Section I - INTELLIGENCE HIGHLIGHTS

Colombian Intelligence Official Investigated Over Wiretaps. Felipe Mu�oz, director of Colombian intelligence agency DAS, is under preliminary investigation by the Prosecutor General's Office for his alleged role in the agency's illegal wiretapping of government critics.

This the latest in a series of investigations against various senior DAS officials for illegally tracing movements and communications of people believed to be in opponents of former President Alvaro Uribe. The Prosecutor General's Office is currently deciding whether former DAS Director Andres Pe�ate is guilty of taking part in the illegal activities.

Colombian Minister for the Interior and Justice German Vargas Lleras said that he checks in with Mu�oz each week to ensure the intelligence agency is not engaging in illegal monitoring of any kind.

DAS became the center of a scandal when allegations emerged in 2009 that the intelligence and security agency had carried out illegal surveillance on the orders of the administration of then-President Alvaro Uribe.

Uribe was forced to dismantle the DAS, Interpol transferred its cooperation with Colombian authorities to the national police, and U.S. Congress ruled that neither the DAS nor its successors will receive any financial aid from the U.S. government. [Walsh/ColombiaReports/27September2010] 

NSA Rings Up a $1.2 Billion, 1 Million Square Foot Data Center. What does one stuff into a $1.1 billion, 1 million-square-ft data center? Well, the super secret National Security Agency won't tell you exactly, but this week it awarded the contract to start building one in Utah.

What the data center in Utah's Camp Williams will include is 100,000 square feet of computer space dedicated to collecting data from the country's intelligence agencies. There will also be about 900,000 square feet of technical support and administrative space in addition to an electrical substation, a vehicle inspection building and visitor control center, fuel and water storage structures and a chiller plant.

What kind of data center can you build with $500 million?

The contract went to a joint venture made up of Balfour Beatty, DPR Construction and Big-D. DPR has tons of data center construction experience and is currently building the $188 million, 147,000-square-foot data center in Oregon.

According to datacenterknowledge.com the Utah economic development officials have estimated that the 1 million square foot project could involve 7,000 workers or more during the peak of construction.

The Social Security Administration was last year authorized to replace its National Computer Center for a little over $500 million. The SSA at the time said it would need closer to $800 million to fund a new IT infrastructure, including the new data center-the physical building, power and cooling infrastructure, IT hardware, and systems applications. [Conney/NetworkWorld/27September2010] 

Pelosi: No �Retreat' on GAO and Spy Agencies. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) today praised the intelligence authorization bill passed by the Senate last night for providing "a framework for" congressional investigators to look at the spy agencies' books.

The White House had threatened to veto any bill that gave Government Accountability Office investigators any access to the inner workings of the CIA and other spy agencies, as proposed in an amendment sponsored by Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) and others last May.

The new language provides only for the director of national intelligence to issue a directive on access in consultation with the GAO.

But Pelosi lauded the measure as a step forward.

"In passing the Intelligence Authorization Act last night, the Senate upheld our first responsibility - to ensure the security of the American people - while addressing two key objectives," Pelosi said in a statement Tuesday.

"It expands and improves the congressional notification process for covert action and provides the framework for GAO access to intelligence community information so that the GAO can conduct investigations, audits, and evaluations as requested by Congress," Pelosi said.

A Democratic leadership aide rejected the notion that Pelosi's acceptance of a "framework" for providing the GAO access to CIA and other spy agency operations, rather than actual access, was a "retreat" from her earlier position on the issue.

Instead, it was "a legislative compromise where both sides gave some to come to an agreement," the aide said.

The White House did not answer several requests for comment.

The House is planning to vote on the measure Wednesday.

Meanwhile, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said the Pentagon "has issued a directive governing GAO access to Defense special access programs."

"This directive is regarded as having resolved successfully the issues that the Department and GAO had previously encountered," Feinstein added.

A spokesman for the Defense Department could not be immediately reached for comment. [Stein/WashingtonPost/29September2010] 

CIA Chief Panetta Meets Pakistani Counterpart. A Pakistani intelligence officer confirmed that Panetta was meeting Wednesday with Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha.

He did not give his name in line with agency policy.

Pakistani officials say the spy chiefs are in frequent contact to coordinate cooperation in targeting al-Qaida and other militant groups.

The officials say such coordination has led to more than a hundred joint raids on militant targets by officers of Pakistan's Inter Service Intelligence and the CIA this year.

CIA drone strikes are also at their highest level ever, with more than 20 suspected attacks on Pakistan's lawless North Waziristan region this month. [Dozier/AP/29September2010] 

Intelligence Bill Heads to President to be Signed. Congress has passed an intelligence agency policy bill for the first time since 2004 after agreeing on strengthening congressional oversight of sensitive spy operations.

House passage of the intelligence authorization bill sends it to President Barack Obama. The Senate approved the measure earlier this week. The House vote came shortly before Congress recessed for the November elections. The vote followed months of negotiations with the White House and Senate leaders.

Lawmakers had faulted the Bush administration and its top intelligence officials for not fully briefing Congress on highly classified programs such as a secret plan to target terrorist leaders.

Under the compromise, a limited number of congressional leaders will be briefed on the most secretive programs. [AP/30September2010] 

North African Spy Chiefs Meet to Fight Al Qaeda. Intelligence chiefs from four north African countries were meeting in Algiers on Wednesday to set up a center for joint operations against Al Qaeda in the region, a source at the talks said.

The source, who is taking part in the talks, said intelligence chiefs from Mali, Niger, Mauritania and Algeria were attending the meeting which was under way.

"The atmosphere is good and we are going to end the talks today," said the source, speaking by telephone to AFP in the Mali capital Bamako.

The source said that there was basic agreement between the four participants "that the centre should be based in Algiers."

But he said that other nations of the Sahel region of North Africa where the terror threat is spreading should be invited to participate in the operation.

These nations would include Chad, Libya and Morocco who must "join the club," the source said, while adding that not everyone agreed and that strained ties between some of the nations such as Algeria and Morocco would reduce the chances of broadening the operation for now.

The talks are taking place three days after a meeting of the chiefs of general staff of the four countries in Tamanrasset in the south of Algeria, where they made known their readiness to step up the struggle against Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

AQIM is active in all four countries and operates across their desert borders in the Sahel, a band of territory between the Sahara desert to the north and grasslands to the south.

In mid-September, AQIM claimed responsibility for taking seven hostages in northern Niger, who have since been transferred to northeastern Mali, close to the Algerian border.

The hostages were kidnapped by an armed gang in a September 16 raid on a uranium mining town.

According to the Algerian newspaper Liberte, the four African nations face obstacles in working together on terrorism including the failure of Western nations to share information supplied by sophisticated surveillance techniques such as satellite images.

The newspaper also cite Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, whose address to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday condemned nations who pay ransom to terrorists, saying the money fuelled the spread of the problem.

