Section I - INTELLIGENCE HIGHLIGHTS

Witness Says WikiLeaks Investigators Sought to Limit Disclosure. Before the online site WikiLeaks published a trove of classified documents about the Afghanistan war, government investigators interviewed Boston-area acquaintances of a military analyst charged with providing other documents to the site in an effort to prevent additional leaks, according to one person interviewed in the probe.

The investigators from the Army and the State Department seemed to be "looking for classified documents that they thought to be in the Boston area," said the acquaintance, who would discuss the sensitive matter only on the condition of anonymity. "I got the impression that we're still in the process of containing a leak."

The man, a computer expert who met Pfc. Bradley E. Manning in January, said he told the investigators in mid-June that he knew of no such documents.

The interview was among at least two investigators conducted in the Boston area after Manning was accused of giving WikiLeaks State Department cables and a video of a helicopter attack in which unarmed civilians were killed in Baghdad. Officials have said they are investigating whether Manning leaked the Afghanistan documents made public last week, a disclosure that prompted condemnation from the Obama administration.

The computer expert also said the Army offered him cash to, in his word, "infiltrate" WikiLeaks. "I turned them down," he said. "I don't want anything to do with this cloak-and-dagger stuff."

Army Criminal Investigation Division spokesman Chris Grey declined to comment on the claim. "We've got an ongoing investigation," he said. "We don't discuss our techniques and tactics."

Another Manning acquaintance who was questioned said investigators "assumed that he was the one who did it and were trying to understand why, what was going on with him psychologically, to either make it so nobody gets to this point in the future or spot people who've gotten to this point and make sure they didn't do any damage."

This acquaintance, also a computer expert who spoke on the condition of anonymity, is affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He said he was interviewed twice in June in Cambridge, Mass., shortly after Manning was detained. Manning was charged in July.

Manning, who lived in Potomac and was stationed at Fort Drum, N.Y., before shipping out to Baghdad last year, had hoped he would serve his time and then use the G.I. Bill to go to college. His military attorney has declined to comment.

"He was definitely interested in making a positive impact on the world," said Danny Clark, a friend of Manning's who runs a small tech firm in Cambridge and has declined to be interviewed by military investigators.

Meanwhile, friends and family are raising money for Manning's defense, including a private lawyer to augment the Army-provided defense lawyer. The San Francisco-based war resisters' group Courage to Resist has raised $11,418 and is aiming for $100,000, assuming a "sizable contribution from WikiLeaks," said Jeff Paterson, project director.

Manning has been transferred from Kuwait, where he had been detained, to Quantico. He was charged in military court in July and will have a preliminary hearing to determine if he should face a court-martial.

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is scheduled to appear on NBC's "Meet the Press" and CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday to further denounce WikiLeaks for endangering the lives of U.S. troops and Afghan civilians. White House officials are concerned that more potentially damaging information could be released by the group in the coming weeks.

One senior military official balked at a suggestion by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates that the WikiLeaks disclosure could cause the Pentagon to limit the distribution of classified information to combat field units, where it is harder to monitor what analysts are downloading.

"Limiting intelligence to troops in combat is a non-starter," said the official. "It doesn't make sense to use WikiLeaks as a reason to limit information to the troops who need it." Such limits could "get soldiers killed," the official said.

The classified computer systems in Iraq and Afghanistan don't have the same safeguards that exist in the United States. "In the States, there are rack and scoring servers that watch where analysts go," the official said. At the time of his arrest, Manning was an intelligence analyst at a relatively small base in Iraq. [Nakashima/WashingtonPost/31July2010]

Two Arrested After Explosives Sent to British Spy HQ. British police are questioning two men after a homemade parcel bomb was sent to the headquarters of the MI6 spy agency, and another was found at a London postal depot.

The men, aged 52 and 21, were arrested in Wales on explosives charges and being held at a London police station. They have not been charged.

The Metropolitan Police said a suspect package was found "at a premises on Albert Embankment" - the location of Britain's foreign intelligence agency. Another device was intercepted at a postal sorting office.

The force said the packages had the potential to cause injury, but no one was hurt.

MI6's fortress-like headquarters is a London landmark. In 2000, it was slightly damaged in a rocket attack by Irish Republican Army dissidents. [AP/1August2010] 

Czech Military Intelligence Uncovered its Own Spies. The Czech Republic's military intelligence service unintentionally revealed the identities of its own agents active after the fall of Communism.

The blunder dates back to April, when the state-run Prague-based Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes posted on its website a list of Communist-era spies provided by the country's military intelligence agency.

However, several hundred of those spies stayed on after Communism collapsed in former Czechoslovakia in 1989 and some may be active to this day.

The institute took down the list in June after being alerted by military intelligence that it includes names of spies active after the fall of Communism, the report said.

While intelligence experts told the newspaper that any active spies on the list could be in danger and should be withdrawn, the Defense Ministry said that the list's publication was 'a problem, but the agency's activities were not under a direct threat.'

Among the compromised agents is Frantisek Masopust, who was the Czech charge d'affaires in Moscow until 2002 and currently heads a Prague-based chamber of commerce for the Commonwealth of Independent States, a post-Soviet group of former Soviet countries.

'I already know that they compromised me,' the newspaper quoted Masopust as saying. 'Whether it offends me or angers me? That is an understatement. This is something that should not happen in a normal country.'

The military intelligence and the institute are now trading accusations over who was responsible for the leak. [MonstersandCritics/1August2010] 

Iran 'Spying Trial' Opens in Kuwait. Six men, including a Kuwaiti soldier, and one woman have gone on trial in Kuwait accused of spying for Iran.

The charges include passing on confidential information to the Iranian authorities about the Kuwaiti army and US troops stationed in the Gulf state.

The defendants deny all the charges. Their lawyer has said they were forced to confess under torture, and has demanded a medical investigation.

Iran has denounced the case as a bid to create a "climate of fear" in the Gulf.

Three members of the alleged spy ring are Iranian, two are stateless, one is Kuwaiti and the other is Syrian, the AFP news agency reported.

The woman, an Iranian, was not present in court, it said. She had been freed earlier without bail.

Kuwaiti police uncovered the alleged spy cell in May. Local newspapers said the group was spying for Iran's Revolutionary Guards - a claim Iran has categorically denied.

Tehran's foreign ministry said in May that the allegations were aimed at "creating a climate of fear towards Iran," while a Revolutionary Guards official dismissed them as "baseless". [BBC/3August2010] 

Father of Internet Imam Plans to Sue CIA. The father of the Internet's most famous radical cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, is planning to sue the U.S. government for including his son on a CIA target list.

Nasser al-Awlaki hired the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights to file a lawsuit that would seek to remove his American-born son from what the CIA calls its "capture or kill" list. The lawsuit, which has not yet been filed, will mark the first time there has been a legal challenge to the CIA's target list.

"This represents a new kind of challenge to American counter-terrorism," said NYU law professor Sam Rascoff. "Previous lawsuits have focused mainly on the government's power to detain, interrogate, and gather intelligence on individuals as part of the so-called 'war on terror.' Now, for the first time, the government's authority to kill one of its own citizens is in question."

Anwar al-Awlaki is thought to be a senior operative for al-Qaida's arm in Yemen, and he has been linked to both the Fort Hood shootings and an attempted bombing on a U.S. airliner on Christmas day. NPR reported last week that Awlaki's father had been in contact with U.S. attorneys to file the lawsuit.

The ACLU's Jameel Jaffer was one of two attorneys who traveled to Yemen in May to sit down with Awlaki's father and discuss the case. Nasser al-Awlaki formally retained the ACLU and the CCR last month. He told the lawyers that he feels the Obama administration has essentially green-lighted his son's assassination - without filing any charges or having a court weigh the evidence in the case. Awlaki hasn't been publicly charged or indicted in the U.S.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, there has been a debate about where the boundaries of the battlefield actually lie in the war against al-Qaida. The Obama administration has maintained that the battlefield isn't limited to specific parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iraq, but essentially is wherever terrorists may be plotting against the U.S. That's the same position the Bush administration took. An Awlaki case will go right to the heart of that issue.

"There's no question that the government has the authority to use lethal force against Americans who join the Taliban, say, or who join the insurgency in Iraq," the ACLU's Jaffer said. "But the United States is not at war in Yemen, and the government doesn't have a blank check to kill terrorism suspects wherever they are in the world. Among the arguments we'll be making is that, outside actual war zones, the authority to use lethal force is narrowly circumscribed, and preserving the rule of law depends on keeping this authority narrow."

The case hasn't progressed, partly because in order to represent either of the Awlakis, lawyers have to get a special license from the U.S. Treasury Department. The license is required because Treasury has Anwar al-Awlaki on its list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists. That means Awlaki's assets have been frozen, his travel is restricted and, among other things, Americans are barred from doing any kind of business with him - business that includes providing him with legal representation, even if it is uncompensated. Awlaki was put on that list last month.

The ACLU and the CCR argued to a U.S. District Judge on Tuesday that its efforts to represent Awlaki have been hobbled by the office in Treasury that handles the terrorism list - the Office of Foreign Asset Control. They asked OFAC on July 23 for permission to represent Awlaki. So far, they haven't received any response.

"Without the license, we can't provide legal representation," Jaffer said. "We were retained by his father in July, but we can't provide legal services that would benefit his son unless we first get the government's permission. So the case we filed this morning challenges the constitutionality of the regulations that prohibit us from suing the government without the government's permission."

In Tuesday morning's filing, the ACLU and the CCR are challenging Treasury's ability to deprive a U.S. citizen of his right to retain counsel and, among other things, say the executive branch shouldn't be in the business of deciding which Americans can or can't have access to the courts. [Temple-Raston/NPR/4August2010]

The Slow Revelation of Poland's "CIA Detention Facilities." The question of whether Poland hosted a secret detention facility for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency remains murky, but evidence is mounting, slowly.

All may become a lot clearer if Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza is correct in reporting Wednesday that Poland's former leaders may face war crime charges for agreeing to host the facility.

According to earlier unconfirmed reports, Poland hosted a secret CIA prison in 2002-2005, during the presidency of Aleksander Kwasniewski and the government run by Leszek Miller, both leaders of the left-leaning Democratic Left Alliance.

Reports of the existence of the prison first appeared in 2005, and in 2007 a Council of Europe investigation led by Dick Marty concluded it had "factually established that secret detention centers operated by the CIA have existed for some years in Poland and Romania" and possibly other states, with the Polish facility being host to detainees who were considered especially sensitive.

It said "The detainees were subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment, sometimes protracted."

Polish authorities have repeatedly denied the existence of any facility.

Since then, news media brought more details. In June 2008, the New York Times said, citing unnamed CIA officers, that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had been held in Poland. A Kuwaiti suspected of mass murder of civilians, he remains in U.S. custody. Later in the year, Polish daily Dziennik quoted two anonymous Polish intelligence officers who said the CIA held terror suspects inside a military intelligence training base in Kiejkuty, northeastern Poland. Only the CIA had access to the zone created in the secluded base, but which had easy access to a former military airport in the vicinity, according to the report.

Earlier this year for the first time the Polish aviation authority delivered the first official confirmation that airplanes operated by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency landed in Poland in 2003.

