrorist leaders, operatives or fighters.

No detainees were ordered released. Forty-eight were ordered to be held indefinitely without trial under the laws of war, 36 to stand trial and 126 were approved for transfer to a third country. But the task force cautioned "a decision to approve a detainee for transfer does not reflect a decision that the detainee poses no threat or no risk of recidivism." It simply means the "threat posed by the detainee can be sufficiently mitigated through . . . security measures in the receiving country."

A detainee does not have to be a terrorist mastermind to be dangerous. One low-level detainee released in 2007, Hafizullah Shahbaz Khail, claimed he had no military training and was a supporter of Afghan president Hamid Karzai. Paul Rester, director of the Joint Intelligence Group at Guantanamo, told me that "after his transfer . . . [Hafizullah ] carried out an attack against U.S. forces during which two soldiers were killed and four wounded . . . he's now sitting back in Bagram, Afghanistan, today, having been recaptured." Rester said an intelligence officer in Afghanistan e-mailed back to Guantanamo after [Hafizullah's] capture to say, "Thanks a bunch for letting him go; he's killing our guys."

There are dozens of similar examples. According to Obama counterterrorism advisor John Brennan, the recidivism rate for Guantanamo detainees is now 20 percent. One out of five go back to jihad.

The task force's report was finished in January, but the White House knew that releasing it as the president's deadline to close Guantanamo came and went would have been a public relations disaster. Now the White House has turned it into a public relations trifecta: It kept the findings secret for nearly four months; placed them in the Saturday papers over Memorial Day weekend; and spun the story as a vindication of their position on Guantanamo.

The press may be buying the spin, but Congress is not. Last week, the Senate Armed Services Committee voted to bar construction of the military detention center in Thomson, Ill., where the Obama administration wants to transfer many Guantanamo detainees. The House Armed Services Committee has approved a similar restriction. The killers held at Guantanamo are not coming stateside anytime soon. And if the conclusions of the Obama administration's Guantanamo task force are to be believed, that is good news for America. [Thiessen/AEI/6June2010] 

A Three Pronged Approach to Confront Afghanistan's Corruption, by Cheryl Benard and Elvira Loredo. President Karzai's Washington visit last month was basically a "be-nice-to-Karzai summit."

After a period of harsh and direct US criticism this past fall, the air is cleared, but issues remain. Corruption in particular - hardly touched upon during the visit - threatens to imperil success in Afghanistan even if the military and security challenges are mastered.

Transparency International ranks Afghanistan as the second most corrupt country in the world, after Somalia. A study from the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime reports that corruption is the second-largest contributor to the country's gross domestic product. Clearly, corruption is Afghanistan's Achilles' heel.

A few weeks ago, RAND hosted a gathering of the Afghan government's director general for the High Office of Oversight and Anti-Corruption, civil society activists, investigative journalists, parliamentarians, educators, and bloggers in Kabul to discuss Afghanistan's future.

While the participants generated a depressing list of the myriad ways corruption permeates daily life, we also found many bright spots - groups and individuals resisting the insidious spread of corruption - and together developed ideas on how to fight corruption more effectively.

As dramatic and disturbing as the statistics are, they can make it seem like corruption is just a regrettable and inevitable fact of life. What they don't convey is just how difficult it makes the daily reality for the Afghan people. Citizens have to bribe a cascade of officials before they can pay their electricity bill or even taxes. Schoolchildren often need to bribe their teachers to obtain a report card. One man related how a cleric had demanded a bribe to convert his Christian fianc�e to Islam.

Corruption has gone beyond what is normal or tolerable in Afghanistan. In previous generations, officials were known to be corrupt, but they were ostracized for it. Now it is seen as an acceptable and normal way to get ahead.

Even some economists argue that corruption can be a lubricant, greasing the wheels where salaries are low and idealism is tepid. Maybe. But in Afghanistan, corruption impedes sustainable economic development, depletes donor resources, and plays to the one perceived strength of the Taliban - their moral righteousness.

Discussions of corruption in Afghanistan tend to focus on addressing it at the top - to set an example, and because this is where large amounts of money are siphoned off. There is no doubt that Afghan elites and leadership must be held accountable; and sure, putting one or two big name malefactors on trial and sentencing them would send a message. But that effort should not mean putting on hold any effort to clean things up at the middle and lower levels. If citizens could open and run their businesses and manage their daily affairs without being extorted by police, bureaucrats, and officials, life would improve and confidence in the government would increase.

Confronting mid-level corruption requires three areas of focus: technical, legal, and cultural.

1. Technical
Technical solutions, such as electronic payments, cut out the middleman and reduce opportunities for extortion. Technology could also allow public servants to be monitored, for example, by tracking the number of cases they can process and allowing an incentive system to replace bribes as a source of additional income.

2. Legal
Legal means are often the most difficult to develop and enforce. The media, as one of the better developed institutions in Afghanistan, could help by cooperating with the High Commission to expose corrupt bureaucrats.
The Afghan parliament has independently set up a "Complaints Office." While it is now just a shabby little room with a paper sign on the door, it is still open for citizen business every day, and the staff make an effort to follow up on reports of wrongdoing. With a little guidance, and perhaps also coordination with the media and the High Commission, this office could become significantly more effective.

3. Cultural
Finally, Afghans need to regain their moral footing. Other countries have shown great success when society simply begins to reject the attitude that it is okay to extort money for services to which the public is entitled. Corrupt individuals need to be shamed, perhaps patterning after India's "Zero Rupee" campaign, where corrupt officials received "payment" with specially printed bills that resembled the actual currency - but had a denomination of zero.