France was sharply criticized in Algeria in February after Frenchman Pierre Camatte was freed after three months in captivity at the hands of Al Qaeda. He was freed after Al Qaeda demands for the release of four detained Islamists were met.

France has said that it is willing to talk to Al Qaeda about the release of the hostages captured in September. [AP/30September2010] 

Two Bills Target Over-Classification of Information. It's important to keep sensitive information secret. But have we gone too far in some cases?

Some members of Congress say the over-classification of documents in the intelligence community is causing miscommunication and confusion.

This week Congress passed two pieces of homeland security legislation.

The "Reducing Over-Classification Act" (H.R. 553) addresses the over-classification of information that, bill sponsors say, slow down the information-sharing process between federal, state, local, and private partners.

Rep. Jane Harman (D-Cal.), a sponsor of that bill, said over-classification impedes efforts to give first responders real-time intelligence so they can prevent and disrupt terror plots.

The second bill - the "Redundancy Elimination and Enhanced Performance for Preparedness Grants Act" (H.R. 3980) - would help determine the effectiveness of homeland security grants given to state and local governments. [FederalNewsRadio/29September2010]

Sensitive Stolen Documents Found in Raid. A drug raid in Melbourne turned up secret files belonging to the Australian Security Intelligence Organization and other police agencies, officials say.

Authorities fear the discovery means there has been a serious breach of national security and criminal intelligence in Australia.

The newspaper said police in Victoria state are investigating whether a former head of intelligence and phone tapping at the state's Office of Police Integrity, who previously worked for Victoria Police and the Corruption and Crime Commission in Western Australia, was responsible for the theft and storage of the documents found Sept. 10.

Boxes of sensitive national security and law enforcement papers were found during the raid of a criminal suspect's home. The suspect is believed to be in a relationship with the former official suspected of taking the documents, the Herald said.

The newspaper said it is its understanding many of the documents contain information that may pose a threat to law enforcement sources. The files also contain details on highly sensitive operational matters, the Herald said.

"Documents from other agencies at which the former employee was previously employed were also located," the Office of Police Integrity told the Herald in a statement. "The OPI documents have been secured by Victoria police and examined by OPI. OPI will continue to co-operate with Victoria police in its ongoing investigation.

"OPI has undertaken a full security and risk assessment. So far as OPI is aware, there has been no compromise of any OPI operation."

A spokeswoman for Victoria police said officers were investigating and an ASIO spokeswoman said there would be no comment on the situation. [UPI/28September2010] 

Spec Ops Vet Vickers Tapped as DoD Intel Chief. The White House has nominated Michael Vickers, a former Special Forces soldier and Central Intelligence Agency paramilitary operations officer, to be undersecretary of defense for intelligence.

Since July 2007, Vickers has served as assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict. During his 13 years in Special Forces, he said he served on both the "black" and "white" - covert and overt - sides of special operations, Vickers told Congress.

According to his Defense Department biography, during his Special Forces and CIA years Vickers had operational and combat experience in Central America and the Caribbean, the Middle East, and Central and South Asia, spanning covert action and espionage, unconventional warfare, counterterrorism (including hostage rescue operations), counterinsurgency, and foreign internal defense.

His tenure as a CIA operative included serving as a "principal strategist" of the largest covert action in CIA history, the arming of Muslim insurgents in Afghanistan in 1980s against the Soviet-backed government in Kabul. The paramilitary operation ended with the Soviet Union withdrawing from Afghanistan.

The undersecretary for intelligence, one of the most senior positions in the Defense Department, reports directly to the secretary of defense. If his nomination is approved by the Senate, Vickers would replaces James Clapper, who was recently appointed to serve as director of national intelligence, a job created in 2004 to oversee 16 intelligence agencies.

Vickers and Defense Secretary Robert Gates have a "long professional relationship" that dates back to their time together at the CIA, said Gates' spokesman Geoff Morrell Tilghman. [Andrew/ArmyTimes/1October2010] 

Britons linked to European Terror Plot? There may be as many as 20 British Muslims training for strikes against possible targets in Europe, including the United Kingdom, intelligence sources said.

Europe is on high-alert following allegations that terrorists in Pakistan were plotting commando-style raids on targets in Western Europe.

Intelligence sources told British newspaper The Daily Telegraph that "there are 15 to 20 Britons" training for attacks at camps in Pakistan.

Intelligence officers who spoke to the newspaper on condition of anonymity said the Britons were trained in the use of firearms and explosives.

The British intelligence service MI5 said the European attacks were traced from Pakistan to Britain. Authorities said some of the information on the European plot was linked to Ahmed Sidiqi, a German national arrested in July who revealed details of the attacks to interrogators in Afghanistan.

MI5, the Telegraph adds, is upset that information about the plot was revealed while intelligence officials were still connecting the dots.

"This is an ongoing operation with a constantly changing dynamic," a security source said. "There are local, national and international links, including Pakistan." [UPI/30September2010] 

Swedish Terror Threat Elevated To Highest Level Ever. Sweden's terror threat alert was elevated on Friday to its highest level ever. The country's Saepo intelligence agency confirmed the news and said it was based on a classified intelligence assessment.

According to a newly released statement by the agency, "the terrorist threat level has been raised from low to elevated."

It went on to say that the country's threat is not currently assessed to be imminent.

"The assessment is based on intelligence indicating a shift in activities among certain groups in Sweden, judged to be targeted at Sweden," the agency said. Officials added the threat level to Sweden is still low when compared to other European countries.

Saepo chief Anders Danielsson said this is the highest level ever of terror alert in Sweden, but that the situation was considered under control.

Friday's announcement follows a Wednesday report that revealed there was a potential terror plot that may involve coordinated attacks throughout European countries with at least a dozen people taking part. [AllHeadlineNews/1October2010] 

Harold Nicholson Accused of Conspiring with Son to Spy for Moscow. The US Government thought it had put paid to Harold Nicholson's espionage activities in 1997 when he was jailed for 23 years for passing secrets to Russia.

Now it transpires that the former CIA agent continued his contact with Moscow all along, sneaking out messages on screwed-up paper napkins to his son as he visited him in prison, bypassing the agency's high-tech attempts to monitor all his communications.

Nicholson will go on trial again in Portland, Oregon, next week on conspiracy charges after his son, Nathaniel, 26, pleaded guilty to acting as a go-between for his father and Russian agents who gave him $US47,000 to deliver to his father during encounters around the globe.

"Nathaniel was excited about the prospect of acting in a clandestine fashion like his father," prosecutors wrote in a pretrial memo. That excitement having apparently worn off with discovery and the prospect of jail, Nathaniel Nicholson is expected to appear as the state's key witness against his father as part of a plea bargain to avoid incarceration.

Harold Nicholson, now 59, was the most senior CIA agent to have been caught spying for a foreign government when he was jailed in 1997. He pleaded guilty to passing secrets to Russia in return for $300,000.

According to pretrial documents reported in The Oregonian, Nicholson began grooming his son, a disabled former paratrooper, four years ago to help to collect his "pension" for spying on behalf of Russia.