In the latest development, Poland's former leaders Kwasniewski and Miller may stand trial before the State Tribunal, a rarely-used special court designed to try Poland's top officials according to Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza. The prosecutor on the case wants to ask the Speaker of Parliament to start the criminal procedure against the former leaders, according to the report. The case would first go to a parliamentary committee and then to the lower house of parliament, which has the power to decide whether or not to press charges, the daily says.

Under the Polish law, top officials - presidents, prime minister and cabinet ministers - cannot stand trial before a regular court for the alleged work-related criminal offenses they may have committed while in office. The State Tribunal has so far handled just a handful of cases since its creation in 1921.

Kwasniewski told Gazeta Wyborcza that Poland had cooperated with the CIA under his watch, with CIA operating flights to the Polish intelligence facility in Kiejkuty. But he again denied the CIA operated a secret detention facility there.

"There was no prison," he said. "I have no information about Americans torturing prisoners in Poland."

The prosecutor's motion will require political support in parliament. A majority behind the concept that the country must reveal its secrets and prosecute its leaders for cooperating with their U.S. ally may be difficult if not impossible to build. [Sobczyk/WallStreetJournal/4August2010] 

Senate Approves Honor for WWII Service Members. The U.S. Senate has unanimously approved the Congressional Gold Medal in recognition of the heroic service and sacrifices of Japanese-American service members during World War II.

The medal would go to the 100th Infantry Battalion, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and Japanese-American troops who were part of the Military Intelligence Service.

Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, the first Japanese-American to serve in Congress, received the Medal of Honor for his service during World War II, during which he lost an arm. He said Tuesday that he is humbled by the honor the Senate wants to bestow upon his unit.

The bill now heads to the House of Representatives for consideration. A similar measure passed the House unanimously in May. [NavyTimes/4August2010] 

Israel Indicts Three Arabs on Espionage Charges. Israel has indicted three Arab men on charges of spying for Syria.

The Shin Bet security service reported on Thursday that two Druse Arabs living in the Golan Heights and an Arab citizen of Israel were charged with passing information to the enemy and plotting to kidnap a Syrian pilot who had defected to Israel.

Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 war. The two indicted Druse Arabs - a father and son - are Syrian citizens, like most of the Druse in the Golan Heights.

Thousands of Druse surrounded the home of one of the two charged Druse Arabs when police arrived to arrest him in July, trapping officers inside for hours before the standoff ended peacefully.

Israel has recently charged several Israeli Arabs with espionage. [AP/5August2010] 

Another CIA Departure. In April, the CIA announced that Deputy Director Steve Kappes, a veteran operations officer, was retiring. Then last month, the Agency announced that Kappes's longtime deputy Michael Sulick, the Director of the National Clandestine Service, was stepping down.

Now, intelligence community sources tell POLITICO that Sulick's former deputy, the CIA's Associate Deputy Director of Operations (now Deputy Director of the National Clandestine Service), is also leaving.

The ADDO (now DDNCS), whose name is not public, is a former chief of the Near East division, who rose up the ranks during the tenure of former CIA Director George Tenet.

The CIA confirmed the impending departure, saying it was a well-deserved retirement for a long serving clandestine officer, and that it was hardly surprising that the new CIA Deputy Director Michael Morrel and new chief of the National Clandestine Service John Bennett might want to bring in their own deputies.

"There's nothing dramatic here. Far from it," according to a CIA spokesman. "The deputy chief of our National Clandestine Service - an exceptional officer who has spent his long and distinguished career undercover - has an outstanding record in intelligence and espionage."

"It's not unheard of for people who have earned their retirement to take it one day, especially after decades on duty, nor is it unusual for a new chief to choose his own deputies," the spokesman added. "None of that - if it happens - should be at all surprising." [Rozen/Politico/5August2010] 

For Spy Case, Libya Asks for $1 Billion from Seoul. Libya has demanded $1 billion worth of civil engineering work from Korea in compensation for a recent dispute over a South Korean spy's alleged espionage activities in the country.

Seoul's Foreign Ministry, however, denied the report, stressing the diplomatic sensitivity of the issue.

Ties between Seoul and Tripoli deteriorated rapidly in recent weeks after an intelligence agent at the Korean embassy in Libya was detained, questioned and deported in June. Following the deportation of the agent, the Economic Cooperation Bureau of Libya suspended its operations in Seoul, and its diplomats returned home on June 24.

"The Libyan authorities made the demands [for the construction] to the Korean delegation that recently visited the country to resolve the situation," the official told the paper Tuesday. "Libya also said it will restrict Korean businesses in the country if its demands were not met."

The delegation, comprised of officials from the National Intelligence Service, returned home over the weekend after negotiations with the Libyan authorities. The source said other demands were also made during the negotiations. "Libya wanted a list of contacts in the country whom the suspected South Korean spy had interacted with," the official said.

Libya also asked Korea to correct negative depictions of it and its leader Muammar el-Qaddafi in local textbooks, the official said, and asked the government to stop Korean Christian missionary activities in the Muslim nation. The demands are seen as being out of the ordinary. "When a conflict arises over an espionage operation, it is the international norm for a deputy head of the intelligence agency to visit the disturbed country and express an apology," the official said. "The Libyan's requests for astronomical compensation and the spy's list of contacts are unusual."

Libyan media also confirmed that Tripoli had made demands on Seoul in return for resolving the espionage incident. Quoting Oea Weekly, the English-language Tripoli Times said Seoul has confessed in writing its espionage operations in Libya. The report also said there were two diplomats involved in the Korean espionage case - not one as Korean media alleged.

"An official source told Oea that Libya made other demands, along with a written apology and confession, and those demands are not to be revealed for the time being," the report said. "The official also made it clear that Korean interests in Libya would be reviewed and certain measures are to be considered if the government of Korea did not fulfill the demands in the time frame specified by the Libyan side," it reported.

The report also said Libyan intelligence authorities suspect that the Korean agents may have been a part of a larger spy network in the region. "The Libyan source said it is most likely that the Korean spies are working for other foreign entities, and both the espionage and Christian missionary activities violate Libyan law," the report said.

Seoul's Foreign Ministry expressed concerns yesterday that media reports about Libya's demands would worsen the diplomatic incident.

In a radio interview yesterday, Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan said progress is being made. "Some media reports, however, are not true," he said. "I am also concerned that reporting about such issues at this moment will hinder the efforts to resolve the situation."

Stressing the government's ongoing diplomacy, Yu asked for the nation's patience over the crisis. A foreign ministry official also said Libyan media reports were inaccurate, claiming that only one diplomat was accused of espionage, not two. [Lee/JoongangDaily/5August2010]

Spy Scandal Hounds Uribe's Last Days in Office. A domestic spying scandal has reached Alvaro Uribe's inner circle, complicating the legacy of the popular two-term Colombian president who leaves office Saturday with 75 percent approval ratings.

Prosecutors have been questioning his closest advisers in recent weeks over allegations they illegally ordered warrantless wiretapping of the conservative president's political enemies by the DAS domestic spy agency.

Uribe's chief of staff, Bernardo Moreno, was deposed last week after jailed former DAS intelligence chief Fernando Tabares said Moreno told him in late 2007 that "the president was interested in having the DAS keep him informed" about four targets.

According to Tabares' sworn deposition, Moreno listed the targets as the Supreme Court; two opposition senators, Gustavo Petro and Piedad Cordoba; and investigative journalist Daniel Coronell.

Moreno did not respond to repeated attempts by The Associated Press to seek comment on Tabares' accusation. But in an interview with the newspaper El Tiempo on Sunday, he denied ordering any illegal espionage.

The DAS, short for the Department of Administrative Security, answers directly to the president but has been so discredited that President-elect Juan Manuel Santos plans a radical reform.

Most politically explosive in the scandal, which broke early last year, is the targeting of the Supreme Court. It has been at war with Uribe since it began prosecuting members of Congress in late 2006, most of them close Uribe allies, on charges of abetting and benefiting from illegal far-right militias responsible for Colombia's most egregious rights abuses.

To date, 21 lawmakers have been jailed in the paramilitary scandal, with 15 convicted and sentenced to prison terms of up to 40 years, chiefly for criminal conspiracy but some for crimes including murder. In addition, 54 are under investigation. [AP/5August2010] 

German Spies May Face Punishment Over Internet Use. Germany's government has asked its spy agency to open an investigation following reports that several former intelligence officers advertised themselves as experienced spies on a professional networking website.

A government spokesman said Friday that current and former employees of Germany's spy agency, BND, are bound to secrecy and may not disclose their employer.

The spokesman said on condition of anonymity in line with government policy that the chancellery asked the BND to consider disciplinary and legal action against the alleged former spies.

German tabloid newspaper Bild has reported at least 12 former employees looking for jobs advertised their spying credentials on the business networking website Xing, Germany's equivalent to LinkedIn. [AP/6August2010] 

Defense Ends Performance-Based Pay for Intelligence Employees. Most Defense Department intelligence employees will no longer be paid directly based on their job performance.

In an Aug. 5 memorandum, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence James Clapper, who late Thursday was confirmed as the next director of national intelligence, wrote that except for National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency employees, the intelligence workforce will move from pay-for-performance to a compensation system similar to the General Schedule.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates' decision to scrap the pay-for-performance elements of the Defense Civilian Intelligence Personnel System came in response to concerns from the National Academy of Public Administration, which in June found that the implementation of DCIPS was rushed and left employees with an unclear understanding of the link between performance and pay. The panel did not recommend shutting down the system, however. In the memo, Clapper wrote that Defense still is committed to a "performance-driven culture" and will be awarding bonuses, awards and quality step increases based on how well employees do their jobs.

"Future Defense Intelligence base pay increases will not be directly linked to performance and employees will be aligned to a GS-like grade structure," he wrote. "The heart of the DCIPS program will stay intact, including the occupational structure, common performance management system and bonuses tied to performance."

The NAPA panel found leaders showed uneven levels of commitment and failed to communicate how performance-based pay fit with the intelligence mission, as well as disseminated inconsistent information about how DCIPS works. Rather than abandoning the system, however, Defense should take a "more thoughtful, incremental and methodical approach" to implementation, the report concluded. That could include better training, clearer communication with employees, creating a formal process for gathering feedback from workers, and establishing a program management office to increase accountability, NAPA said.

Clapper said the process for moving to a GS-like system has yet to be determined, adding no employees will lose pay as a result of the change. [Long/GoveExec/6August2010]

Lebanon in Shock After Ex-General's Arrest on Spy Charges. This week's arrest of a well-respected retired general and politician allied with Hezbollah on suspicion of spying for Israel has sent shock waves through Lebanon and left many wondering how deep the Jewish state has infiltrated the country.

Fayez Karam, a member of the Christian Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), is the first political figure to be arrested in Lebanon as part of a wide-ranging probe launched in 2009 into Israeli spy networks.

A well-informed source close to the investigation told AFP that after his detention last Monday on the orders of the prosecutor general, Karam confessed to spying for Israel.

"You don't arrest someone like him without rock-solid proof and there was enough evidence against him," the source, who requested anonymity, said.

"He may not have given the Israelis much technical information, but his arrest has a huge political impact because of his position and rank," he added.

He said Karam, 62, who stood in parliamentary elections last year, allegedly used cell phones with roaming numbers from European countries to contact his Israeli handlers.

He reportedly met them in Paris, where he travelled regularly, and was nabbed because of an unspecified mistake.