While we may not soon see high Afghan officials brought to justice on charges of corruption, these three areas of focus could ease the tyranny of corruption on the daily lives of Afghans and rebuild the cultural underpinnings needed for a next and better generation of Afghan leaders and public servants. [Cheryl Benard is the former director of the Alternative Strategies Initiative at the RAND Corporation. Elvira Loredo is a researcher at RAND, a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decision making through research and analysis.] [Benard&Loredo/CSMonitor/4June2010] 

In CIA's Drone Mission, Who Will Protect the Protectors?, by Marc A. Thiessen. Last year, CIA Director Leon Panetta made an unusual visit to the agency's Counter Terrorism Center (CTC) to buck up his troops. Morale had been decimated by the release of highly classified details of the CIA's interrogation program and the growing calls for prosecutions of those involved. According to one top intelligence official, a senior officer involved in targeting terrorists asked Panetta what would happen to him in five years when the political winds shifted? Would he be hung out to dry like those in the interrogation program? Panetta told the officer he could not promise he would not be hung out to dry - only that it would not happen while Obama was in office.

It has been just a year since Panetta's visit, but already the wolves are circling. Last week, the CIA celebrated one of its biggest successes when al-Qaeda confirmed that a drone had killed its No. 3 leader, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, in Pakistan. Yet also last week, the United Nations issued a scathing report demanding the CIA stop using drones and declaring that agency officials involved in targeted killings of terrorists like Yazid may be in legal jeopardy. The United Nations' special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions questioned whether the United States was engaged in an "armed conflict" outside of the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, and declared that outside the "exceptional circumstance" of such an armed conflict "killings by the CIA would constitute extrajudicial executions assuming that they do not comply with human rights law. If so, they must be investigated and prosecuted by the U.S. and the State in which the wrongful killing occurred."

The special rapporteur was joined in his condemnation by the American Civil Liberties Union, which sent a public letter to President Obama on April 28 accusing him of supporting a "program of long-premeditated and bureaucratized killing" and declared that the program "violates international law." In its letter, the ACLU told Obama that "financiers, and other non-combat 'supporters' of hostile groups cannot be lawfully targeted with lethal force." Yet that is precisely what Obama did in the case of Yazid.

On this page Sunday, Treasury Undersecretary Stuart Levey noted that the killing of Yazid was a "major blow" to al-Qaeda because "Yazid has essentially served as al Qaeda's 'chief financial officer,' coordinating the group's fundraising and overseeing the distribution of money essential to its survival." According to the ACLU's reasoning, this would make the strike that killed Yazid illegal. Does the ACLU want to see the Predator operator who took out al-Qaeda's third in command prosecuted for murder? The ACLU has already gone after CIA interrogators - surreptitiously photographing these covert operatives and sharing the images with al-Qaeda terrorists in Guantanamo. CIA drone operators may soon be in for similar treatment.

The Obama administration has put the Predator operators at greater risk by dramatically narrowing the legal underpinnings for their actions. In a March 25 speech, State Department legal adviser Harold Koh - a harsh critic of the Bush administration - explained that the Obama administration was no longer invoking the president's Article II authority as commander-in-chief to justify many of its policies in the war on terror. But he said that drone attacks were lawful because "Congress authorized the use of all necessary and appropriate force through the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF)."

The problem - as Koh's predecessor, John Bellinger, told The Post last week, - is that Congress authorized the use of force against those who "planned, authorized, committed, or aided" the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. And many of those currently being targeted - particularly outside Afghanistan - had nothing to do with those attacks.

The American-born radical cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, was not involved in the attacks - yet he has reportedly been put on the targeting list. The Pakistani Taliban leaders who sent a terrorist to blow up a car bomb in Times Square were also not involved in the Sept. 11 attacks - but they are being targeted with Predators. The president has the authority to strike these individuals under his Article II powers, but Obama refuses to invoke them - a decision he may come to regret. The administration is expanding the use of drones while shrinking the legal ground on which the attacks are based.

After Sept. 11, few objected to the CIA interrogation program - until the threat appeared to dissipate and the political winds shifted. Today, the breezes are beginning to shift on the Predator program - a telltale sign of the gale to come. A few years from now, when the situation in the war on terror has stabilized, will there be calls for the disbarment of the Obama lawyers who authorized these strikes, and criminal investigations of the CIA officers who carried them out? Will Harold Koh join John Yoo and other Bush lawyers in the left's hall of infamy? As Panetta made clear in his visit to the CTC last year, he can only provide a guarantee that lasts one election cycle - after that the CIA is on its own. [Marc A. Thiessen, a visiting fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of the book "Courting Disaster." He writes a weekly column for The Post.] [Thiessen/WashingtonPost/7June2010] 

Section IV - BOOKS AND COMING EVENTS

Books/Reading

Eggplant and Espionage: Memoirs of a Spy Chef. Kay Shaw Nelson has learned that the weather isn't the only topic to bring up when conversation lags. She discovered that a recipe for holiday cranberry-walnut bread can make for fine fodder, too.

The CIA intelligence officer turned to cooking as a way to connect with people even though she couldn't tell them much about herself.

"Once in the CIA, I was unprepared for a lonely life, telling falsehoods to cover up what I was really doing and living in two worlds," she explains.