From 2006 to 2008, Nathaniel Nicholson regularly visited his father, smuggled out notes and took them to meetings with Russian agents in San Francisco, Mexico City, Lima, Peru, and Nicosia, Cyprus, where they handed over cash in return for his father's continued pledges of support.

Nicholson's notes reportedly expressed thanks for the money, reassured the Russians that his son was trustworthy and described his two older children's debts. In return, the Russian agents wanted to know how much US authorities had learnt about their operations during their investigation of Nicholson. According to The Oregonian, prosecutors allege that Nicholson's notes also revealed secrets from his days in the CIA.

Nathaniel Nicholson pleaded guilty to conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government and conspiracy to commit money laundering last year. He has yet to be sentenced.

His father has pleaded not guilty to the same charges, arguing that although the pair hatched a plan to get money from the Russians that did not in itself constitute a crime.  [Philp/TheAustralian/1October2010] 

Iran Clears Ex-British Embassy Staffer of Espionage. Iran has cleared a former British embassy staffer who was jailed last year on espionage charges, and commuted his sentence to a suspended one-year jail term, his lawyer said on Monday.

"The appeals court dropped espionage charges for which Hossein Rassam was sentenced to four years in prison," the lawyer, Babak Farahi, told AFP.

"He was sentenced to one year in jail, suspended for five years, for propaganda against the establishment... as he had no previous record and held no managerial posts," he said.

But the court "upheld a previous ruling that bans him from working for foreign embassies for five years," the lawyer said, adding the appeals verdict was issued on Sunday.

Rassam, the embassy's chief political analyst, was arrested in June 2009 along with eight other local employees of the mission on charges of taking part in riots after the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The eight were later freed and Rassam released on bail after three weeks, before being paraded on television in a mass trial in August 2009 and later handed the four-year jail term amid protests from Britain and the European Union.

Iran has jailed scores of reformist politicians, journalists, students and rights activists on charges of undermining the regime and inciting unrest after the vote which the opposition dismissed as massively rigged.

Iran's highest authority, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has accused the United States and Britain of fomenting the post-vote unrest and seeking to topple the regime by backing internal critics.

The Islamic republic's ties with Britain have worsened as Tehran also expelled a BBC correspondent shortly after the mass protests. [Zawya/1October2010]

Section II - CONTEXT & PRECEDENCE

FBI Drive for Encryption Backdoors is D�j� vu for Security Experts. The FBI now wants to require all encrypted communications systems to have backdoors for surveillance, according to a New York Times report, and to the nation's top crypto experts it sounds like a battle they've fought before.

Back in the 1990s, in what's remembered as the crypto wars, the FBI and NSA argued that national security would be endangered if they did not have a way to spy on encrypted e-mails, IMs and phone calls. After a long protracted battle, the security community prevailed after mustering detailed technical studies and research that concluded that national security was actually strengthened by wide use of encryption to secure computers and sensitive business and government communications.

Now the FBI is proposing a similar requirement that would require online service providers, perhaps even software makers, to only offer encrypted communication unless the companies have a way to unlock the communications.

In the New York Times story that unveiled the drive, the FBI cited a case where a mobster was using encrypted communication, and the FBI had to sneak into his office to plant a bug. One of the named problems was RIM, the maker of Blackberrys, which provides encrypted email communications for companies and governments, and which has come under pressure from India and the United Arab Emirates to locate its severs in its countries.

According to the proposal, any company doing business in the States could not create an encrypted communication system without having a way for the government to order the company to decrypt it, and those who currently do offer that service would have to re-tool it. It's the equivalent of outlawing whispering in real life.

Cryptographers have long argued that backdoors aren't a feature - they are just a security hole that will inevitably be abused by hackers or adversarial governments.

The proposal also contradicts a congressionally-ordered 1996 National Research Council report that found that requiring backdoors was not a sensible policy for the government.

"While the use of encryption technologies is not a panacea for all information security problems, we believe that adoption of our recommendations would lead to enhanced protection and privacy for individuals and businesses in many areas, ranging from cellular and other wireless phone conversations to electronic transmission of sensitive business or financial documents," said committee chair Kenneth W. Dam, professor of American and foreign law at the University of Chicago. "It is true that the spread of encryption technologies will add to the burden of those in government who are charged with carrying out certain law enforcement and intelligence activities. But the many benefits to society of widespread commercial and private use of cryptography outweigh the disadvantages."

Moreover, cases of encryption tripping up law enforcement are extremely rare, according the government's own records. In 2009, for instance, the government got court approval for 2,376 wiretaps and encountered encryption only once - and was able to get the contents of the communication. Statistics for other years show no problems whatsoever for the government.

Jim Dempsey, the West Coast director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, told Wired.com that the FBI is now saying that the numbers are mistaken - and they'll issue new ones in the spring.

Despite that, the FBI is saying that its spying capabilities could be degraded unless the Congress requires companies using encryption to re-make their current systems so that the companies have some way to spy on the communications.

The FBI did not return a call seeking comment, but the FBI's general counsel Valerie Caproni told the New York Times that companies "can promise strong encryption. They just need to figure out how they can provide us plain text."

While the scope of the proposal isn't clear, it would seem to target Hushmail, Skype, RIM and PGP, each of which use encryption to make it possible for users to communicate without fear of being eavesdropped on by the company making the service, hackers, criminals, business competitors, and governments (authoritarian or otherwise).

There's also a number of open source software packages that might also get swept up by the proposal, including OpenPGP (an open protocol for sending encrypted e-mails), TOR (a system for disguising the origin of web traffic), and OTR (a system for encrypting instant messages).

University of Pennsylvania computer science professor Matt Blaze, a cryptography exert co-authored a paper in 1998 about the technical limitations of requiring back doors in crypto, says he's confused by the return of the dream of perfect surveillance capabilities.

"This seems like a far more baffling battle in a lot of ways," Blaze said. "In the 1990s, the government was trying to prevent something necessary, good and inevitable."

"In this case they are trying to roll back something that already happened and that people are relying on," Blaze said.

Few net users realize that they rely on cryptography every day. For instance, online shopping relies on browsers and servers communicating using SSL. Government employees, NGOs and businesses use RIM and PGP's e-mail encryption systems to safely protect diplomatic secrets, confidential business documents and human rights communications. It's not clear how those services could continue since they work by having each user create special decryption keys on their own devices, so that no one, including PGP or RIM, could decrypt the communication if they wanted to. In PGP's case, the company doesn't even run a mail server.

Skype routes calls through peer-to-peer connections in order to be able to offer free internet calls, and uses encryption to prevent the computers in the middle from being able to listen in. Under the FBI's proposed rules, that architecture would be illegal. Targeted calls would have to be routed through Skype.

"It would make Skype illegal," said Peter Neumann, the principal scientist at TKTK who testified to Congress in the 1990s on the earlier proposal.