Ironically, in the 1980s Karam headed the Lebanese army's anti-terrorism and counter-espionage unit where he worked closely with FPM leader Michel Aoun, who was army chief at the time and who also served as interim prime minister.

Aoun was staunchly anti-Syrian and was forced into exile in France at the end of Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war when Damascus imposed its rule over its tiny neighbor.

Aoun returned to Lebanon in 2005, one month after Syria withdrew its troops following a 29-year presence.

In a controversial move in 2006, he entered an alliance with the Iran- and Syria-backed Shiite group Hezbollah. Aoun also caused a stir by visiting both Damascus and Tehran.

Karam, who through the years has remained close to Aoun, was himself arrested by Syrian troops in 1990 and spent five months at the notorious Syrian jail of Mazzeh.

He went to Israel after his release through southern Lebanon, which was then occupied by Israel, and then headed to France where he set up a dry-cleaning business.

"He may have begun to spy for Israel in reaction to the harsh treatment he suffered during his detention at the Mazzeh prison," the source said.

Karam's arrest, which has been the talk of the capital Beirut, has shocked political circles in Lebanon, which along with Syria is still technically at war with Israel.

"We are stunned," said Simon Abi Ramia, a deputy with the FPM. "We just cannot believe it."

Another retired general who knows Karam well and who considered him to be a friend said the entire military community was incredulous.

"We're all in shock because he is really the last person you would expect to be implicated in this," the ex-general, who requested anonymity, told AFP.

"He is extremely polite, honest and very disciplined," he added. "That's all we have been talking about this week at the officers' club."

Local media reports questioned whether Karam had provided Israel with information about Hezbollah since he was very close to Aoun.

"Did Fayez Karam have details on the timing of the meetings that took place between Aoun and (Hezbollah chief) Hassan Nasrallah?" asked the Arabic-language daily Al-Akhbar, which is close to Hezbollah.

Members of the militant party refused to comment on the case.

Some 100 people have been arrested in the spy probe, among them members of the security forces and telecommunications employees.

Karam's arrest has many people now wondering who will be next.

"When you catch a big fish like him you always have others that follow," the source close to the investigation said. [Moussaoui /AP/9August2010] 

Section II - CONTEXT & PRECEDENCE

Lebanon Better Able to Catch Alleged Israeli Spies. The chief of Lebanon's domestic security forces had a warning for the Hezbollah commander: "You've been infiltrated."

With that, Achraf Rifi, head of the U.S.-backed Internal Security Forces, handed over evidence showing that two trusted, mid-ranking Hezbollah commanders were working as informants for Israeli military intelligence, said a high-ranking Lebanese security official with knowledge of the April 2009 meeting.

Wafiq Safa, the security chief for the powerful Shiite Muslim militia and political organization, was silent.

"They were shocked," said the security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak on the subject.

Things moved quickly after that. The Hezbollah commander called Rifi the next day to assure him that the militant group would "take care of" the alleged infiltrators, who were never heard from again, the security official said.

A month-long war between Hezbollah and Israel ended four years ago, and Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon ended a decade ago. But a clandestine intelligence war between the Jewish state and the Iranian-backed militant group continues unabated, officials and security experts say.

Now, a strengthening Lebanese government is helping Hezbollah bust alleged spy cells, sometimes using tools and tradecraft acquired from Western nations eager to build up Lebanon's security forces as a counterweight to the Shiite group, which since a 2008 power-sharing agreement has been a member of the governing coalition.

Although security officials here say they're using newfound tools to ferret out spies watching Hezbollah, just like they would against anyone attempting to infiltrate the country, Western observers express concern.

"There are deep Israeli worries that anything the West gives the Lebanese armed forces and the Internal Security Forces could be used against them," said Mara Karlin, a former Lebanon specialist at the U.S. Defense Department, now a researcher at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

The United States and its Western allies play a delicate balancing game in Lebanon. Since 2006, Washington has given nearly $500 million in military aid to Lebanese security forces and has allocated $100 million for 2011, making Lebanon the second-largest recipient of American military aid per capita after Israel.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense Alexander Vershbow met officials in Lebanon on Monday, emphasizing that continuing U.S. aid and training would allow the army to "prevent militias and other non-government organizations" from undermining the government.

The use of sophisticated equipment in the foiling of alleged Israeli spies may be the first concrete illustration of the U.S. dilemma. According to Lebanese officials, Israeli analysts and a Western diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity, Lebanon has redirected for use against Israel signal-detection equipment donated by France and intended to fight Islamic militants.

"The technology used with Fatah Islam was used to detect Israeli spies and collaborators in Lebanon," said retired Col. Kamal Awar, a U.S.-trained former member of the Lebanese Special Forces who now publishes Defense 21, an Arabic-language military journal. "They discovered they were talking with the Israeli guy on the other side of the border."

The U.S. military has also contributed to the Lebanese security forces' communications abilities. Israeli analyst Ronen Bergman, author of "The Secret War with Iran," who is writing a book about the history of his country's intelligence efforts, said the U.S. gave Lebanon's army sophisticated electronic equipment that allowed it to identify and trace even encrypted communications.

But there is no evidence that the training and equipment have been used to foil the intelligence operations of Israel, a major American ally.

Israel and Lebanon have long claimed counterintelligence coups and thwarted alleged traitors.

In 2008, Israel charged Sgt. Maj. Lovai Balut of Military Intelligence Unit 504 of passing on information to Hezbollah, according to the Jerusalem Post. In June, the Israeli army arrested a soldier and several civilians accused of spying for Hezbollah and smuggling drugs into the Jewish state.

But over the last two years, Lebanon's security forces may have conducted one of the most extraordinary counterintelligence sweeps in the annals of espionage. Dozens of alleged spies have been arrested in Lebanon on suspicion of sending information to Israel on the whereabouts and movements of Hezbollah and other enemies of the Jewish state.

The broad range of suspects suggests a widespread effort by Israeli security forces to infiltrate Hezbollah, which Israel views as a severe threat to its national security.

They include a city official of a small town in Hezbollah's Bekaa Valley stronghold. Ziad Homsy, allegedly recruited at a conference in the Far East, is serving a temporary sentence of hard labor pending a final verdict.

"Homsy had fought against the Israeli occupation," said a Lebanese army officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the topic. "It was not easy to recruit him. But he needed the money. He would never drive a Kia. It was either a Mercedes or an SUV or stay at home."

There is the case of Lebanese army reserve Brig. Gen. Adib Alam, arrested in 2009 on charges of spying for Israel, who was reportedly convinced that it would help counter Syria, which he despised for its dominant role in recent Lebanese history.

One convicted spy, Marwan Faqih, was a car dealer who allegedly sold Hezbollah bigwigs SUVs equipped with tracking devices that allowed Israel to follow their movements. Hezbollah has denied that its members bought cars from him.

This summer, Lebanese security forces arrested two people working for the country's state-owned Alfa cellphone company who allegedly allowed Israel to breach the communications network, a matter that has roiled the Lebanese Cabinet and prompted the government to announce that it would seek redress against Israel at the U.N. Security Council.

Three Lebanese nationals, one of whom was found guilty of providing Israel with sensitive information during its 2006 war with Hezbollah, have been sentenced to death for spying activities.

The motives vary, security officials said. Some of those apprehended have political gripes against Hezbollah.

"There are some political reasons, there are some psychological reasons," the high-ranking security official said. "But mostly it's money and sex."

According to Lebanese security officials and intelligence experts, the alleged spies used sophisticated electronic devices to communicate with their handlers via coded messages. In May 2009, the intelligence branch of the ISF paraded some of the devices before an eager press corps. They included laptop computers, satellite phones, a tracking device hidden in the lid of a water cooler and a wooden chest installed with an apparatus for transmitting and receiving messages.

"If only part of this story is true, it means [Hezbollah] has been sharing its every step and move with a silent partner," said Gad Shimron, a former Mossad officer and author of the book "Mossad Exodus."

Over the last several years, Lebanon has doubled the number of officers working in counterintelligence. Security officials believed that their efforts are bearing fruit by dismantling a robust Israeli spy infrastructure they say has been in place in the country for decades.

"They were strong and we were weaker," the Lebanese security official said. "The Israelis thought they had the technological edge that put them ahead of the Arabs by 30 years. But we showed them we're catching up."

But some analysts speculate that Lebanese security forces are giving themselves too much credit, and that Hezbollah, Iran and Syria may have contributed to the country's apparent counterintelligence successes.

"Anecdotal data suggests Hezbollah is providing intelligence to ISF and LAF," the Lebanese military, said Aram Nerguizian, a resident scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

Some of the successes involved blind luck. The alleged activities of Faqih, the SUV dealer, unraveled when a Hezbollah member took his car to a mechanic over a minor electrical problem.

"The electrician started testing here and there," the Lebanese army officer said. "He found a wire leading to a strange device. He told the owner."

Hezbollah detained Faqih soon afterward. [Daragahi/LATimes/1August2010] 

How the US Reshaped an Afghan Prison's Image. In an outdoor field, inmates at the Detention Facility in Parwan play soccer in the shadow of the transport planes, shipping containers and thousands of troops that cram this major hub of the Afghanistan war.

In another part of the prison, the men are being visited by their wives and children. Others whose families live far from the base talk on a videoconference system. In a vocational training wing, inmates use new sewing machines to make curtains for a meeting room.

"They jumped all over this," Army Maj. Ann Sampson said. "They all want to make suits and learn English."

Prison life at Bagram is far different today than the initial years of the war, say military officials. Before Parwan, suspected Taliban militants, sympathizers and abettors were squeezed into a windowless Soviet airplane hangar known as Bagram Theater Internment Facility. The Red Cross complained about the rudimentary conditions. Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union likened it to the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where inmates were abused by several U.S. troops.

Two Afghan inmates died at Bagram in 2002. A military judge found Army Pfc. Willie Brand guilty of abusing one of the inmates, and five U.S. guards pleaded guilty to abusing inmates there. Afghans were not allowed to visit, the Western media were refused entry, and the local press was full of dark accusations of hidden torture chambers and clandestine executions.

"Our first approach was, 'You know, we have to hold them.' It wasn't planned or intended," Vice Adm. Robert Harward, who oversees detention operations in Afghanistan, said of the early days of the war in Afghanistan. "We were in the reactionary phase of detention operations across the board. (Parwan) is a dramatic shift from what Bagram was about."

Harward is the commander of Joint Task Force 435, which was created in September to revamp detention operations in Afghanistan. Parwan opened late last year, a $60 million facility with huge cells, recreation facilities, visitor centers, high-definition TVs, modern medical equipment and, more importantly, Harward says, a new attitude.

U.S. military leaders believe that running a transparent prison is critical to ending the armed conflict in Afghanistan. They hope the openness will end the Taliban's use of the Bagram prison as a source of propaganda, make it easier to get military intelligence from inmates, and help persuade captured Afghans to reintegrate into the communities by working with coalition forces and the government of Afghanistan.

Not all are persuaded of the effort. Army Maj. David Frakt, a military lawyer who has defended former Bagram inmates, acknowledges that conditions have gotten better and cases are adjudicated faster. But he says the inmates still have few legal rights, such as being given a "personal representative" rather than lawyers.