Nelson, a Bethesda resident since 1959, has documented her life as a spy and the recipes that got her through those isolating times in her latest book, "The Cloak and Dagger Cook, A CIA Memoir." Tales of her globetrotting life as a CIA operative are interspersed with recipes that boast a variety of international flavors - among them, Greek Vegetable-Cheese Salad, Roman Peas with Prosciutto, Spanish Almond Sighs and Korean Kimchi.

The author of 20 cookbooks, Nelson began her love affair with cuisine while on a deep cover mission with her husband - also a CIA agent - in Istanbul. There, she explored local markets, learned about Turkish food and gleaned cooking skills from her Armenian maid.

"As I often say, an interest in food introduces you to the agriculture of the country, to its history and to its religions, but most importantly, food introduces you to the people," she observes.

Although she has no single favorite recipe, Nelson loves Turkish eggplant dishes, like the book's Turkish Eggplant-Yogurt recipe.

Nelson landed in the CIA almost by accident. In May 1948, the New Hampshire native and Syracuse University senior - soon to be one of the first seven students in the United States to earn a degree in Russian studies - went to Washington, D.C. Her Russian history professor had given her a piece of paper with a name and address of a man to talk to about an unspecified job.

The man who interviewed her wanted to know why she was interested in working for the CIA.

"In all innocence, I had to reply that there was no reason," Nelson writes. "It was simply because my professor had sent me to see him and that I wanted to work in Washington and hopefully go abroad some time in the future."

To be able to write about her experiences, Nelson had to wait until her late husband retired from the CIA and get approval from the CIA Publications Review Board. Several interesting stories of intelligence operations that took place when she and her family were living in Greece had to be deleted.

Nelson says she chose to work for the CIA not only for the opportunities for adventure and travel, but also because she was part of a generation that "got caught up in the exhilaration and importance" of serving their country.

To date, she has traveled to 70 countries.

Despite her unusual experiences, Nelson thinks of herself as "typical."

"I believe that I did have a traditional life as a wife, mother and writer," she says. "...we in [the] CIA were ordinary, friendly people - not the scary spooks that some thought."

"The Cloak and Dagger Cook" is available for purchase at major booksellers. [Kenney/Gazette/2June2010] 

China Information Warfare. U.S. intelligence agencies have obtained a Chinese military book that will provide new insights into the Chinese military's information-warfare plans.

The book reveals Beijing's priorities for high-technology warfare using computers and electronic-warfare weapons.

The 322-page book, "Information Warfare Theory," was published in May 2007 and written by Wang Zhengde, president of the People's Liberation Army Information Engineering University.

Like other military and Communist Party writings, such books are not often made public, and when they are, they provide U.S. intelligence and military specialists with valuable clues to the military thinking and plans of China's secretive military.

The book states that information warfare is the "core" of China's high-tech military-reform efforts, which are referred to as "informationized" warfare - what the U.S. military has called the "revolution in military affairs." It involves integrating various weapons and intelligence with advanced command-and-control systems and mobile, combined-arms forces.  Key features of Chinese information warfare are "switching freely between offense and defense," "striking the enemy's fatal targets," and "instant and flexible mobility and real-time responses."

The book also notes that outer space is "the commanding point" for information warfare, perhaps an indirect reference to China's growing anti-satellite weapons capabilities.

The Chinese military also views electronic warfare, cyberwarfare and psychological warfare as the "main battlefields" for high-tech war.

Key technologies identified by the Chinese for information warfare include the know-how to conduct radar detection, photoelectric reconnaissance, computer-network warfare and acoustic reconnaissance.

"Assault" techniques include jamming radar and telecommunications systems, "acoustic" anti-submarine warfare and strikes on photoelectric spy satellites, as well as "network attack."

The book also contains sections on anticipated developments, including "sky-based" information-warfare weapons and unmanned, aerial vehicle information weapons. [Gertz/Gertzfile/5June2010]

Want to Understand What Makes A Jihadist Tick? Read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's "Nomad." Ayaan Hirsi Ali's new memoir, "Nomad," is the most powerful book you will have read in a long time. Ms. Hirsi Ali writes with the clear eye for detail and narrative flair of a novelist. She invites the reader to witness the clash of civilizations between the West and Islam - and Islam within the West - first hand, not as an abstraction in Sam Huntington's Harvard seminar room or in the august pages of Foreign Affairs, but as it has played out in the very intimate interstices of her personal life.

Hirsi Ali is more than a nomad, She is a time traveler between the universes of tradition and modernity. In this book she takes us along on that emotionally tumultuous journey from the moment doubt morphed into her defection from the "childlike" womb of Islam to her nagging guilt as an undutiful daughter; from her giddy intoxication with newfound liberty to the fear for her safety and the loneliness of her freedom. "The world outside the clan is rough, and you are alone in it," her grandmother had warned her.

Rarely does the telling of a very personal story also tell one of the key stories of our time. But Hirsi Ali accomplishes this in "Nomad."

We witness a wrenching deathbed reunion with her once proud Somali warlord father, in exile and on welfare in the largely Muslim ghetto of East London. They had not spoken in years since, as Hirsi Ali puts it, "Living as a Western woman meant I had shed my honor." Yet, even as he beseeched Allah with his last breaths to return his wayward daughter to the fold of family and faith, his lingering anger and deep disappointment yielded to love. "He ultimately allowed his feelings of fatherly love to transcend his adherence to the demands of an unforgiving God," she writes.