"The arguments haven't changed," Neumann said. "9/11 was something long predicted and it hasn't changed the fact that if you are going to do massive surveillance using the ability to decrypt - even with warrants, it would have to be done with enormously careful oversight. Given we don't have comp systems that are secure, the idea we will have adequate oversight is unattainable."

"Encryption has life critical consequences," Neumann added.

The CDT's Dempsey, who spent years working on the Hill on digital policy issues, says the issue won't get to Congress until next year, and depending on the election, could face Republican backlash, especially given that the Tea Party movement is driven in part by a distrust of big government.

Most importantly, for encryption advocates is getting the government to describe in detail what their problems are and what they propose as a solution.

In the 1990s, the NSA created the Clipper chip intended for telecoms to use to encrypt phone calls. The NSA initially refused to let outsiders see the chip, which had a backdoor for the government.

"We, meaning Matt Blaze, Peter Neumann and [Columbia University professor] Steven Bellovin, got them to show us details," Dempsey said. "Then Matt broke the Clipper chip."

That put an end to that proposal.

"No disrespect to Matt, but there are 10,000 people who can do what he did, and my worry is half of them work for Moldovian criminal hacker groups," Dempsey said.

Another concern is that wiretapping requirements in software have a tendency to be used not just by governments bound to the rule of law. For instance, TKTK was lambasted last year for selling telecom equipment to Iran that included the ability to wiretap mobile phones at will. Lost in that uproar was the fact that sophisticated wiretapping capabilities became standard issue for technology thanks to the U.S. government's CALEA rules that require all phone systems, and now broadband systems, to include these capabilities.

Blaze says he's just confused by the proposal.

"If the point is to discourage the use of encryption broadly, that contradicts the policy position of this administration and the two before it," Blaze said. "We need to protect the country's information infrastructure. I was at meeting of the White House and the very same officials backing this were talking about the rollout of DNSSEC [a technology that protects the internet's lookup system from hackers].

"So how do you reconcile that with the policy of discouraging encryption broadly?," Blaze asked. [Signal/Wired/28September2010] 

A Glimpse of History: Mordechai Vanunu. As the sun set on October 6th, 1986, fears were growing over the missing nuclear technician who disappeared in London after he revealed details on Israel's nuclear weapons program.

According to the American magazine, Newsweek, Israel's intelligence services, the Mossad, stand behind the abduction of Mordechai Vanunu; a former Israeli nuclear technician. Vanunu had occasionally expressed opposition to the Zionist regime's weapons of mass destruction, revealing details of its weapons program to the British press in 1986.

Between 1976 and 1985, Vanunu was employed as a nuclear plant technician and shift manager at the Negev Nuclear Research Center, an Israeli facility allegedly used to develop and manufacture nuclear weapons, located in the Negev Desert south of Dimona. Most worldwide intelligence agencies estimate that Israel developed nuclear weapons as early as the 1960.

At Dimona, Vanunu became increasingly troubled over Israel's nuclear weapons program, and possibility of Israeli nuclear strategies in the event of war. He left Dimona in 1985 and departed Israel.

Vanuon headed towards Sidney, Australia, where he was acquainted with Peter Hounam, a journalist from The Sunday Times in London. In early September 1986, Vanunu flew to London with Hounam, and revealed to The Sunday Times information on Israel's nuclear program, providing photographs he had secretly taken at the Dimona site. Vanunu gave detailed descriptions of lithium-6 separation required for the production of tritium, an essential ingredient of fusion-boosted fission bombs.

The Sunday Times was wary of Vanunu's story, and so the editors checked the information with leading nuclear weapons experts. Vanunu grew frustrated while waiting for the research to be completed and the information verified, and approached the Sunday Mirror, the Sunday Time's rival tabloid. The newspaper leaked the information to the Mossad, through the British secret services.

Vanunu was subsequently lured to Italy by a Mossad spy, where he was drugged and kidnapped by the Israeli Intelligence Services, after which they transported him to Israel where he was convicted in a trial that was held behind closed doors.

Vanunu was put on trial in Israel on charges of treason and espionage. The trial, held in secret, took place in the District Court in Jerusalem. During this time, Vanunu was not allowed to contact any media personals. As such, he wrote the details of his abduction (or "hijacking" as he put it) on the palm of his hand, and while being transported he held his hand against the van's window so that waiting journalists could get the information.

Soon afterwards, the Sunday Times published the story and estimated that Israel has manufactured over 100 nuclear warheads. Vanunu soon became a hero for many peace activists, and was nominated several times for a Nobel Price. In March 2009, he responded by writing the following to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee:

'I am asking the committee to remove my name from the list for this year's list of nominations', he said, 'I cannot be part of a list of laureates that includes Shimon Peres . He is the man who was behind all the Israeli atomic policy.' [PressTV/28September2010] 

Russian Haunted By Role in Spy Swap. The Russian arms researcher released from prison in a Cold War-style spy swap has mixed feelings about the deal and wishes more of his colleagues had been freed.

Igor Sutyagin, still struggling to adjust to life in Britain following 11 years behind bars in Russia, told the Associated Press in an interview Tuesday that he assumed more people would be liberated when he signed the confession that set the swap into motion.

Sutyagin told the AP he knew of at least eight fellow academics languishing in Russian prisons, including physicist Valentin Danilov, who is serving a 14-year-sentence for working with allegedly sensitive information that his defenders argue has long been in the public domain.

"I would be glad if I sat next to them on the plane to Vienna," Sutyagin said, describing the flight that flew him from Moscow to freedom on July 9. "I would definitely be happy - not only glad - if more people would be free."

Sutyagin, 45, was one of four Russians released in a dramatic exchange that followed the arrest of 10 deep-cover Russian agents operating in the United States.

But his was not the classic case of spy-for-spy. Russia watchers have described his 1999 conviction on charges of treason as a part of campaign by the Kremlin to intimidate the nation's academics, and Sutyagin's case has been championed by Russian and international human rights campaigners. Sutyagin himself has long insisted on his innocence.

In earlier remarks to journalists and lawyers in central London on Tuesday, Sutyagin said his signature was part of "a very clear deal: Honor for freedom."

But he said he also had in mind the prisoners - in both in the U.S. and in Russia - whose fate hung on his move. Describing the torment of being a prisoner, and the pain it had put its family through, he said he felt as if "my relatives were somehow imprisoned with me." He said he did not want to put other families through that just to preserve his own honor.

Sutyagin has little in the way of links to Britain - although the company he worked for was based in the U.K. His flight from Vienna dropped him off in Britain with nothing by way of official explanation, and he told the AP he still has not made his peace with life here.

He compared his predicament to a swimmer trapped under a sheet of ice, searching desperately for a hole through which to breathe.

"That hole would be the old Russia which I left long ago," he said sadly. [AP/28September2010] 

FBI Files: Solzhenitsyn Lived in Fear After Exile. Soviet dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn lived in fear of the KGB for years after his exile from the Soviet Union - even as the FBI was secretly watching him, newly disclosed documents reveal.