"All of their efforts to improve things and make things more fair still fall short when they refuse detainees to be represented by council," Frakt says. "Other than that, keeping detainees in Afghanistan, closer to home putting timelines, deadline requirements - all of those things are an improvement."

The thinking behind the new facility originates from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former top U.S. commander in Afghanistan who was replaced recently by Gen. David Petraeus. McChrystal's counterinsurgency strategy stressed the importance of winning over the locals to deny the Taliban recruits and safe havens.

In his August assessment of the war, McChrystal observed that captured Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders were operating within prison walls and creating future insurgents out of inmates. He blamed a lack of transparency.

"The Afghan people see U.S. detention operations as secretive and lacking in due process" he warned. "Hardened, committed Islamists are indiscriminately mixed with petty criminals and sex offenders. They are using the opportunity to radicalize and indoctrinate them."

Joint Task Force 435 was created in September to remedy the situation. The Pentagon said the purpose of the task force was, among other things, "to support the overall strategy of defeating the Taliban insurgents."

One of its first tasks was shuttering Bagram, which closed in January.

"Bagram represents those early years when conditions were quite horrifying and there were egregious human rights abuses," Frakt says. "A lot of physical abuse, it was extremely cold, people were placed in stress positions, they were handcuffed to doors or to overhead bars, people were hooded."

Afghans say such reports fueled anti-American sentiment.

"Where I come from, half the people thought the prisoners were being tortured by U.S. soldiers," says Mohammad Zai, 21, an eastern Afghanistan native who is training to become a prison guard at Parwan.

Some think the problems at Bagram were cleaned up long ago.

"When's the last accusation of abuse at Bagram? 2003?" asks Army Col. Thomas Cantwell, who is leading the training program that teaches Afghan soldiers the basics of being a prison guard. "So why are we still talking about it?"

Afghans were suspicious nonetheless, says Col. Bhadur Shah Ahmadi, an Afghan commander training Afghan prison guards. He says the Taliban used the cloak of secrecy at Bagram to conjure up all manner of horrors taking place there against Afghan sons and husbands and fathers. The stories enraged Afghans and led many to take up arms against the Americans, he says.

"The U.S. did not let people see the prisoners," Ahmadi says. "The enemy used that for their advantage."

Army Maj. Andy Rodgers says about 100 visitors a week are making the trip to Parwan to see their relatives and about 50 more are using the videoconference links from locations in Kabul and the southern city of Kandahar.

In the Parwan cell block, about 800 inmates are housed in large, open-air rooms that hold up to 20 men each. Sleeping on mats, the men create small personal areas to keep their limited belongings - the Koran, blankets, prayer beads, books, drawings and, sometimes, extra cartons of milk.

Some have taken the straws from the milk cartons and used them to make paper flowers, hanging them on the walls and along the metal bars of the cells.

Inmates are fed Afghan bread made outside the prison and other traditional food. Rodgers, the operations officer of the prison, says they gain an average of 37 pounds in the prison.

"They really like chicken strips," Brig. Gen. Mike Martins says. "They're not big into gravies."

Gone is the old process of reviewing each inmate's detention behind closed doors and deciding whether to release them by simply looking through their files. Now, inmates appear before a three-person Detainee Review Board to discuss the evidence against them, listen to witnesses and argue for release.

When the new process began late last year, about 25% of the inmates going before the board wound up being handed over to Afghan custody or freed, according to the task force. That number is now up to 50%.

Martins uses the example of Jamaluddin, an Afghan who was captured in May 2009 after coalition forces determined he was assisting an insurgent group to carry out attacks. When he met with his review board in February, several people from his home province showed up to vouch for Jamaluddin. He was released.

Now, Martins says he is hearing reports that Jamaluddin is showing up unannounced to meetings throughout his home province, urging people to work with the Americans and telling them of the humane way he was treated.

"You just can't get that from a news spot or a radio announcement," says Martins, a Harvard-trained lawyer and military judge who runs the day-to-day operations at Parwan. "What this new process allows us to do ... is end the war, detainee by detainee."

When inmates are released, Americans transport them back to their hometowns and hold a "release shura" - a meeting at which local elders pledge to watch over the inmate.

At a recent shura in Khost province, which borders Pakistan, three men were handed over to village elders at a government center. One by one, the men proclaimed their innocence, claimed there were more innocent men being held in Parwan and chastised Afghan government officials for allowing a foreign country to detain their countrymen. But they had kind words for their jailers.

"Americans treated us OK," said Jumadin, who was arrested last year after coalition forces discovered a weapons cache on his property. "They treated us very humanely. They gave us hats. They gave us prayer rugs."

Parwan is also a hub for interrogations, an intelligence-gathering practice that has not been without controversy. Intelligence personnel say they are using methods that are more effective than previous ways of getting inmates to provide information.

When one is scheduled for questioning, guards go to his cell, place him into a wheelchair, blindfold him and take him to an interrogation room in a secret part of the prison. Guards do the same for inmates who are being taken to the medical clinic or to meet with families. The practice ensures that others being held don't know who is speaking with U.S. interrogators.

"The detainees are very hard with each other if they even suspect that they're cooperating," said Col. Anthony MacDonald, the Theater Intelligence Group commander. "It's like they're guilty until proven innocent."

MacDonald said the new facility has improved his ability to glean more information from the inmates. Before Parwan, they were only able to do about 100 interviews a week, confining their questions to very specific topics. Interviews are now up to 300 a week.

"My sample set has grown threefold," MacDonald says. "I have a greater depth of information."

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a former military prosecutor who has worked to reshape U.S. detention policy in Afghanistan, worries that the rush to hand over the prison could interfere with what's most important right now - a pending offensive against the southern Taliban stronghold of Kandahar. Harward wants to hand over all detention operations to the Afghans by Jan. 1. After touring the facility recently, Graham said the intelligence that U.S. interrogators are getting is too important to give up.

"What we need to focus on, is the intelligence-gathering to help the surge be successful," Graham says, referring to the 30,000 additional troops President Obama has ordered to Afghanistan.

Harward says the intelligence side of the operation could be the last to be handed over.

"I would ... suggest the government of Afghanistan will always want us to be a partner," Harward says. "We will be partnered for a very long time in doing that." [Gomez/USAToday/4August2010] 

Secrecy Shrouds Canadian Spy History. What concerns did Canadian government spymasters have about efforts to break the Japanese's military's code in 1944?

What stood in the way in the 1950s to hinder the development of a Canadian secret service?

After the federal government spent $40,000 to find those answers and others for a study on the history of Canada's intelligence community, the results remained locked up behind the doors of the Privy Council Office.

And in a new twist, the Privy Council Office has now declared the reasons for the secrecy surrounding the historical study are secret as well.

It took PCO four years to respond to a Citizen access to information request on why the official history of Canada's spy community can't be released to the public. That response was 16 pages of completely censored documents.

At issue is an official history of the Canadian intelligence community that was finished around 2001 by Professor Wesley Wark at a cost to taxpayers of $40,000.

Wark, an intelligence specialist and a visiting professor at the University of Ottawa, had received support from federal bureaucrats in his quest to publish the study he wrote as a book. He has argued that such a book would educate Canadians on the valuable contributions the country's intelligence agencies have made over the decades.

But nine years after it was completed the history, which covers the period from the Second World War to 1970, remains in limbo.

"I think it's a good news story so it's all the more bizarre to bury it away in locked cabinets in Ottawa," says Wark.

Parts of the history have already been released through the Access to Information law but Wark says large and crucial chunks of the study have been withheld or severely censored by the government. Without those portions intact, the history of the country's intelligence services would be incomplete, making a book on the subject not worthwhile, he added.

PCO officials did not respond to a request for comment on whether Wark's study will be eventually released.

Wark said he had written the history with the view to having it made public. With that in mind, he was careful in what he included, for example, removing the names of individuals who served with foreign intelligence services.

Wark said the censorship is even more baffling as the history study did not bring any "scandals or terrible deeds to light." Much of the study is about the bureaucratic maneuvers, discussions and in-fighting that went along with the development of various intelligence organizations and policies.

"I felt that the material being redacted, from my own judgment, represented no conceivable harm to national security," he added.

Wark originally had the support of bureaucrats to publish the study but once Access to Information officials from various departments got involved that support dwindled. "As personalities changed on the government side the sense of commitment (to publication) eventually got diluted," he added.

The government's continued insistence to keep much of the contents of the study secret is even more strange since allied intelligence agencies have produced and released to the public similar histories, Wark noted. The official histories of the CIA and the National Security Agency, both in the U.S., have been published as has that of the MI5 security service in Britain. The official history of the British MI6 intelligence service will be published next year, he added.

Lawyers and others who use the access law point to an increasing reluctance in the federal bureaucracy to release information, even those documents decades old.

In particular, they point to a legal battle, about to resume in the fall in Ottawa, to force the federal government to release surveillance documents produced by the RCMP from the 1930s to 1970s about former NDP leader Tommy Douglas, the father of Canada's public health-care system.

The records had been requested under the access law but Library and Archives Canada, based on advice from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, refused to release many of the files, claiming they violated privacy and they put the security of the nation at risk.

The Office of the Information Commissioner, Suzanne Legault, has agreed with the government that the release of the records, about 75 years old, would put Canada's defense in jeopardy and hinder the "detection, prevention or suppression of subversive or hostile activities." The commission serves as an impartial intermediary between those seeking access to federal records and government institutions.

Wark has also questioned the government's decision to withhold the Tommy Douglas records. [Pugliese/OttawaCitizen/9August2010] 

Section III - COMMENTARY

A Leaner and Meaner Intelligence System, by David Ignatius. The [Washington] Post series on "Top Secret America" has done a superb job of charting an intelligence community so big and unwieldy, and so layered with redundant operations, that, as the newspaper said in its opening headline, it is "a hidden world, growing beyond control."

The Obama administration, rather than reacting defensively, should seize the initiative by trying to control this behemoth. The paradox here is that a smaller, better-controlled intelligence community will actually make the country safer than the unmanaged sprawl we have now.

This is the real mission for the star-crossed Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), which was created in 2005 to bring order out of the intelligence chaos. By picking the wrong fights and conducting turf wars, the DNI has made some of these problems worse. The right model is the Office of Management and Budget - a coordinating staff of experts that can monitor budgets, personnel and performance.

James Clapper, Obama's nominee for DNI, took some wobbly first steps Tuesday at his confirmation hearing, criticizing "sensationalism" in a Post series that has been widely praised by other intelligence veterans. And he unwisely dismissed the problem of redundancy in the intelligence bureaucracy, which many other experts regard as serious.

"There needs to be a revolution in the intelligence community, not an evolution," says Henry Crumpton, a former top CIA counterterrorism officer who now runs a company that invests in intelligence contractors. "You need to cut back in dramatic ways and empower people in the field, he says. "We've just been throwing money at the problem," producing a "breathtaking lack of coordination."

How did this out-of-control Top Secret America develop, and how can the problems be fixed?

The archipelago of contractors surfaced decades ago, and in some cases it has provided essential and efficient services. Once upon a time, the Navy kept its own herd of cows to provide safe milk for the Naval Academy and made its own rope. The Army insisted that the only reliable weapons were ones made in military-run arsenals. This all changed with the Cold War and the rush of technology, which created what President Dwight Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex."