Not so for the customs of the clan and the tenets of the faith. Hirsi Ali could not attend the funeral because "women are not allowed to be present at the graveside during a Muslim burial ceremony." But it was only when she stepped out of the hospital onto the East London streets that her personal grief over her father's loss once again met the reality of what she had chosen to leave behind. This passage illustrates Hirsi Ali's gift for turning quotidian observation into poignant insight:

"Seated outside a halal fast-food shop was a small woman in a long black robe with a black embroidered beak of cloth tied over her nose and mouth, in the style of Algerian women. Two small children were crying in the buggy beside her, and she was trying to jiggle and comfort them while she lifted her cloth beak to try to eat her pastry modestly underneath it. Her older toddler was wearing a veil too. It was not a face veil, but it covered her hair and shoulders; it was white and lacy and elasticized so it fit snuggly over her head. The child couldn't have been older than three.

"Two shop fronts further down was a huge mosque, the biggest mosque in London my escorts told me. A small crowd of men stood outside, all wearing loose clothing, long beards and white skull caps. All these people had left their countries of origin only to band together here, unwilling or unable to let go, where they enforce their culture more strongly than even in Nairobi. Here was the mosque, like a symbolic magnetic north, the force that moved their women to cover themselves so ferociously, the better to separate themselves from the dreadful influence of the culture and values of the country where they had chosen to live.

"It was just a glimpse, and yet I felt an instant sense of panic and suffocation. I was right back in the heart of it all: inside the world of veils and blinkers, the world where women must hide their hair and their bodies, must cower to eat in public, and must follow a few steps behind their men on the street. A web of values - of honor and shame and religion - still entangled me together with all these women at the bus stop and almost every other woman along Whitechapel Road that morning. We were all very far from where we had been born, but only I had left behind that culture. They had brought their web of values with them, halfway across the world."

Further on her journey, we listen in on her halting, guilt-laden phone calls with her mother, one of her father's several wives, living alone and virtually abandoned, though among her Duhulbahante ancestral tribe in a gritty hovel in the remote reaches of what was once Somali territory. Hirsi Ali envisions it as "a little hamlet of cinderblock buildings, unpaved roads, thorn bushes and endless dust."

In one of the more interesting passages of the chapter "My Mother," Hirsi Ali lifts the veil on a taboo subject: the emotional damage to women and children as a result of the practice of polygamy.

"Even though she was my father's second wife, from the day she learned that my father had married a third woman and had another child, Sahra, my mother became erratic, sometimes exploding with grief and pain and violence. She had fainting episodes and skin diseases, symptoms caused by suppressed jealousy. From being a strong, accomplished woman she became a wreck, and we, her children, bore the brunt of her misery."

Though tenderly attached to her grandmother, who lovingly helped raise her and her sister, Hiirsi Ali sees in her grandmother the fatal flaw that traps the tribal communities of Muslim Africa. Having tasted what Octavio Paz called the "republic of the future" in America, it especially drives her crazy to see her grandmother focusing all her energies and emotions on the past, always looking back to what she knows instead of looking forward to what might be.

At the end of the book, we read Hirsi Ali's letter to her "unborn daughter," a moving prayer for a future bond of love to replace the broken tether to her past that is at the same time a profoundly humanist manifesto. Remembering her father as she imagines her child, Hirsi Ali writes "I could never re-adopt his belief in Allah, in prophets, in holy books, angels and the hereafter. But our unconditional love for one another, the love between a parent and a child, was so much more powerful than that belief. And the proof was the way we clutched each other's hands at the end. That earthly love is my faith. It is the love I shall always give you.�

Through these insights into the formative crucible of family, clan, and faith - and their relentless drilling down on duty, honor, and shame - we learn more about why young men, especially those living or raised in the West, become susceptible to the jihadist siren than from all the weighty tomes of intelligence analysis. "With a collective feeling of being persecuted, many Muslim families living in the West insulate themselves into ghettos of their own making," she writes. "Unhappy, disoriented youths in dysfunctional immigrant families make perfect recruits to [the jihadist] cause." The answer for Hirsi Ali is precisely not the well-meaning "multiculturalism" that leaves each to their own, as has been the case in Holland where she was a member of parliament and defender of immigrant women's rights. The answer is the opposite: integration of Muslim immigrants as individual citizens into Western society. Frustrating that process, Hirsi Ali warns, will lead to peril for the West given the scale of Muslim immigration and the high birth rate of Muslims in the West.

Unlike her nemesis Tariq Ramadan, the Islamic scholar who wants the West to accommodate Islam as a community of faith and practice, Hirsi Ali insists that Islam, especially in the clannish permutations of its immigrants, must instead let go of the individual. (On this score, a new book by Paul Berman, "The Flight of the Intellectuals," is a very fitting complement to "Nomad.")

Some quibbles. I do get the sense once in a while in the second half of "Nomad," which discusses her arrival in America, that Hirsi Ali is a little starry eyed about the West. Yes, Christianity at its best is about love; and no, it is not an all-encompassing theocratic order. But in its fundamentalist reaches the literalism and dogma of evangelicals generates plenty of intolerance, hypocrisy, and familial dysfunction. And let's don't forget about the sex scandals in the Catholic Church.

Also, no doubt, in contrast to her experience of misogyny and polygamy Western men look pretty good. But to suggest they are nearly always upright and faithful to their wives and family is to ignore the reality of so many ugly divorces, forlorn children raised by the media, battered spouses and deadbeat dads. Certainly, the West has its fair share of desperate housewives.

Many Muslim readers will have bigger squabbles. How much does Hirsi Ali's experience, in which faith and clan are fused, tell us about, say, modern Turkey or Iran? Others, like Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the Shiiite theorist and first president of revolutionary Iran, will argue that the concept of "Tawhid" - that the whole of existence is one - understands that freedom, not submission and domination, is the path to the divine. Yet, admittedly, he lives in exile outside Paris like Trotsky in Mexico City while "actually existing Islam" is run by the Revolutionary Guard back in Tehran.