The Nobel Prize-winning author's FBI file shows that the U.S. law enforcement agency closely, but quietly monitored Solzhenitsyn for years, knowing the discovery of its surveillance would lead to political repercussions.

Solzhenitsyn, perhaps best known for writing The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which chronicled the brutality of Stalin's labor camps, died in 2008 at age 89.

The NYCity News Service obtained the FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act, which allows certain documents to be released after the subject's death. The FBI did not release all the documents in the file, citing national security issues and concerns about revealing sources. Forty-two pages were deleted and 46 pages were redacted.

The 95-page file shows FBI tracked the Nobel Laureate from 1968, the time of his first major protests against the Soviet regime, then followed his banishment and continued until 1976, as he settled in the U.S.

A 1975 memo circulated in the FBI cautioned that investigating a prominent individual such as Solzhenitsyn could be politically sensitive. The documents instructed agents to limit coverage to established sources to minimize the risk of being discovered.

Solzhenitsyn eventually moved to Vermont, where he lived about 20 years.

During his first years in the United States, Solzhenitsyn still feared the KGB, the Soviet spy agency, and worried about attempts on his life, the documents show.

While working on a book in 1976 at the Stanford University's Hoover Institute, a conservative think tank, Solzhenitsyn felt so threatened that he wanted to obtain a gun permit, according to FBI memos and police reports. He was denied because he was not a U.S. citizen, and the FBI noted it would not intervene in his request.

"Solzhenitsyn said he feels he is in imminent danger," citing some "very disturbing events" in Switzerland, where he stayed before coming to the U.S., according to the file. It's not clear from the documents exactly what alarmed the writer.

Documents show the FBI tracked Solzhenitsyn on a 1975 visit to a Russian Orthodox monastery in Oregon. The author wanted the visit kept confidential because he feared the KGB would learn of the trip. The files include a copy of Solzhenitsyn's temporary visa to the U.S. and details about his travel plans to Canada in search for an "Old Believer," or a Russian Orthodox community, where he could settle.

There is no evidence he knew the FBI was monitoring him, though a 1976 memo notes that Solzhenitsyn did not trust the U.S. State Department, and preferred using unofficial channels to make his travel plans rather than getting approvals from the U.S. agency.

The FBI monitored him using undisclosed sources who reported on his activities, relying on reports from local authorities and tracking news accounts of his activities. The Bureau amassed more than 40 clips on Solzhenitsyn from U.S. and international newspapers and wire services, most of them documenting the author's 1974 arrest and exile from the Soviet Union.

Information about the writer was monitored by the FBI's highest echelons, including one-time acting director Mark Felt, best known as Deep Throat, and associate director Clyde Tolson.

The reports tracked Solzhenitsyn's movements as he began his exile, from Russia to Germany and Switzerland. In 1976, Solzhenitsyn moved to Vermont, where he lived until he returned to Russia in 1994. He died on August 3, 2008 at the age of 89. [Narizhnaya/HuffingtonPost/28September2010] 

Original US Intelligence Agency Laid the Groundwork for the CIA. Art Reinhardt of Great Falls was in China on Aug. 6, 1945 - the day the U.S. dropped the "Little Boy" atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.

Although only 20 at the time, he already was keenly aware that his short service with World War II's Office of Strategic Services soon would be coming to an end.

The OSS - the predecessor to the CIA and U.S. Special Operations Forces - was formed in June 1942 by order of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The agency's mission was to collect and analyze strategic intelligence requested by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and to conduct "special" operations outside the scope of other agencies.

"The OSS was the first centralized foreign intelligence agency in U.S. history and was organized along the lines of some of the chief responsibilities of CIA today: analysis, collection, counterintelligence and covert action," CIA spokeswoman Donna Weiss said.

Reinhardt, who now is 85, was recruited by the OSS in May 1944, shortly after joining the U.S. Army Air Corps at 17.

After being recruited, Reinhardt received advanced OSS training as a radio operator and cryptographer at "Area C" in Prince William County - a one-square-mile tract of heavily wooded land about five miles west of Quantico where the OSS trained its agents from 1942 to 1945. Today the training area is preserved as part of Prince William Forest National Park and is open to the public.

"From 1942 to 1945, the Communications Branch of the OSS used the area as a training facility for about 1,500 communications personnel learning international Morse code, ciphering, weapons, demolition, self-defense and physical training," Reinhardt said.

After three months of training, Reinhardt was deployed to China to provide intelligence targets for Air Force bombers attempting to disrupt the Japanese occupying forces that had taken control of key Chinese railways and seaports.

While in China, Reinhardt lived the life of a secret agent. He spent much of his time in remote forested areas, living off the land and trying not to draw much attention from locals.

"As American agents in China, we had a bounty on our heads," he recalled. "It was rumored that Japanese soldiers were offered the equivalent of $50,000 to capture one of us."

Reinhardt decoded incoming communications and encoded outgoing messages, transmitting them from his portable SSTR-1 "suitcase" radio.

"One of my daily duties from the field was to give hourly weather reports for the B-29 bombers," Reinhardt said. He soon discovered he was on his own in terms of scrounging up food and supplies.

"I ate a lot of rice," he said.

Once, after discovering he had no antennae wire, he improvised by scavenging materials from a discarded B-24 bomber and made his own.

"I was a free spirit," he recalled. "I had no uniform, and often no orders. It was very easy to forget that I was in the military."

Reinhardt left China not long after the Hiroshima bombing. The OSS was disbanded the following month - September 1945.

In 1947, Reinhardt joined the ranks of the newly-formed CIA.

"When the CIA was created in 1947, it built on the solid foundation of the OSS, and many of our officers drew on their OSS experience to build the new agency and meet the new postwar challenges," Weiss said. "The agency inherited its very DNA from the OSS, an organization of courageous men and women who made decisive contributions during and after the war."

Reinhardt retired in 1976. Today, he is treasurer of the McLean-based OSS Society, which lists President H.W. Bush, Ross Perot and James R. Schlesinger as honorary chairmen. The nonprofit organization will honor Perot at its annual award dinner on Saturday.

"At its peak, there were nearly 13,000 active OSS agents and operatives," said OSS Society President Charles Pinck, 46. "Today, there are about 200 [to] 300 left."

Pinck, the son of legendary OSS agent Dan Pinck, said the original organization, founded in 1947 as Veterans of the OSS, changed its name in 1998 to the OSS Society.

The elder Pinck also served behind enemy lines in China and wrote a memoir - "Journey to Peking: A Secret Agent in Wartime China" - about his time in the OSS.

"It's sad, but we basically had to prepare for a time when the organization would have to continue on with no actual OSS veterans left," Charles Pinck said. The group today includes CIA and Special Operations Forces members.

Reinhardt recently donated his rare suitcase radio to the society.