The intelligence community's version of this complex features many of the old Cold War giants - General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are among the 10 companies doing the most top-secret work, according to The Post. The crowd at the intelligence trough is increasing as defense firms seek lucrative counterterrorism and homeland-security contracts to replace weapons procurements that have been cut.

The intelligence community, to be sure, needs private help. Once upon a time, the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology managed the cutting-edge breakthroughs that were later copied by industry. But in the information-technology era, this flow has been reversed.

The code-breaking National Security Agency has experienced the upside and the downside of outsourcing. The agency in 2001 launched a successful IT upgrade program called Groundbreaker. A less happy experience was the NSA's Trailblazer program, launched in 2000, which sought private help in upgrading surveillance and data-storage capabilities. That program had big cost overruns and other disappointments.

The war on terrorism has been a magnet for spending, just as the Cold War was. The military's Special Operations Command, based in Tampa, has spun off a vast secret network of contractors doing esoteric jobs ranging from "human terrain mapping" to intelligence collection in war zones. By one estimate, SOCOM has 1,000 people just involved in its secret contracting.

The CIA, too, has been awash in money since Sept. 11. "We expanded so fast we were sometimes bidding against ourselves" for contractor services, recalls retired Gen. Michael Hayden, a former director of the CIA. The agency saw such a rapid migration of its blue-badged employees to better-paying jobs as green-badged contractors doing the same work that Hayden launched a "green to blue" program and banned those resigning from the CIA from contracting there for the next 12 months. But these moves barely dented the problem.

Congressional budgeting has played a role, too. Most Iraq, Afghanistan and war on terrorism funding has come through supplemental appropriations, which must be renewed each year and thus are seen as uncertain. Intelligence agencies have preferred to add this surge capability through "temporary" contractors rather than permanent employees.

The result has been a bloated "community" that combines secrecy and bureaucracy in a ruinous mix, as described by reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin. A couple of years ago I wrote that the problem was so bad that perhaps we should blow up the existing structure and start over. Maybe that's extreme, but the watchword for Clapper should be: Less is more. The Post series dramatized a system that doesn't work, and in this case, leaner will be meaner - and cheaper, too. [Ignatius/WashingtonPost/22July2010] 

Sorry, Time, Assange is a Criminal, Not a Journalist, by Marc Thiessen. Over at Time Magazine, Michael Scherer takes issue with my column charging that WikiLeaks is a criminal enterprise and that its founder, Julian Assange, should be indicted for violations of the Espionage Act.

Scherer writes:

"To be clear, Assange's crime, according to Thiessen, is intentionally receiving and republishing classified information, something that is done with some regularity in the United States by respectable and responsible reporters working for top flight news organizations. To adopt Thiessen's view, one would effectively have to reject the Supreme Court's opinion in New York Times Co. v. United States, the so-called Pentagon Papers case from 1971."

Scherer is grossly misinformed both as to the law and what constitutes "respectable and responsible journalism."

First, the law. In 1971, the Supreme Court rejected the government's efforts to suppress publication of the Pentagon Papers, but it explicitly stated that the decision to go ahead with publication of the classified materials could result in criminal prosecution. In a concurring opinion, Justice White, joined by Justice Stewart, wrote:

"...terminating the ban on publication ... does not mean that the law either requires or invites newspapers or others to publish them, or that they will be immune from criminal action if they do. Prior restraints require an unusually heavy justification under the First Amendment, but failure by the government to justify prior restraints does not measure its constitutional entitlement to a conviction for criminal publication. That the government mistakenly chose to proceed by injunction does not mean that it could not successfully proceed in another way."

Justices White and Stewart further noted that:

"The Criminal Code contains numerous provisions potentially relevant to these cases. Section 797 makes it a crime to publish certain photographs or drawings of military installations. Section 798, also in precise language, proscribes knowing and willful publication of any classified information concerning the cryptographic systems or communication intelligence activities of the United States, as well as any information obtained from communication intelligence operations. If any of the material here at issue is of this nature, the newspapers are presumably now on full notice of the position of the United States, and must face the consequences if they publish. I would have no difficulty in sustaining convictions under these sections on facts that would not justify the intervention of equity and the imposition of a prior restraint... Section 793(e) makes it a criminal act for any unauthorized possessor of a document "relating to the national defense" either (1) willfully to communicate or cause to be communicated that document to any person not entitled to receive it or (2) willfully to retain the document and fail to deliver it to an officer of the United States entitled to receive it. The subsection was added in 1950 because preexisting law provided no penalty for the unauthorized possessor unless demand for the documents was made."

Assange could be indicted and prosecuted under these and other provisions of U.S. law. Indeed, the Obama administration is apparently considering indicting Assange, or may already have. The New York Times reported Friday:

"A person familiar with the investigation has said that Justice Department lawyers are exploring whether Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks could be charged with inducing, or conspiring in, violations of the Espionage Act, a 1917 law that prohibits the unauthorized disclosure of national security information.

As to Scherer's claim that Assange is doing nothing different from what is regularly done by "respectable and responsible reporters working for top-flight news organizations," I suspect top-flight news organizations (including The Post and Time Magazine) would likely take issue with that statement. Certainly the news organizations that initially reported on Assange's revelations do.

According to the Columbia Journalism Review, these news organizations recoiled when Assange referred to them as WikiLeaks' "media partners." New York Times reporter Eric Schmitt told CJR:

"I've seen Julian Assange in the last couple of days kind of flouncing around talking about this collaboration like the four of us were working all this together," says Schmitt. "But we were not in any kind of partnership or collaboration with him. This was a source relationship. He's making it sound like this was some sort of journalistic enterprise between WikiLeaks, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel, and that's not what it was."

Nick Davies of the Guardian agreed:

"There's a really interesting collaboration between the three news organizations. But Julian, he's a source," says Davies.

Unlike reputable news organizations, Assange did not give the U.S. government an opportunity to review the classified information WikiLeaks was planning to release so they could raise national security objections (such as, for example, the fact that they contained the names of Afghan informants who are now being hunted and killed by the Taliban as a result of his disclosures). Providing such an opportunity for review is common journalistic practice. Indeed, when this newspaper recently put up its "Top Secret America" website, built entirely from publicly-available materials, it still allowed the U.S. government to review the site - and even adjusted it to accommodate national security concerns. As The Post's ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, wrote:

"The Post allowed government officials to see the Web site in advance and express concerns. The editor's note said, 'One government body objected to certain data points on the site and explained why; we removed those items.'... Out of what [Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli] termed a 'public safety' precaution, The Post curbed the capabilities of its interactive Web site. For instance, the Google-powered mapping function limits the degree to which readers can pinpoint many locations."

Again, The Post went to these lengths for a website built entirely from open source information.

By contrast, Assange simply posted 76,000 un-redacted secret documents on the web, without giving the government a chance to review the documents. He even chided the New York Times for consulting with national security officials before publishing its news stories on the revelations, declaring:

"We don't see, in the case of a story where an organization has engaged in some kind of abusive conduct and that story is being revealed, that it has a right to know the story before the public, a right to know the story before the victims, because we know that what happens in practice is that that is just extra lead time to spin the story."

The Times found Assange's approach so dangerous and irresponsible that the paper pointedly refused to link to the WikiLeaks site. In a statement to the Daily Beast, Times editor Bill Keller said this was intentional:

"The Times - in a note to readers explaining how we handled the secret archive - made a point of saying that we did not link to the material posted by WikiLeaks. Since we normally do link to source data that we have used in our stories, we thought readers were entitled to know that the absence of a link was intentional, not some oversight, and to know the reason for it. In our own publication, in print and on our Web site, we were careful to remove anything that could put lives at risk. We could not be sure that the trove posted on WikiLeaks, even with some 15,000 documents held back, would not endanger lives. And, in fact, as we will be reporting in tomorrow's paper, our subsequent search of the material posted on WikiLeaks found many names of Afghan informants who could now be targets of reprisals by the insurgents.... His decision to release the data to everyone... had potential consequences that I think anyone, regardless of how he views the war, would find regrettable."

So let's not pretend that Assange is a journalist who is simply doing what other responsible journalists have done for years. Even the news organizations reporting on his information say his conduct is highly irresponsible and do not consider him a fellow journalist.

By the standards of U.S. law - including under the Supreme Court decision in the Pentagon Papers case - he should be considered a criminal. He is in unlawful possession of classified information. He has released tens of thousands of documents, which the Taliban are using at this moment to target and execute Afghans who cooperated with U.S. and NATO forces. And he is threatening to release many thousands more, which could put more American, Afghan and allied lives at risk. His actions are a clear violation of U.S. law. He should face justice for these crimes. [Thiessen/WashingtonPost/9August2010] 

Plugging the WikiLeak: What Can the Government Do?, by Lolita C. Baldor. An online whistle-blower's threat to release more classified Pentagon and State Department documents is raising difficult questions of what the government can or would do, legally, technically or even militarily to stop it.

Constrained by the global reach of the Internet, sophisticated encryption software and the domestic legal system, the answer seems to be: Not much.

But if the U.S. government believes that the release of classified documents WikiLeaks is preparing to disclose will threaten national security or put lives at risk, cyber and legal experts say the options could expand to include cyber strikes to take down the WikiLeaks website and destroy its files or covert operations to steal or disable the files.

It all sounds, at times, like a spy movie, where the possibilities extend as far as the imagination can reach. But most outsiders agree that reality is probably far less dramatic.

At the center of the drama was the posting last week of a massive 1.4 gigabyte mystery file named "Insurance" on the WikiLeaks website.

The "Insurance" file is encrypted, nearly impossible to open until WikiLeaks provides the passwords. But experts suggest that if anyone can crack it - it would be the National Security Agency.

That file, coupled with WikiLeaks' release of more than 77,000 secret military documents last month, prompted the Pentagon to demand that the website's editor-in-chief, Julian Assange, cancel any new document dumps and pull back the Afghan war data he already posted.

WikiLeaks slammed the demand as an obnoxious threat, and Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell declined to detail what, if any, actions the Defense Department may be ready to take.

Few people involved, for the Pentagon and other agencies, would talk openly about what the Pentagon or the clandestine NSA could or would do to stop the expected document dump. It is not even clear if U.S. officials actually know what WikiLeaks has.

"Do we believe that WikiLeaks has additional cables? We do," said State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley. "Do we believe that those cables are classified? We do. And are they State Department cables? Yes."

Officials say the data may also include up to 15,000 military documents related to the Afghanistan war that were not made public in the initial release.

Daniel Schmitt, a WikiLeaks spokesman in Berlin, said Saturday the new batch of classified documents the website is preparing to release will contribute to the public's understanding of the war.

"Hopefully with this understanding, public scrutiny will then influence governments to develop better politics," he told The Associated Press.

Schmitt denied that the disclosure of the documents is a threat to U.S. security interests.

Assuming the documents contain highly sensitive information that threatens national security, the U.S. must weigh a number of options, experts say.

First, from a legal standpoint, there is probably little the U.S. government can do to stop WikiLeaks from posting the files.

It is against federal law to knowingly and willfully disclose or transmit classified information. But Assange, an Australian who has no permanent address and travels frequently, is not a U.S. citizen.

Since Assange is a foreign citizen living in a foreign country, it's not clear that U.S. law would apply, said Marc Zwillinger, a Washington lawyer and former federal cyber crimes prosecutor. He said prosecutors would have to figure out what crime to charge Assange with, and then face the daunting task of trying to indict him or persuade other authorities to extradite him.