Above all, like Hirsi Ali's first account of her defection from Islam, "Infidel," the power of this book is that it was written in "good faith" as the Italian essayist Nicola Chiaromonte meant it: As a witness to her moment, Hirsi Ali calls it as she sees it. She has arrived at her beliefs not by retreating into orthodoxy out of fear of uncertainty or through the nihilism of indifference, but because experience has led her to them. If she wants to live in this world as a free women, here she must stand. [Nathan Gardels is the editor of NPQ and the Global Viewpoint Network. His latest book, with Mike Medavoy is "American Idol After Iraq: Competing for Hearts and Minds in the Global Media Age."] [Gardels/CSMonitor/27May2010] 

Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel: German Abwehr and SS Agent during WWII. Hal W. Vaughan, the author of FDR's 12 Apostles: The Spies who Paved the Way for the Invasion of North Africa and Doctor to the Resistance, the story of an American physician, Sumner Waldron Jackson and his family in WWII occupied Paris. The family fought the Nazis as members of the French Resistance. They were betrayed and deported in 1943: wife, Toquette, to Ravensbruck and father and son to Neuengamme where Dr. Jackson perished at the massacre at Lubeck Bay.
Vaughan is currently writing the story of Coco Chanel's Nazis WWII connections in occupied Paris and her missions to Spain for German military intelligence in 1941 and for Himmler in 1943. His book will be based on documents discovered at NARA, at KEW in Great Britain and in European National Archives.
Vaughan is a former USIS officer with tours of duty at Dacca, East Pakistan (Bangladesh) and Karachi, Pakistan where he worked closely with the late CIA officers Howard "Rocky" Stone and Maury Lax on a case involving KGB agent, the now deceased, Uri Sinitzyn. Later, in Geneva, Switzerland where Vaughan was the spokesman to Ambassador W. Michael Blumenthal he worked with the CIA station chief on a Soviet defector case. His now deceased French born wife was a contract CIA source.

Coming Events

EVENTS IN COMING TWO MONTHS....

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

• Wednesday, 7 July 2010; 6:30 pm - Washington, DC - "A New Cold War: Inside Nuclear Iran" at the International Spy Museum
• Thursday, 15 July 2010; 12 noon – 1 pm - Washington, DC - "Eyes in the Sky: Eisenhower, the CIA, and Cold War Aerial Espionage" at the International Spy Museum
• Thursday, 5 August 2010, noon - Washington, DC - "Silent Sentry: The Untold Story of the National Security Agency" - at the International Spy Museum
• Wednesday, 11 August 2010, 6:30 pm - Washington, DC - "Uneasy Alliance: The CIA and ISI in Pakistan" - at the International Spy Museum

7 -11 June 2010 - San Diego, CA - Bicoastal Counter Terrorism Summit by Halo Corporation. Monday Warrior Mindset $200; Tuesday: Active Shooter Campus, Corporate and House of Worship Safety $200; Wednesday: Maritime Security and Port/Border Awareness $200; Thursday: Americas Deadliest Threat $200; Friday: Islamic Literalist Ideology $200. California Responders these training courses are eligible for the use of Homeland Security. Grant Program SHSP, UASI, LETPP. Homeland Security Grant funds may cover the cost of Registration, Travel, Lodging and Per Diem
If you would prefer to pay by check, please make payable to: The HALO Corporation, 501 West Broadway, Suite A‐331, San Diego, CA 92101
www.thehalocorp.com 619-881-9125

Tuesday 15 June 2010, 5 p.m. - Newport News, VA - AFIO Norman Forde Hampton Roads Chapter Meeting features LTC Joe Leporati on Disaster Relief in Haiti
US Naval Lieutenant Commander Joe Leporati will speak about his experience with disaster relief as part of the US military's "Operation Unified Response" in Haiti
LCDR Leporati is a US Naval aviator and strategic planner whose early Naval experience included Helicopter Aircraft Commander and Functional Check Pilot positions in helicopter missions in the Mediterranean Sea, Arabian Gulf and Africa. He left the Navy in 1999; after the 11 Sep 2001 attacks, he joined the Navy Reserve and was voluntarily recalled to active duty. LCDR Leporati served as Safety Officer onboard USS KEARSARGE, deploying twice in support of OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM. He was awarded the Chief of Naval Operations Safety Award for his efforts.
In 2004 - 2005, LCDR served US Fleet Forces N3 Global Force Management as Assistant Aviation Operations Officer. In that role, he participated in USN's humanitarian assistance in Haiti, as well as relief efforts to Hurricane Katrina victims. He authored the Airborne Use of Force Concept of Operations, placing US Coast Guard gunners on Navy helicopters to prosecute "Go Fast" drug running vessels in the US Southern Command. In Mar 2006, LCDR Leporati reported to the Multi National Forces Iraq Joint Personnel Recovery Center, where he fused intelligence, conducted diplomatic efforts and coordinated operations to recover missing US Service members, US citizens and others in Iraq. After Iraq, he served as Joint Forces Staff College instructor on the Joint Command, Control and Information Operations School faculty.
LCDR Leporati transferred to the Information Warfare Officer community in 2008 and was appointed Director of the Fleet Information Operations Center Texas. As FIOC Director, he led 200+ sailors conducting direct support, analysis and production, and cyber operations in support of Joint Interagency Task Force South, 4th Fleet and US Southern Command. LCDR Leporati was temporarily supporting Carrier Strike Group-1 aboard the USS Carl Vinson in January 2010 when it was re-routed to Haiti for earthquake disaster relief. In Mar 2010, LCDR Leporati reported to the NIOC Norfolk Planning Directorate and is assigned to the Information Operations Planning Team for US Southern Command.
His military decorations include the Bronze Star, the Joint Service Commendation Medal, the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal with two gold stars, and the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal with one gold star. He is a Joint Qualified Officer. LCDR Leporati holds both a Master of Business Administration Degree and a Master of Arts Degree in Diplomacy.
Location: Christopher Newport University Library, Newport News (Room # tbd)
Free and open to the public.
Please rsvp: Melissa Saunders mwsaunders@cox.net