"I am proud to have served in the OSS Communications branch," he said. "Communications underpinned everything OSS ever did, and I dedicate my field radio to all the men and women who served in the Communications Branch during WWII." [MacDonald/FairfaxTimes/29September2010]

Ex-Terrorist Verena Becker in Court. On Thursday, former RAF terrorist Verena Becker appeared in a Stuttgart court to face charges in connection with the 1977 murder of the former German federal prosecutor. The judges will try to solve the puzzle of who really killed Siegfried Buback.

"Historical events occur twice - the first as tragedy, the second as farce," Karl Marx once wrote. If the murder of German Federal Prosecutor Siegfried Buback by far-left terrorists in April 1977 was a tragedy, then the farce began this Thursday when Verena Becker, a former member of the Red Army Faction (RAF), appeared in a court in Stuttgart, charged with complicity in the attack on Buback, who died along with his driver and a judicial officer.

The last RAF trial was in 2004, when Andrea Klump was sentenced to 12 years in prison. The case against Verena Becker is likely to be the last major trial of a former member of the terrorist group, which officially disbanded in 1998. The RAF, which was allied with Palestinian terrorists, killed 34 people and injured scores more in bomb attacks and assassinations targeting top German civil servants and corporate executives as well as US military installations in strikes that shocked the world.

Former Berlin anarchist Becker will have to sit in the dock in a windowless multi-purpose hall at the Stammheim prison in Stuttgart that was specially built for the trials of RAF founders Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof.

Becker herself was previously sentenced to life in prison in Stammheim for shooting at police officers during her arrest in May 1977. She was later secretly paid for cooperating with the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Germany's domestic intelligence agency, and was pardoned by then German President Richard von Weizs�cker in 1989. She only served nine years of her sentence.

Although Becker was released on bail and the RAF no longer exists, the strict security measures still apply in Stammheim - a macabre d�j�-vu from an era when the RAF brought the former West Germany to the brink of a state of emergency in the 1970s and '80s and nervous politicians defended themselves against the "terrorist threat" with dubious judicial methods.

The Federal Prosecutors Office has spent the last two years investigating Becker, a 58-year-old practitioner of alternative medicine who is now living on social welfare benefits. The charges against her run to 78 pages. More than 33 years after the event Becker has been accused of being in favor of the murder, of being seen in Karlsruhe before the crime was committed and of sticking the stamps on the envelopes that contained the letters that claimed responsibility for the attack. There have also been notes from previous years indicating that Becker saw herself as guilty.

However, the prosecutors insist that Becker was not directly involved in Buback's murder. The charge states that three men carried out the attack on the morning of April 7, 1977 in Karlsruhe. One of them drove the Suzuki motorbike, another shot into Buback's car from the pillion seat, while a third drove the getaway vehicle.

The Federal Prosecutor's Office seems to be attempting to use the Becker case to revive their old and doubtful charges against other RAF members in the Buback murder. Just one day after the murder, the Federal Criminal Police Office and the prosecutors determined that RAF members Knut Folkerts, G�nter Sonnenberg and Christian Klar were the attackers. Folkerts, who is accused of being the shooter, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1980. Christian Klar and Brigitte Mohnhaupt also later received life sentences, in part for involvement in the Buback murder.

However, Mohnhaupt was in the Netherlands on the day of the murder, Folkerts in Cologne and Amsterdam - at least according to ex-RAF member Silke Maier-Witt. Michael Buback, the son of the victim, has suggested that none of the three (Folkerts, Klar, Mohnhaupt) were on the motorbike. Buback, a chemistry professor in G�ttingen, has complained of "false convictions." He is convinced that it was Becker who shot his father.

Buback, who has researched the matter for the past two years, says that 20 witnesses claim to have seen a diminutive person or a woman on the pillion seat of the motorbike. Furthermore, the police seized the murder weapon, a Heckler & Koch semi-automatic rifle, during Becker's arrest four weeks after the attack, as well as a screwdriver that came from the motorbike.

However, the prosecutors do not consider statements by witnesses who are only now describing their impressions as credible. Yet a number of witnesses, who Buback talked with, had already spoken in their 1977 statements of a petite person. Frankfurt-based lawyer Ulrich Endres, who represents Michael Buback as a joint plaintiff in the case, is to request to be allowed question these witnesses in the coming months.

It is paradoxical that the Prosecutor's Office is being so skeptical about the witnesses questioned by Buback and yet are calling on a number of witnesses in the case against Becker, who claim to have seen Knut Folkerts in Karlsruhe that day. Folkerts has stated that he was in Cologne and Amsterdam on the day of the attack. Furthermore, at the time Folkerts did not look the way he did on the wanted poster that witnesses were shown to help them recognize him.

Michael Buback is now on the brink of despair. He cannot understand how the former Federal Prosecutor Kurt Rebmann could have received indications from Becker's statements to the Office of the Protection of the Constitution that Stefan Wisniewski was the shooter, and yet not have launched an investigation. A so-far inconclusive investigation into Wisniewski was only launched in 2007 after the publication of a SPIEGEL article.

Buback also fails to comprehend how Rebmann, who has since passed away, could have allowed the documents from the Office of the Protection of the Constitution about Becker's statements to disappear. He also can't fathom why her statements about his father's murder are missing from the first summary of the discussions between Becker and the domestic intelligence agency.

Then there is a statement by Becker to the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, that SPIEGEL reported on this week. According to the report, Becker had claimed that at the time of the attack she was visiting Palestinian comrades in the Middle East with Brigitte Mohnhaupt. However, since Mohnhaupt was in Amsterdam on the day of the murder, this must be a false claim.

The court in Stuttgart will now attempt to solve this puzzle. The legal proceedings will be made yet more difficult by the fact that all former RAF members refuse to make any statements, apart from Silke Maier-Witt and Peter-J�rgen Boock, who were both in Amsterdam on the day of the murder. Both believe, according to information obtained by SPIEGEL TV, that Stefan Wisniewski was the shooter. G�nter Sonnberg must have been the motorbike driver, Boock told the prosecutors and Christian Klar drove the getaway car.

Michael Buback will in any case be disappointed, because Verena Becker is not going to be convicted as the shooter. The Federal Court of Justice has already stated that Becker should only be charged with aiding and abetting rather than being an accomplice. The Stuttgart judges will hardly be able to find her guilty of complicity based on the evidence that will be presented.

If she is found guilty then the court has to make "hardship allowances" for the fact that Becker has already been sentenced to life due to her crimes as an RAF member.

Atonement in the form of a long custodial sentence, such as that envisaged by conservatives, is not likely. But 33 years after the murder, who would it serve if Becker were subjected to 1970s style justice, with a draconian sentence on the basis of doubtful evidence? [Sontheimer/Spiegel/30September2010] 

At the National Cryptologic Museum, a Not-So-Secret Enigma. Legend has it that in the early 1990s the National Security Agency bought the Colony 7 Motel, just off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, after one of its employees, too tired to drive home, discovered his room had a straight line of sight into NSA's super-sensitive communications complex.

Today the erstwhile motel, refurbished as the National Cryptologic Museum, is chocked with the gewgaws and gadgets of electronic eavesdropping and code-breaking. My favorite remains the Nazis' famous Enigma machine, which looks like a very strange old typewriter, but in its day enabled German military units to send and receive completely secure coded messages.