It would be equally difficult, Zwillinger said, to effectively use an injunction to prevent access to the data.

"Could the U.S. get an injunction to force U.S. Internet providers to block traffic to and from WikiLeaks such that people couldn't access the website?" Zwillinger said. "It's an irrelevant question. There would be thousands of paths to get to it. So it wouldn't really stop people from getting to the site. They would be pushing the legal envelope without any real benefit."

Legal questions aside, the encrypted file conjures visions of secret codebreakers hunched over their laptops, tearing open secret, protected files in seconds with a few keystrokes.

Reality is not that simple. It appears WikiLeaks used state-of-the-art software requiring a sophisticated electronic sequence of numbers, called a 256-bit key, to open them.

The main way to break such an encrypted file is by what's called a "brute force attack," which means trying every possible key, or password, said Herbert Lin, a senior computer science and cryptology expert at the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences.

Unlike a regular six- or eight-character password that most people use every day, a 256-bit key would equal a 40 to 50 character password, he said.

If it takes 0.1 nanosecond to test one possible key and you had 100 billion computers to test the possible number variations, "it would take this massive array of computers 10 to the 56th power seconds - the number 1, followed by 56 zeros" to plow through all the possibilities, said Lin.

How long is that?

"The age of the universe is 10 to the 17th power seconds," explained Lin. "We will wait a long time for the U.S. government or anyone else to decrypt that file by brute force."

Could the NSA, which is known for its supercomputing and massive electronic eavesdropping abilities abroad, crack such an impregnable code?

It depends on how much time and effort they want to put into it, said James Bamford, who has written two books on the NSA.

The NSA has the largest collection of supercomputers in the world. And officials have known for some time that WikiLeaks has classified files in its possession.

The agency, he speculated, has probably been looking for a vulnerability or gap in the code, or a backdoor into the commercial encryption program protecting the file.

At the more extreme end, the NSA, the Pentagon and other U.S. government agencies - including the newly created Cyber Command - have probably reviewed options for using a cyber attack against the website, which could disrupt networks, files, electricity, and so on.

"This is the kind of thing that they are geared for," said Bamford, "since this is the type of thing a terrorist organization might have - a website that has damaging information on it. They would want to break into it, see what's there and then try to destroy it."

The vast nature of the Internet, however, makes it essentially impossible to stop something, or take it down, once it has gone out over multiple servers.

In the end, U.S. officials will have to weigh whether a more aggressive response is worth the public outrage it would likely bring. Most experts predict that, despite the uproar, the government will probably do little other than bluster, and the documents will come out anyway.

"Once you start messing with the Internet, taking things down, and going to the maximum extent to hide everything from coming out, it doesn't necessarily serve your purpose," said Bamford. "It makes the story bigger than it would have been had the documents been released in the first place."

"If, in the end, the goal is to decrease the damage, you have to wonder whether pouring fuel on the fire is a reasonable solution," he said. [Baldor/AP/7August2010] 

Clapper, Lavelle, Military Service, by Arthur I. Cyr. Despite facing multiple military challenges, and two long very vexing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Americans remain remarkably preoccupied with varied domestic concerns.

Politics in Washington D.C. seems as mean, rancorous and partisan as ever.

With this in mind, two essentially positive Washington developments directly related to our military should receive a lot more attention.

Retired Air Force Gen. James R. Clapper Jr., named by President Obama as the next Director of National Intelligence, has been confirmed unanimously by the Senate following unanimous Intelligence Committee support.

Simultaneously, the late Air Force Gen. John D. Lavelle is being posthumously vindicated for actions that cost his career during the agonizing last phase of the Vietnam War.

Clapper succeeds retired Admiral Dennis Blair, who was attacked for ineffectiveness and ultimately alienated the White House.

Clapper's nomination was criticized by some who argue the military has become too prominent in intelligence.

That complaint is not persuasive, especially when historical context is considered.

The Central Intelligence Group was established in 1946, succeeded by the Central Intelligence Agency the following year. The first four directors were all senior military officers: Rear Admiral Sidney W. Souers, General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, Vice Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, and General Walter Bedell Smith.

Bedell Smith, a very successful CIA head, had been chief of staff to Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower during World War II.

In retrospect, Ike and his team were successful overall in steering the U.S. through exceptionally dangerous Cold War years.

Experience in the disciplined milieu of the military translated directly into success in the shadowy world of the spy.

Current CIA Director Leon Panetta is a civilian Washington veteran and highly effective administrator as well as political operator.

So far, he has shown commendable independence, including opposition to Attorney General Eric Holder's retroactive investigation of CIA officers involved in harsh interrogations.

Such independence of mind is essential in this shadow world. In the fall of 1962, civilian CIA Director John McCone refused to share the Kennedy White House's wishful thinking that Soviet long-range missiles would not be introduced in Cuba.

He insisted on resuming U-2 flights, which led to discovery of Moscow's duplicity - just in time.

The National Intelligence Director has a fancy title but no direct control over sixteen separate intelligence agencies.

The 9/11 Commission urged strong central authority; this was not implemented.

Presidential leadership therefore is absolutely essential.

This brings us to Air Force Gen. John Lavelle, demoted and forced to retire for allegedly unauthorized bombing raids during the Vietnam War.

Nixon White House tapes now confirm he acted under presidential directive.

Bombing Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam did interdict some supplies.

In South Vietnam, massive U.S. B-52 bombing raids along with tactical air support were essential in defeating an enormous offensive in the spring of 1972 by the North Vietnamese army.

But bombing also fed the anti-war movement at home.

Nixon worried nonstop about defeat for reelection in November, so Lavelle was left to "twist slowly in the wind," to use a phrase popular in that White House.

This dedicated officer now at last is being vindicated.

Obama has an opportunity to counter current perceptions of weak leadership. Contrary to some predictions, Clapper generated bipartisan Senate support.

Obama has initiated Lavelle's vindication.

At this moment, praising Republicans and bipartisanship would be a very smart and strong White House move, implicitly emphasizing honesty is the best policy. [Arthur I. Cyr is a Clausen Distinguished Professor at Carthage College.] [Cyr/TimesHerald/8August2010]

Section IV - OBITUARIES, BOOKS, JOBS AND COMING EVENTS

Obituaries

Robert John Baker. Robert John Baker, 88, an intelligence and operations officer for the Central Intelligence Agency from 1951 until his retirement in 1981, died July 19 at Greenspring Village retirement community in Springfield. He had congestive heart failure.

A native of Detroit, he received a bachelor's degree in 1947 from Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. He served in the Navy during World War II and was a member of the Scouts and Raiders, the Navy's forerunner to the SEALSs special operations force. His decorations included the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart.

He was a reading volunteer for Fairfax County Public Schools and an ESL tutor through St. John's United Methodist Church in Springfield, where he served on the board and taught Sunday school.

He had been a Springfield resident since the late 1950s.

He was a member of Giant Foods' community advisory board during the 1980s and was the editor of the Navy's Scouts and Raiders newsletter from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s.

Survivors include his wife of 61 years, Marilyn Cato Baker of Springfield; three children, Laurie Baker of Falls Church, Julie Brannan of Fairfax County and Robert J. Baker Jr. of Arlington; and five grandchildren. [Wiseman/WashingtonPost/4August2010] 

Books

Roald Dahl: The Spy Who Loved Me. In an exclusive extract from his new Roald Dahl biography -Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl - Donald Sturrock recounts how, as a dashing young air attach�, the writer enraptured New York society's greatest beauties. 

Roald Dahl had been a rebellious teenager, but his defiance was generally a private affair. As a schoolboy at Repton, disguised in waders, helmet, wind-jacket and goggles, he had roared noisily through town on his illicit motorbike, relishing the annoyance he caused the masters and exulting in the fact that no one in authority recognized him. "I never told anyone, not even my best friend," he wrote later. "I had learnt even at that tender age that there are no secrets unless you keep them to yourself, and this was the greatest secret I had ever had to keep in my life so far."

Yet among those who knew him best, Dahl was notorious for being leaky. "He regularly betrayed confidences," his old American friend, Marian Goodman, told me with a chuckle, recalling one incident where Roald destroyed a friendship and wrecked a marriage by an intemperate indiscretion. His daughter Lucy agreed: "Dad never could keep his mouth shut. He gossiped like a girl." She found it almost impossible to imagine that her father had worked in any capacity as a spy during the war. Yet he did. And for the most part he was scrupulously discreet about it.

Dahl's remit to Washington in the early Forties mainly involved dealing with press and public relations, but he would also have been aware of a complex network of British undercover operations being manipulated from New York by one of the war's most eccentric figures - the buccaneering Canadian industrialist and businessman William Stephenson.

A former boxing champion and pioneering First World War aviator, Stephenson's business acumen and flair for technical innovation had, by the mid-Twenties, made him a millionaire several times over. Churchill admired him and selected him to run a wartime secret-service network based in the United States called British Security Coordination (BSC). Established initially to promote UK interests in the United States and counter Nazi propaganda, BSC soon became involved in more clandestine activities ranging from training spies to publishing horoscopes from Hitler's former astrologer that predicted the F�hrer's imminent demise.

Dahl was fascinated by BSC, initially imagining its enigmatic boss - code name "Intrepid" - as a "small unknown creature, hiding in a dark room somewhere in New York". Reality was an office on the 35th floor of the International Building at Rockefeller Center, from where Stephenson coordinated more than 1,000 agents, whose activities were directed towards counteracting the significant element in American politics and society that was either overtly isolationist or simply strongly opposed to Great Britain and its imperial interests.

Exactly how Dahl stumbled into this world is not entirely clear. His sister Alfhild, whose love of a good story often rivaled her brother's, believed Roald's links with espionage began shortly after he was invalided back to England in 1941 - he had been flying out to join his RAF squadron and had made an emergency landing in the Egyptian desert, narrowly escaping with his life. Alfhild described how Roald "got in with a lot of funny people" in the winter of 1941. She recounted a convoluted tale about an Englishman and his half-German, half-Japanese wife whom Roald met on the boat back home. In London, Alf and her sister Else fell in with the couple's social circle, but began to suspect that they might be spies for the Vichy French. Alf shared her suspicions with Roald, who promptly had them reported to the authorities. Subsequently, she believed her brother had been "followed and watched" by Secret Servicemen before he was eventually sent for training somewhere on the outskirts of London. Dahl himself, however, never corroborated this story, and the official records suggest that he had little contact with the intelligence world until some months after he arrived in Washington.

Dahl was probably working loosely for BSC during the first four months of 1944, but the formal change of his role did not happen until April, when he was replaced as assistant air attach� and left Washington "on completion of his tour of duty". He flew back for two months to London, at Max Beaverbrook and Stephenson's request, "to report personally to [them] on the political situation in America".

While in London, Dahl also acted as minder for Ernest Hemingway, prior to his departure as a war reporter on the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Dahl had met his hero in New York a few weeks earlier, sparring in a boxing ring with him, before being joined by Hemingway's wife, Martha Gellhorn, at the Gladstone Hotel, where Dahl recalled they drank champagne and ate caviar from a 2kg tin.