16-17 June 2010 - Independence, Missouri - CIA/Harry S. Truman Library/Woodrow Wilson Center Co-Host Conference "The Korean War, the Armistice, and the Search for Peace on the Korean Peninsula." Event falls on 60th Anniversary of The Korean War. Registration on AFIO website will open in mid-April. Announcement of CIA document release including special booklet/CD handouts to attendees, includes roundtable discussion – Invasion and Intervention: What the U.S.. Intelligence Community Knew and Who They Told - chaired by Clayton Laurie, with 3 other historians; Reception at Truman Library. CD-ROMs containing the newly released documents will be distributed at the press conference and the conference.
From the Central Intelligence Agency: Approximately one thousand declassified documents from four series in the agency's records relating to the Korean \War have been digitized and described by the agency's Historical Documents Division. The four series are (1) Korean Daily Reports; (2) National Intelligence Estimates; (3) Special Intelligence Estimates; and (4) Foreign Broadcast Information Service reports. About half of the documents have never been released before; the other half have been released in part, but are now being either fully released or with newly released information included.
Registration handled by the Truman Library. To view agenda: http://www.trumanlibrary.org/koreanwar2010.html
To Register for event: [Word Document] http://www.trumanlibrary.org/korea/KoreanWarRegistration2010.doc
or [PDF form] http://www.trumanlibrary.org/korea/KoreanWarRegistration2010.pdf

Thursday, 17 June 2010 - Washington, DC - OSINT 2020: The Future of Open Source Intelligence

Keynote Speaker: Mr. Dan Butler, Assistant Deputy Director for Open Source, Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), hosted by LexisNexis
1:00 – 3:00 P.M. (Doors open at noon), National Press Club, Washington, D.C., No Charge. Seating may be limited. RSVP at www.lexisnexis.com/osint
The program will include keynote remarks by Mr. Dan Butler, Assistant Deputy Director for Open Source, Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), followed by a "perspectives" discussion with leading experts among our group of distinguished attendees. The discussion will be based on the future of OSINT as a recognized discipline in strategic and tactical national security decision-making.
OSINT 2020 Panelists:
*Mr. Alexander Joel, Civil Liberties Protection Officer, ODNI
*Mr. Doug Magoffin, Chief, Defense Intelligence Open Source Program Office
*Mr. Kevin O'Connell, Adjunct Professor, Georgetown University and President/CEO of Innovative Analytics and Training
*Dr. Mark Gabriele, Booz Allen Hamilton
*Mr. Kenneth Rapuano, Director of Advanced Systems & Policy, The MITRE Corporation
About the OSINT Round Table hosted by LexisNexis
The OSINT Round Table was created to make a public space for discussion about the government's needs for Open Source Intelligence in order to facilitate relationships between government officials and private sector leaders. We seek to foster an increasingly responsive open source intelligence infrastructure that meets the needs of national security decision makers.
No Charge. Seating may be limited. RSVP at www.lexisnexis.com/osint

19 June 2010 - Kennebunk, ME - The AFIO Maine Chapter features lawyer Suzanne Spaulding speaking on "Solving Current National Security Issues." Suzanne Spaulding, who is currently Principal, Bingham Consulting Group, Bingham McCutchen LLP, is an authority on national security . She served as director of two congressionally mandated commissions, the National Commission on Terrorism, chaired by Amb. Paul Bremer, III, and the Commission to Assess the Organization of  the Federal Government to Combat the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction chaired by former CIA Director, John Deutch.  She has been quoted regularly in media outlets around the country.  She was minority staff director for the House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.  Previous legislative experience includes legislative director and senior counsel for Sen. Arlen Specter.  She also worked for Rep. Jane Harman.  She was assistant counsel at CIA and  is immediate past chair, American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Law and National Security.  Ms. Spaulding is currently a member of AFIO's National Board. The meeting will be held at the Kennebunk Free Library, 112 Main St., Kennebunk at 2:00 p.m. The public is invited. For information call 967-4298.

Monday, 21 June 2010, 6 p.m. - New York, NY - The AFIO NY Chapter meets to hear Jack Devine discuss "The True Story of Charlie Wilson's War"

Speaker: Jack Devine, 32 year veteran of the CIA. Was Acting Director of the Agency's operations outside the US with authority over thousands of employees in very sensitive missions among many other worldwide assignments. Recipient of the CIA Meritorious Officer Award, the Distinguished Intelligence Medal and several other meritorious awards.
Topic: (1) Afghanistan: Where we are, (2) Charlie Wilson's War: The inside story of what actually happened
Where: University Club 9th Floor, Registration 5:30 PM Start 6:00 PM
$40./person; only $20./person, students & military. No reservations required.
Questions to Jerry Goodwin, Chapter President, 347-334-1503 or email him at afiometro@yahoo.com

22 June 2010 (Rescheduled from 25 May) - Arlington, VA - The Defense Intelligence Forum meets to hear Keiswetter on Political Islam.