Or that's what they thought. As the world would learn after the war, a team of brilliant Polish mathematicians had duplicated the machine and turned it over to the Allies. In one of the cruelest of wartime ironies, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill could not use what he learned from the German "decrypts," as they're called, to evacuate British subjects from the path of Nazi bombers, lest he tip off the enemy that their codes had been broken.

All of which means that half the allure of the museum's gadgets comes from learning the back story to what they did. But in any event, visitors can make their own codes on the Enigma machine, learning, as they plunk the keys, that nothing stays secret forever. [Stein/WashingtonPost/1October2010] 

Section III - COMMENTARY

Contractual Dispute Leads To Claims Of CIA Using Hacked, Faulty Software To Mistarget Bombs, by Mike Masnick. One important lesson I've heard from lawyers over and over again in cautioning companies who are too eager to sue: when you open up a lawsuit to discovery, be aware that discovery works both ways. Take, for example, the bizarre lawsuit highlighted by The Register, between Intelligent Integration Systems (IISi) and Netezza, the data warehousing company IBM just announced it's trying to buy. Apparently, IISi makes a product called Geospatial that datamines information to determine location. It works on Netezza's NPS platform, and the two companies had a relationship, but Netezza sued IISi for refusing to modify Geospatial to work on its updated appliance, TwinFin.

The details all flowed out during the legal dispute, and it doesn't make Netezza or the CIA look very good. The CIA? Oh, we hadn't mentioned them? It seems they were the key to the whole issue. Netezza apparently did a deal with the CIA to provide some TwinFin appliances with Geospatial, which could be used (allegedly, allegedly) to help predator drones pinpoint where to drop bombs to kill people. Only problem? Geospatial doesn't work on TwinFin, and Netezza didn't want to lose the sale. Apparently after some back and forth between Netezza and IISi, where Netezza revealed the client and the importance of this - and IISi pointing out that it just wasn't that easy to port the software and keep it accurate - IISi claims that Netezza went ahead and modified the software on its own - and the CIA used it, even though everyone admitted that it wasn't particularly accurate at times - sometimes being off by as much as 13 meters.

Of course, much of that came out as part of the discovery process after Netezza sued IISi for refusing to do the update. As that went on, IISi learned more about how Netezza apparently decided to make its own version of Geospatial, and is now suing back. The original case of Netezza suing IISi? That got dismissed, as IISi had no contractual obligation to port its software... but the lawsuit itself seems to have dragged all sorts of dirty laundry out into public, including the fact that our predator drones might not be very accurate, and the CIA might have knowingly used buggy software. [TechDirt/27September2010] 

Pakistan Daily Times: 'Foiling' Terror Attack in Europe. According to reports in the British media, the American CIA has attempted to foil Mumbai-style terror attacks in France, Germany, the UK and the US by ramping up missile strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas. The source of this information is a German citizen of Afghan descent. A US official confirmed the reports of an al Qaeda plot to carry out attacks in Western Europe and the US. He said: "The threat is, at this point, credible but not specific." Just this year, there was a failed attempt to bomb Times Square in New York by Faisal Shahzad, a naturalised US citizen of Pakistani descent. The US took a hard stance after the Times Square incident and warned Pakistan of dire consequences if a terror attack originating from our soil takes place in the US. In the light of the rise in attacks in Afghanistan by the Taliban, the US appears to be losing patience with Pakistan.

US top commander in Afghanistan General David Petraeus has given a veiled warning that the US can eventually launch ground operations in FATA. According to a New York Times report: "Petraeus wants to turn up the heat on the safe havens...He has pointed out to the Pakistanis that they could do more." Such thinking brewing within the US security establishment could have serious consequences for our country.

North Waziristan has been a hot issue for quite some time now for the western forces. The notorious Haqqani network is accused of providing safe havens to foreign terrorist networks. It has also been alleged that the Haqqani network has the covert support of Pakistan's military establishment. With endgame in Afghanistan approaching, the military establishment thinks that it can pursue its 'strategic depth' policy without any repercussions. What it does not envisage is any international terror plots emanating from our soil. The Haqqani network itself may not be involved in pursuing such attacks outside the region, but its affiliates like al Qaeda are being provided with shelter and training in North Waziristan. Now that such plots are being uncovered, it is time to scrap this deadly foreign policy. A recent drone attack killed al Qaeda's operational chief, Sheikh Fateh, in North Waziristan. It shows that the al Qaeda leadership is indeed hiding inside Pakistani territory. It is time that the Pakistan Army stops giving a free rein to the Haqqani network and launches a crackdown against all such elements that can lead to the destabilisation of the country, the region and the world at large.

The shelf life of our policy of protecting the Afghan Taliban has ended. If any terror attack takes place in any part of the world and has its origins in Pakistan, it could lead to serious consequences. We can hardly afford this. Pakistan is a dependent country. Our economic model is such that if the west decides to stop giving us loans and monetary aid, our economy will collapse. A 'client state' like Pakistan cannot afford to annoy its benefactors. Besides, by rooting out terrorism from our soil, we will be helping ourselves the most. Terrorist attacks on our soil have crippled the economy and made the life of every citizen all the more difficult. Political stability will be ushered in as well when we are rid of all extremist elements and can then work on getting our act together. Let this anticipated terror attack in Europe incident be a lesson for us to move forward and scrap all such policies that have increasingly diminishing returns. [DailyTimes/30September2010] 

Pollard - "Common Sense and Impudence," by Richard Sale. The recurring pressure from Israel to repatriate convicted spy Jonathan Pollard is clearly an expression of common sense if Israel wants to recruit any other agents in place. The KGB was always conscientious in extracting its snared spies by one means or another.

If anything smacks of impudence it's the current Israeli pressure when contrasted with the stormy ocean of pious Israeli government denials when the case first broke.

My own view is that Pollard should never be released.

I was the reporter who broke the story of how the Israeli government was selling the pilfered Pollard material to the Eastern Bloc in return for increased emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union.

I don't recall the exact date of my story but I believe it was 1987. My sources were senior U.S. serving counterintelligence (CI3) officials. According to them, the Israel-Soviet deal on emigration was made on Cyprus in 1981 and was the brilliantly cunning idea of top Israeli defense official Ariel Sharon. (CI3 officials also told me at that time that Mossad was "full of Soviet moles.")

The recruitment of Pollard was not an aberration - he became an operative of Israel as early as 1981 when he was working for the U.S. Navy's Field Operations Intelligence Office. Israel was targeting certain oil fields in southern Russia and Pollard's task was to gather information on the targeting.

In any case, although Sharon appears to be the initial villain, high level Israeli officials including Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, Yitzhak Shamir and others knew of Pollard's existence. Shamir, for example, was very active in peddling the Pollard data to the Soviets.