In London, however, some of Old Hem's luster began to wear off as Dahl saw that the hard-drinking adventurer, this "strange and secret man" for whom he felt "overwhelming love and respect", was also unexpectedly vain. One day he walked into Hemingway's room at the Dorchester Hotel to discover him meticulously dripping hair-restorer on to his thinning pate with an eyedropper. Dahl was made to wait while the great author laboriously massaged the tonic into his scalp.

In July, Dahl returned to America, where he was free at last from the petty constraints of the embassy and of RAF officialdom, and reveled in the company of his buccaneering new colleagues, particularly Max Beaverbrook, whom he would later describe as "the most dynamic man in the world", with "superhuman" intellectual powers. By that stage, he recalled, "I was working entirely for Bill Stephenson". A few months later, he moved from Washington to New York - to BSC headquarters in Rockefeller Center.

In Manhattan, Dahl fully got Stephenson's measure, admiring his quiet exercise of authority, his decisiveness, his ability "to play around with businesses and scientific things", and his striking mental acuity. He was indeed, as Dahl had imagined, "very, very secret". Stephenson, for his part, understood Dahl's strengths and knew that office politics was not one of them. Instead, his intention was to deploy his new employee's potent ability to dazzle the salons of the Washington and New York hostesses who helped form public opinion.

And if Dahl was something of a neophyte in the area of intelligence and propaganda, in this world of jewels and cocktail parties he was fast becoming a master. The war had created a shortage of eligible young men in both cities, and the dashing 27-year-old RAF officer and author found himself constantly in demand as a guest. He was already a skilled flirt. Beatrice Gould, the co-editor of the Ladies' Home Journal who published many of his early stories, was a willing victim of Dahl's "manly beauty" and reveled in her slightly risqu� correspondence with him. His victims were of a type: wealthy, older, sophisticated and married.

Roald had a "whole stable" of women to wait on him, recalled Texan newspaper magnate Charles Marsh's daughter, Antoinette Haskell, confessing that, although her feelings toward Roald were always those of a sister, she had to acknowledge that her father's new prot�g� was nevertheless "drop-dead gorgeous". "He was very arrogant with his women, but he got away with it. The uniform didn't hurt one bit - and he was an ace. I think he slept with everybody on the East and West coasts that had more than $50,000 a year."

One of the more exotic salons Dahl frequented was that of Evalyn Walsh McLean, a "fabulous and rather tipsy dame", as he described her to his mother. Widowed and in her early fifties, she had inherited a fortune from her father, who had struck it lucky as a gold prospector. She was vulgar, loud and wore large spectacles that made her look like a startled owl. Roald described his visits to her house as "like going to the circus and getting a free meal served into the bargain".

Older women were playing a big part in Roald's life in other ways, too. When in New York, he usually stayed as a guest at the apartment of another prominent Anglophile, Helen Rogers Reid, the 60-year-old wife of Ogden Mills Reid, owner of the New York Tribune and the New York Herald Tribune. Dahl described her to his mother as a "charming little grey-haired woman", but as far as Charles Marsh, whom she repeatedly snubbed, was concerned, Mrs. Reid was "Horsewhip Helen". She wielded enormous power in the capital and regularly influenced editorials in her newspapers. And she was a big fan of Roald Dahl's.

Roald was staying at her apartment when he attended the New York premiere of Eagle Squadron, a propaganda movie, co-written by CS Forester, about US airmen who had volunteered to fight for the RAF before Pearl Harbor. His date for the evening was the actress Nancy Carroll, a 39-year-old divorc�e, but at the party afterwards it was Congresswoman Clare Booth Luce, the wife of the owner of Time and Life magazines, who caught Dahl's eye. Mrs. Luce, a reluctant Anglophile, quickly succumbed to the allure of the glamorous young air attach�, and Dahl did not return home that night.

"I got home to the house of my host at 9am the next morning," he told his mother, "and failed to make my room without being seen to ruffle the bedclothes - I had to do a lot of talking to re-establish my reputation."

Later, Creekmore Fath, a Texan lawyer prominent in politics, claimed that the embassy encouraged the liaison in the hope that Dahl would convert Mrs. Luce to a more pro-British position, particularly on Dahl's pet subject, post-war air freedom, which she had opposed in a recent speech in Congress. Two months later, Dahl told his mother that he was "working very hard" on her. "I hope to be able to make her change her views a little, and say something better next time she speaks."

This "assignment" may have proved too much for him. According to Fath - who seems to have lapped up these stories - Dahl told Lord Halifax, then the British Ambassador in Washington, he was "all f----- out" because Luce "had screwed [him] from one end of the room to the other for three goddam nights". Halifax apparently told him it was his patriotic duty to return to her bed. Isaiah Berlin later dismissed this story as a "wild flight of fancy" that was typical of Dahl. He thought it "inconceivable" that Halifax would ever have talked like that. Berlin was right. But he had missed the point. For Dahl, its very improbability made the tale hilariously funny.

Roald's most significant conquest of 1944 was the oil heiress Millicent Rogers. Rogers was 41, quick-witted, well-connected, and had something that he found truly irresistible - a great art collection. In many respects, she was an ideal lover for Dahl. She was not interested in marriage or fidelity. Indeed, she was probably having an affair with his friend Ian Fleming at the same time as she was sleeping with Roald. What she did value was style and good living. Apart from her estate in Virginia, she had houses in Manhattan, Washington, and a summer home on Long Island.

Millicent was infatuated with Roald. She showered the handsome air attach� with gifts, presenting him with a gold key to her front door as well as an elaborate Verdura gold cigarette case and lighter. Her Schiaparelli clothes and her penchant for dressing as Marie Antoinette held little interest for Roald, who nicknamed her "Curvature", probably because her posture was slightly stooped as a result of childhood rheumatic fever.

For Dahl, none of these encounters seems to have involved any serious emotional commitment. But, whereas it was said of Ian Fleming that he got off with girls because he could not get on with them, this was not true of Dahl, who truly delighted in female company. Yet, while he enjoyed being with sophisticated and glamorous women, Roald was not disposed to fall in love.

In a revealing 1949 article for Ladies' Home Journal about the nature of desire, he tried to analyze what made relationships work, speculating that most were built 70 per cent on sexual attraction and only 30 per cent on mutual respect. Consequently, he argued, short-lived affairs, not marriage, formed the best "basis for such activity". To some, this cold-blooded, rather reductive view of human relations was an unattractive aspect of his personality. His friend David Ogilvy, for instance, observed that while he may have enjoyed putting notches on his bedpost, his partners were often hurt by his behavior. "When they fell in love with him, as a lot did, I don't think he was nice to them," he commented.

One person saw through Dahl's rakish, confident exterior and won his lasting affection. She was the French actress Annabella. Rich, sophisticated and sexually experienced, superficially she might have seemed yet another trophy conquest. But Annabella was different. The daughter of the man who brought scouting to France, she valued courage and loyalty as much as glamour. It was in New York, in 1939, that she married her third husband, the American actor Tyrone Power. Subsequently, she became a US citizen and patriotically toured the country, giving propaganda speeches boosting the Allied war effort. Her marriage was unconventional. Both parties felt free to indulge in outside relationships. Power was already in love with Judy Garland and, after his death, a number of stories emerged suggesting that he was also bisexual.

Annabella certainly had no reservations about embarking on an affair with Roald. They first met at one of Evalyn Walsh McLean's parties, where Annabella made an immediate impression. "I thought Annabella (the film star) was fine," he told his mother, "and concentrated in that direction. I've seen her many times since. She's an intelligent dame and much fun."

Annabella herself later recalled meeting Roald at a first-night party, where he told her a creepy story about a rich man with a penchant for gruesome bets. Their affair began shortly afterwards. It was, she recalled, a "crazy thing", which "came back from time to time when we were thrown into each other's arms". Her conclusion: "It was like we were twin brothers. Romantic? Not really. Physical? Sometimes. But, most important, we had a complete understanding and he trusted me."

It was an intense and passionate relationship, from which Roald learned a lot about sex, as he admitted to his second wife, Liccy. Their friendship lasted until his death. But would Annabella herself ever have contemplated marrying him? "Certainly not," was the answer she gave Dahl's first biographer, Jeremy Treglown. Her reason: "Because he was kind of impossible."

Ironically, as 1944 drew to a close and a successful outcome of the war began to seem inevitable, Dahl's sense of ennui and disillusion returned. His letters home lost their vitality. Few things, other than his writing, seemed to offer him amusement and satisfaction.

Dahl finally boarded the Queen Elizabeth at the beginning of February 1946 after four formative years in Washington and New York. There he had mixed with statesmen, movie stars, writers and businessmen, and tasted extremes of wealth and luxury. He had become a man of the world, and consorted with a host of glamorous older women. In the world of diplomacy, he had tasted success and failure. He had won the respect of North Americans for his straight talking and his initiative and, at the same time, invited the disdain of many from the English governing classes for his brashness and unpredictability.

Crucially, he had discovered that he liked the company of buccaneers: men who enjoyed making decisions, who felt no need to shelter behind authority, and who did not care unduly about criticism. He had not lost his enthusiasm, his joie de vivre, his vivid imagination and his powerful desire to entertain, but he no longer craved adventure in the same way. He had experienced enough excitement to last a lifetime, while the realities of war had added a cynical, misanthropic and world-weary aspect to his personality. It was writing that fascinated him now. [Sturrock/Telegraph/9August2010] 

Jobs

CACI - Two Intelligence Positions. Position #�s 46735 & 46734, CI Planner, Principal in Tampa, FL and for Scott AFB, IL..

Candidate must have extensive knowledge of, and experience, in counterintelligence (CI) operations, investigations, collection, analysis, and current DoD CI policies. Candidate must have familiarity with the national and DoD-level CI organizations and structure, as well as experience with Intelligence Community databases and their successful manipulation. Experience with combatant commands (COCOMs) and joint operations is desireable. Candidate must have the demonstrated ability to work independently or lead a CI project and represent the subject matter in DoD and other working groups/meetings. Candidate must possess excellent writing and communication skills, the ability to create comprehensive project plans and products which require minimal editing, provide quality assurance, and brief their project/team's CI products, including presentation to high-level officials. Candidate may serve as a mentor to less experienced personnel. Requires a bachelor's degree and at least 10 years of experience.

CACI is an Equal Opportunity Employer M/F/D/V.
http://www.caci.com/job/apply.shtml

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 in detail in this issue of the Weekly Notes and online as follows:

• Wednesday, 11 August 2010, 6:30 pm - Washington, DC - "Uneasy Alliance: The CIA and ISI in Pakistan" - at the International Spy Museum

Thursday, 12 August 2010, Noon - 2 pm - Washington, DC - Spy Psych David Charney, M.D. on "Why Do People Spy?" at the Returned Services League of Australia, Washington Chapter
(Arrive early as Dr. Charney's briefing will start at around 12:15).
Speaker - Dr. David L. Charney, MD.
o Expert on the Psychology of the Spy
o Psychiatric consultant to three spies after they were arrested:
o Earl Pitts, Robert Hanssen, Brian Regan
o Developer of the Concept: Life Stages of the Spy
o Founder and Medical Director of Roundhouse Square Psychiatric Center, in Alexandria, VA
o Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, George Washington University Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
* Further bio at http://cicentre.com/experts.html
Where - Amenities Room, Embassy of Australia, 1601 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington, DC 20036. NOTE: Valid ID required.
Charge - $15.00, including buffet lunch and sodas. Alcoholic beverages- $2.00 each.
RSVP NLT noon on Wednesday August 11, 2010, to David Ward on 202-352-8550 or via e-mail at dmpward@wwdb.org
Attire : Business casual
Parking: There is no parking at the Embassy. There is paid public parking behind and under the Airline Pilots Association (17th and Mass) and at 1500 Mass Ave NW.