The DIF meets at the Rock Bottom Restaurant and Brewery, Ballston Common Mall, Arlington, VA. The speaker will be Allen L. Keiswetter, who will speak on Political Islam. Mr. Keiswetter, a retired Senior Foreign Service Officer, is a Scholar at the Middle East Institute and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Maryland. He has also taught courses on Islam and the Middle East at the National Defense Intelligence College and the National War College. In the Department of State, he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, Director of Arabian Peninsula Affairs in the Near East Bureau, and Director of the Office of Intelligence Liaison in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. His postings abroad include Riyadh, Sanaa, Khartoum, Baghdad, Tunis, Beirut, Brussels and Vietnam. The Defense Intelligence Forum covers topics of current interest. It is open to members of all Intelligence Community associations and their guests.
Pay at the door with a check for $29 per person payable to DIAA, Inc. Social hour starts at 1130, lunch at 1200. Make reservations for you and your guests by 15 June by email to diforum@verizon.net. Give names, telephone numbers, email addresses, and choices of Pasta, Grilled Salmon, Grilled Sirloin, or Lemon Chicken. Pay with a check. THE FORUM DOESN'T TAKE CASH!

25-26 June 2010 - Great Lakes, IL - The Midwest Chapter of AFIO will host its annual conference at the Great Lakes Naval Station. The conference will include a full days worth of speakers on Friday the 25th. Saturday the 26th will include a day trip to Waukesha, WI to tour the Cold War Museum and former Nike Missile Site, and then lunch at the Safe House, a spy themed museum in Milwaukee, WI. Saturday's return trip will include dinner and a speaker. On Sunday 27 June there will be a trip to the Cantigny First Division Museum (Wheaton, IL) for a museum tour and bring your own meal picnic.
Registration is $10 per person. Hotel reservations can be made by calling the Navy Lodge at 1-847-689-1485 for 24-27 June. Room rate is $65 per night total (no tax). Hotel reservations should be made no later than 7 June 2010. Please remember to mention that you are with the Midwest AFIO Chapter. For more information and to confirm your attendance, please contact Angelo Di Liberti ASAP at 847-931-4184. Also state whether you plan to attend the trip to Cantigny as we will need to contact the Museum curator with a final head count.

10 July 2010, 1000 - 1430 - Salem, MA - The AFIO New England Chapter meets to conduct business and hear Douglas Wheeler on "Writing a History of Spying" and John Behling, Jr. on "Origins of Islamic Extremism."
Our afternoon speaker will be Chapter Member John Behling Jr . John is a veteran of the OSS. He will speak on "Origins of Islamic Extremism" The morning speaker is Douglas L. Wheeler, who will discuss 'Writing a History of Spying-author's dilemma?', Doug is Professor Emeritus at the University of New Hampshire where he taught African, Iberian & European, World and Intelligence Studies History at the University of New Hampshire, 1965-2002 and since then has taught there part-time. Schedule: Registration & gathering, 1000 - 1130, membership meeting 1130 - 1200. Luncheon at 1200 followed by our speaker, with adjournment at 2:30PM.
Location: the Salem Waterfront Hotel located in Salem MA. The hotel website is: 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/
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 1 July 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

Thursday, 15 July 2010, 11:30 am - Colorado Springs, CO - The Rocky Mountain Chapter hears Tim Murphy on R&D Platform Usage in Intelligence. The Chapter presents an expert on Special Ops whose firm is doing an R&D intelligence platform for the Intelligence community. Retired Air Force Col. Tim Murphy who is also a graduate of the Air Force Academy. To be held at a new location the AFA Eisenhower Golf Course Club House. Please RSVP to Tom VanWormer at robsmom@pcisys.net.

Wednesday, 21 July 2010, 10 am - 12:45 pm - Annapolis Junction, MD - "The Mysterious Rosetta Stone: A Code-Cracking International Treasure" with Dr. Joel Freeman, is topic at the National Cryptologic Museum Foundation Summer Cryptologic meeting.

All AFIO members are invited to hear our guest speaker, Dr. Joel Freeman, CEO and President of the Freeman Institute, discuss the history of the Rosetta Stone, focusing on the historical connection between the Rosetta Stone and the breaking of codes. Guests will have an opportunity to view the full-sized, three-dimensional Rosetta Stone replica normally on display in the lobby of the National Cryptologic Museum. Dr. Freeman is an gifted speaker and author. As part of the program there will be a brief presentation to acknowledge the Milt Zaslow Memorial Award for Cryptology that was presented for the first time at this year's Maryland History Day Ceremony on 24 April.
Location: the L3 Conference Center in the National Business Park. Lunch will be served at 11:45 following the presentation. L3 Conference Center is located at 2720 Technology Dr, Annapolis Junction, MD 21076 in the Rt. 32 National Business Park.
Cost: the fee is $25 to cover program & lunch costs.
Confirm your attendance by Wednesday, 14 July, by calling (301) 688-5436 to pay by credit card or by mailing a check to NCMF, POB 1682, Ft. Meade, MD 20755. We look forward to seeing you there.

22 July 2010 – San Francisco, CA – The AFIO Jim Quesada Chapter hosts John Yoo, former deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he worked on national security and terrorism after the September 11 attacks.

John Yoo is currently a professor of law at UC Berkeley. Yoo will be discussing his new book, Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush. RSVP and pre-payment required. The meeting will be held in San Francisco: 11:30 AM no host cocktails; noon - luncheon. $25 member rate with advance reservation and payment; $35 non-member. E-mail RSVP to Mariko Kawaguchi (please indicate chicken or fish): afiosf@aol.com and mail check made out to "AFIO" to: Mariko Kawaguchi, P.O. Box 117578 Burlingame, CA 94011

Saturday, 31 July 2010, 10 am - 12 noon - Coral Gables, FL - AFIO/Miami Police Department Counter-Terrorism Training. In cooperation with the City of Miami Police Dept, Office of Emergency Management & Homeland Security, Officer Marcos T. Perez, AFIO will be presenting a Counter-Terrorism Training and Program. "Operation Miami Shield." There is limited space available for this program.
Please RSVP with checks enclosed before July 21, 2010. There is a $10 charge for AFIO Members. Guests will be charged at $25 per person. Checks payable to "AFIO" and mailed to Tom Spencer at 999 Ponce de Leon Blvd Ste 510, Coral Gables, FL 33134

HOLD THE DATE - 17 - 20 August 2010 - Cleveland, OH - AFIO National Symposium on the Great Lakes - "Intelligence and National Security on the Great Lakes"

Co-Hosted with the AFIO Northern Ohio Chapter at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Cleveland, OH. Includes presentations by U.S. Coast Guard on Great Lakes security; Canadian counterparts to explain double-border issues; National Air/Space Intelligence Center; Air Force Technical Applications Center; Ohio Aerospace Institute. Cruise on Lake Erie .
Spies-in-Black-Ties Dinner and Cruise on Lake Erie. Online Reservations to be taken here, shortly.

29-30 September 2010 - Washington, DC - Conference on the American Experience in Southeast Asia, 1946-1975 by the U.S. Department of State.

The U.S. Department of State's Office of the Historian is pleased to invite AFIO members to a conference on the American Experience in Southeast Asia, 1946-1975, which will be held in the George C. Marshall Conference Center at the State Dept. The conference will feature a number of key Department of State personnel, both past and present. Those speaking will include:
* Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger
* Former Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte
* Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard A. Holbrooke
The conference will include a panel composed of key print and television media personnel from the Vietnam period discussing the impact of the press on public opinion and United States policy. A number of scholarly panels featuring thought-provoking works by leading scholars will also take place. Registration information will be available at the State Dept website, http://history.state.gov, after August 1.

6 - 7 October 2011 - Laurel, MD - The NSA's Center for Cryptologic History hosts their Biennial Cryptologic History Symposium with theme: Cryptology in War and Peace: Crisis Points in History.

Historians from the Center, the Intelligence Community, the defense establishment, and the military services, as well as distinguished scholars from American and foreign academic institutions, veterans of the profession, and the interested public all will gather for two days of reflection and debate on topics from the cryptologic past. The theme for the upcoming conference will be: “Cryptology in War and Peace: Crisis Points in History.” This topical approach is especially relevant as the year 2011 is an important anniversary marking the start of many seminal events in our nation’s military history. The events that can be commemorated are many.
Such historical episodes include the 1861 outbreak of the fratricidal Civil War between North and South. Nineteen forty-one saw a surprise attack wrench America into the Second World War. The year 1951 began with the fall of Seoul to Chinese Communist forces with United Nations troops retreating in the Korean War. In 1961, the United States began a commitment of advisory troops in Southeast Asia that would eventually escalate into the Vietnam War; that year also marked the height of the Cold War as epitomized by the physical division of Berlin. Twenty years later, a nascent democratic movement was suppressed by a declaration of martial law in Poland; bipolar confrontation would markedly resurge for much of the 1980s. In 1991, the United States intervened in the Persian Gulf to reverse Saddam Hussein’s aggression, all while the Soviet Union suffered through the throes of its final collapse. And in 2001, the nation came under siege by radical terrorism.
Participants will delve into the roles of signals intelligence and information assurance, and not just as these capabilities supported military operations. More cogently, observers will examine how these factors affected and shaped military tactics, operations, strategy, planning, and command and control throughout history. The role of cryptology in preventing conflict and supporting peaceful pursuits will also be examined. The panels will include presentations in a range of technological, operational, organizational, counterintelligence, policy, and international themes.
Past symposia have featured scholarship that set out new ways to consider out cryptologic heritage, and this one will be no exception. The mix of practitioners, scholars, and the public precipitates a lively debate that promotes an enhanced appreciation for the context of past events. Researchers on traditional and technological cryptologic topics, those whose work in any aspect touches upon the historical aspects of cryptology as defined in its broadest sense, as well as foreign scholars working in this field, are especially encouraged to participate.
The Symposium will be held at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory’s Kossiakoff Center, in Laurel, Maryland, a location central to the Baltimore and Washington, D.C., areas. As has been the case with previous symposia, the conference will provide unparalleled opportunities for interaction with leading historians and distinguished experts. So please make plans to join us for either one or both days of this intellectually stimulating conference.
Interested persons are invited to submit proposals for a potential presentation or even for a full panel. While the topics can relate to this year’s theme, all serious work on any aspect of cryptologic history will be considered. Proposals should include an abstract for each paper and/or a statement of session purpose for each panel, as well as biographical sketches for each presenter. To submit proposals or form more information on this conference, contact Dr. Kent Sieg, the Center’s Symposium Executive Director, at 301-688-2336 or via email at kgsieg@nsa.gov.

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

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