Saturday, 14 August 2010, 11 am - Orange Park, FL - AFIO Northern Florida Chapter hears expert on technology capabilities of FBI/DEA/ATF regarding air travel.

Social hour from 11:00 am, lunch at noon, and speaker and meeting to follow until 3:00 pm. This meeting's guest speaker will be Mr. Bob DeFrancesco, Security Chief at Jacksonville International Airport. In concert with Ken Nimmich, DeFrancesco will delve privately and confidentially into the technology requirements and capabilities of his systems. He will address successes and failures of both the technology and the dependency of interagency regimes, including the FBI, DEA, ATF, etc. Also in preparation for the meeting, there will be a review of the Nova video on NSA (www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ZWtEp3fLLvo) and 9/11 (www.youtube.com/ watch?v=8EiiZUUGQyI) ramp up from an interagency perspective. Chapter President Dane Baird applauds Bill Webb on this effort and hopes all members can watch the videos, twice if possible, prior to the meeting. Hopefully these are the right YouTube links to access these videos - let me know if not! For potential upcoming meetings, President Baird has uncovered some impressive resumes of generals and admirals living within reach of Ponte Vedra, including one who flew with the Nationalist Chinese Air Force. Think about it, and let us know if a special China program would be interesting – and we're sure that Bill could certainly enhance and enlighten such presentation(s).
RSVP right away for the 14 August 2010 meeting to Quiel at qbegonia@comcast.net or 904-545-9549. The cost will be $16 each, pay the Country Club at the event.

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

AFIO National Symposium: 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. Make your reservations here. Agenda here.

8 September 2010, 11:30 a.m. - Scottsdale, AZ - The Arizona Chapter of AFIO hosts Dr. Robert H. Reuss who will speak on "Novel electronics technologies being explored and developed for the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community."

Prior to joining the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, in Washington, DC, Dr. Robert Reuss spent twenty years in technology and research management positions with Motorola Corporation in the Phoenix area. Prior to that he had worked for a U.S. government agency for seven years as a research and development manager. For three years he was a professor conducting research at the University of Colorado. Dr. Reuss received a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Drexel University in 1971. He has published over 50 papers and has been awarded 13 U.S. patents. His technology interests lie in the area of materials and electrochemistry technologies for advanced microelectronic applications and microsystems integration as well as large area electronics. The presentation will discuss novel electronics technologies being explored and developed for the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community. Presentation will be unclassified. This event is being held at: McCormick Ranch Golf Club (7505 McCormick Parkway, Scottsdale AZ 85258 ~ Phone 480.948.0260) ?Our meeting fees will be as follows: o $20.00 for AFIO memberso $22.00 for guests. ?For reservations or questions, please email Simone sl@4smartphone.net or simone@afioaz.org or call and leave a message on 602.570.6016. Arthur Kerns, President of the AFIO AZ Chapter, president@afioaz.org

Thursday, 16 September 2010, 11:30 am - Colorado Springs, CO – The Rocky Mountain Chapter features speaker on terrorism.

The Rocky Mountain Chapter presents Sheriff Terry Maketa who will speak on legal issues involving El Paso County, crime statistics and give an update on terrorism. To be held at a new location the AFA... Eisenhower Golf Course Club House. Please RSVP to Tom VanWormer at robsmom@pcisys.net

Wednesday, 22 September 2010, 7:30 pm - Fairfax, VA - Stalling For Time: My Life As An FBI Hostage Negotiator by Gary Noesner

The founding chief of the FBI Crisis Negotiation Unit shares a firsthand account of many dramatic cases -- the D.C. Sniper, Waco and Montana Freemen -- highlighting successes, failures and lessons for resolving all types of crises. Event being held in Research I, Room 163 on Fairfax campus of George Mason University. For more information visit www.fairfaxcounty.gov/library

Thursday, 23 September 2010, 6:30 pm - Washington, DC - The A-12 Oxcart - an event at the International Spy Museum

"Forty-five years ago…a group of young Air Force pilots volunteered to be 'sheepdipped' from the Air Force to the CIA to fly an unidentified aircraft at an undisclosed venue to replace the U-2." --Frank Murray, A-12 pilot The Air Force's high-flying SR-71 reconnaissance aircraft, which literally flew faster than a speeding bullet, is legendary. Much less well known is the CIA's version, the A-12, which first flew two years before the SR-71 under the OXCART program. Built by Lockheed's famous "Skunk Works," the plane was an engineering marvel. It made repeated flights over Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, providing photographs to commanders in less than 24 hours from the end of a mission. In 1968, in a ten minute mission that photographed all of North Korea without being detected, an A-12 located the captured American spy ship, Pueblo. Only recently has the veil of secrecy been lifted from this amazing aircraft, allowing the full story to be told, including its enduring legacy. Now the program's pioneers gather to share its history: from sky-high successes to fiery crashes. CIA chief historian David Robarge will be joined by program veterans Robert B. Abernethy, inventor of the J-58 engines used in the A-12, Thornton D. Barnes, hypersonic flight specialist, and AFIO's President S. Eugene Poteat, the CIA officer who assessed threats to the A-12, and others. Kenneth Collins, an A-12 pilot who flew six missions over Vietnam, will also tell his story, along with other test pilots. Tickets: $12.50 per person Register at www.spymuseum.org

Thursday-Friday 23-24 September 2010 - Harrisburg, PA - First Annual Intelligence Community Center for Academic Excellence (IC CAE) Symposium "Intelligence and Homeland Security: Policy and Strategy Implications" - The symposium is by Penn State Harrisburg.

SAVE THE DATE! Potential topics: • Careers in the intelligence community; • Cyber security and information; assurance; • Border security; • Critical infrastructure protection (CIP);
• Intelligence and information sharing – domestic and international; • Fusion centers; • Ethical issues in intelligence; • Operations security (OPSEC); • Terrorism; • Drug cartels; • Private sector and NGOs; • Public health; • Geospatial information; • Counter-proliferation.Registration information and call for presentations/papers to follow.
Event location: Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Hilton Hotel
Contact: Tom Arminio, tja12@psu.edu, tomarminio@gmail.com Mobile: 717-448-5377
or Kate Corbin Tompkins, katespa@psu.edu; Office: 717-948-6058; Mobile: 717-405-2022; Fax: 717-948-6484

24 September 2010 - Tysons Corner, VA - AFIO National Fall Luncheon features CIA Deputy Director, Michael J. Morell and Author/Lawyer Stewart Baker.

11 a.m. speaker - Stewart A. Baker, former General Counsel, NSA, 1st Undersecretary DHS, and author of the important new book: Skating on Stilts: Why We Aren't Stopping Tomorrow's Terrorism .... and .... 1 p.m. speaker Deputy Director Michael J. Morell, CIA
Check in for badge pickup at 10:30 a.m., Steward Baker gives address at 11 a.m., Lunch served at noon; Michael J. Morell gives address at 1 p.m., Event closes at 2 p.m. REGISTRATION Here. EVENT LOCATION: The Crowne Plaza, 1960 Chain Bridge Road • McLean, Virginia 22102
R E G I S T R A T I O N EVENT LOCATION: The Crowne Plaza, 1960 Chain Bridge Road • McLean, Virginia 22102. Driving directions here or use this link: http://tinyurl.com/8228kw Registration limited HERE

Saturday, 25 September 2010, 10:30 am - Coral Gables, FL - "Management of Kidnap and Extortion Incidents" the topic at the AFIO Miami Chapter event. This program is a seminar conducted by a former Intelligence Officer expert in the subject. More details to follow soon or email trsmiami@aol.com

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.

Thursday, 30 September 2010; 12 noon - 1 pm - Washington, DC - Stalin's Romeo Spy: The Remarkable Rise and Fall of the KGB's Most Daring Operative - Event at the International Spy Museum.

Dmitri Bystrolyotov was a man out of the movies: dashingly handsome and fluent in many languages, he was a sailor, artist, doctor, lawyer, and artist. He was also a spy for Stalin's Soviet Union. By seducing women, including a French diplomat, the wife of a British official, and a Gestapo officer, he was able to deliver many secrets back to his masters in Moscow. His espionage career came to an end in 1938, however, when he was caught up in Stalin's purges. Sent to the Gulag for twenty years, he suffered tremendous physical hardship but he also came to see the reality of the regime for which he had spied. Join us for a fascinating talk about Bystrolyotov's rise to greatness and fall from Stalin's graces with author Emil Draitser, once a journalist in the Soviet Union and now a professor at Hunter College in New York. Free! No registration required! Join the author for an informal chat and book signing. More information at www.spymuseum.org

Saturday, 2 October 2010, 6:30 pm - Washington, DC - William J. Donovan Award Dinner Honoring Ross Perot by The OSS Society

The OSS Society celebrates the historical accomplishments of the OSS during WWII through a William J. Donovan Award Dinner. This year the annual dinner honors Ross Perot. Event includes special performance by humorist Mark Russell. Black Tie/Dress Mess. Location: Mandarin Oriental Hotel, 1330 Maryland Ave SW, Washington, DC. By invitation. Tables of ten: $25,000; Table of ten: $15,000; Table of eight: $10,000; Table of Six: $5000; Seating of four: $3,000; One guest: $1,000. Some tickets available for $175 pp. Donations welcomed. Inquiries to The OSS Society at oss@osssociety.org

Tuesday, 5 October 2010; 6:30 pm - Washington, DC - Russian Illegals: The Spies Next Door - an Event at the International Spy Museum

"It's pretty shocking. I didn't think stuff like this still went on." --Scott Inouye, neighbor to two Russian spies On 29 June, 2010 Americans were stunned and then bemused to learn of the arrest of ten Russian "deep-cover" spies who had lived among us for decades as neighbors and Facebook friends-while at the same time operating with secret mission: to meet influential Americans and exploit them for their knowledge of government policy. "Illegals," like these spies, have been a Moscow specialty for years, but traditionally are used sparingly-for only the most sensitive of operations. Seldom has the U.S. government been able to find and arrest "illegals," so Americans are generally not aware of this threat. Join H. Keith Melton, renowned intelligence historian, technical advisor to American intelligence agencies, author of Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA's Spytechs, from Communism to Al-Qaeda, and International Spy Museum board member, and Brian Kelley, counterintelligence specialist with over forty years experience as a USAF and CIA case officer specializing in double agent and deception operations, a recipient of the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal, and currently adjunct professor at several graduate schools on counterintelligence and national security issues, as they shine a spotlight on the murky world of illegals: what they are, how they operate, and the threat they pose. With access to never-before-seen images, Melton will demonstrate both the classis and up-to-date spycraft used by these "spies next door." Retired KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin will also provide commentary based on his years running agents in the U.S. Tickets: $12.50 per person. Register at www.spymuseum.org

29 October 2010, 11 a.m. - Tysons Corner, VA - Naval Intelligence Professionals (NIP) Fall Luncheon. To be held at Crowne Plaza Hotel in Tyson's Corner, VA Event ends at 2 p.m. Keynote speaker TBD.

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

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