At the time of his arrest, the Justice Department alleged that Pollard had provided Israel with 1,800 documents or 100,000 pages. The damage Pollard inflicted on U.S. security was enormous. Senior DOD officials told me that Pollard stole from the Navy's Sixth Fleet Ocean Surveillance Information Facility (FOSIF) in Rota, Spain, the daily report, a top-secret document filed every morning at 0800 Zulu time (Greenwich Mean Time) that contained NSA data on events in the Middle East and North Africa during the previous 24 hours. NASA and Navy Intelligence shared the site.

The U.S. Navy's obsessive focus was on Soviet ballistic missile submarines cruising the Mediterranean whose weapons were aimed at the United States; ships which had to be quickly destroyed in the event of war.

Pollard gave the Israelis the Rota reports for a year, also providing them with the National SIGINT Requirements List, a day-to-day compendium, listed by priority, of NSA collection units around the world that would have included things such as alerts to U.S. bases in a region before an insertion by U.S. Special Forces or a forthcoming bombing mission.

Pollard also plundered the Defense Intelligence Agency's Community On-Line Intelligence System, which was one of the government's first computerized information-retrieval-network systems, called DIAL-COINS, that contained all the intelligence reports filed by Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marine attaches in Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa.

Pollard also stole a huge 10-volume manual called Radio Signals Notations or RAISIN, lauded as the bible of signals intelligence that lists how the United States collects signals around the world. This outlined the sites, frequencies, and significant features of Israeli communication spied on by the United States including the U-2 "Senior Stretch" flights from Cyprus, the RC-135 electronic warfare flights, the joint CIA/NSA listening post in the U.S. Embassy in Israel, along with all the known communications links used by the Soviet Union. All of these were compromised by Pollard.

The Pollard thefts had sinister consequences. U.S. agents in the Eastern Bloc or the Soviet Union were rolled up and America's ability to collect technical intelligence on Soviet designs was shut down or crippled, leaving us blind.

At the time I broke my stories, I did not know former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger, now deceased. However, friends eventually put us together and I talked with him informally over 30 times about what Sy Hersh, myself and others had written about Pollard. Weinberger could not calmly discuss Pollard but hardened into furious rage each time.

Sy Hersh and I became friends over the story. He had a book coming out about Israel and after I talked about the moles in Mossad, he called me at UPI and began by saying, "Thanks for screwing up my book," chiding me for ruining one of the book's exclusives. The book had plenty more of them, and Sy remains for me a gigantic figure in journalism for his integrity and toughness.

To conclude, Pollard should sit where he is until we can, with grace, send his body to Israel for burial. [Sale/SemperTyrannis/30September2010]

Section IV - BOOKS, OBITUARIES, JOBS AND COMING EVENTS

Books

The Horse That Leaps Through Clouds: A Tale of Espionage, the Silk Road and the Rise of Modern China. If I were a completely different person - one with guts, determination and a zest for life - I wouldn't have any need to read Eric Enno Tamm's fascinating and exhausting-by-proxy new book, The Horse That Leaps Through Clouds. I would make the 17,000-kilometre journey from St. Petersburg to Beijing myself.

But that's the great thing about travel/historical books such as this. While the writer's getting, say, heat stroke, armchair travelers who lack guts, determination and a zest for life can get up at the slightest hint of personal discomfort, find a cool, refreshing drink and then return to the journey at hand feeling none the worse for wear.

In this case, it's two journeys: Tamm's and Finnish icon Baron Carl Gustaf Mannerheim's, the latter having made the same trip, more or less, in 1906. He is, in effect, Tamm's travelling companion. "By reading his journal and following in his footsteps, I hoped to share common experiences and perhaps bond with the Baron," Tamm writes. Each night, he turns to Mannerheim's journal for "context and comfort" as well as "hints of what lay ahead on the road and, perhaps, in China's future."

Though born in Tofino, B.C., and currently living in Ottawa, Tamm is of Estonian descent. He grew up listening to his father tell Second World War stories, many of them involving Mannerheim, who was then the commander-in-chief of the Finnish army. These stories piqued Tamm's interest, but it wasn't until 2000 that he first heard about Mannerheim's Asian journey and started thinking about retracing it. It would prove to be a daunting task.

Mannerheim's trek had begun in the aftermath of Russia's humiliating loss in the Russo-Japanese war of 1905, a defeat the Czarist regime attributed to a failure of intelligence. With China thought to be another rising giant in the East - as it is today - Russia was determined not to make the same mistake. So Mannerheim was summoned to St. Petersburg (at the time, Finland was part of the Russian Empire, and Mannerheim a Russian officer) and offered a secret mission to China.

On July 6, 1906, disguised as an ethnographer, he boarded a train and left Russia's capital, not to return for two years. Exactly 100 years later, Tamm follows suit but he has a problem: The Chinese have somehow gotten wind of his plan and deny him a visa. Luckily, this is not an immediate concern and won't be for thousands of kilometers, which he will traverse by plane, train, ferry, car, horse and camel.

Reaching Turkmenistan by ferry, Tamm finds himself both ill and saddled with a very pretty but sour Belorussian interpreter. He soon manages to get himself arrested in Ashgabat, the country's capital. He has no idea why, until he is forced to sign a confession admitting that he, a foreigner, had been out past 11 p.m. Apparently that's not allowed. In Uzbekistan, he takes a drunken tour of Andijan - where government troops opened fire on protesters in 2005, killing hundreds - and miraculously does not get arrested after the police stop the car he is in. And on it goes.

It's a captivating ride in an area of the world that has gone largely unreported and Tamm is an engaging guide. When he finally reaches the Chinese border, he passes himself off as Estonian - not a great leap when you have an Estonian passport - and is astonished to find that he has "snuck through the back door of China."

In China, Tamm's relentless curiosity takes over. He seeks out missionaries - he's not a fan, it's obvious - talks with dissidents and gets a first-hand look at the destruction coal has wrought in the everyday life of China: Crossing the Yellow River on the Peking-Hankow railway one day all he can see is a "sooty haze" as "thick and blue as cotton candy." But the worst place on earth would seem to be Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi Province in China's north, which he calls the "most blighted city I have ever visited."

"Garbage was everywhere. Heaps smoldered on the streets. So many torn bits of plastic hung in the trees that they looked like fall foliage. The roads were horrendously dusty, potholed and cracked. I saw a teenage boy crawling on the sidewalk, dragging his deformed legs behind him and begging for change. A sooty film covered everything."

Tamm is pretty faithful to Mannerheim's route and alternates his thoughts, experiences and impressions with those of the Baron. (It would have been nice to have some pictures, and it's astounding the book has none. But Tamm has set up a very detailed and interactive website, including maps and videos, to fill in these blanks (horsethatleaps.com) and it's worth a look.)

Mannerheim's trip was epic for the time and it's fascinating to read his impressions a century later. His China had one-third the people and far fewer factories, but was thought to have an enormous amount of future potential, much like today's China. Both Chinas flirted with democracy, but the Qing dynasty 100 years ago was not able to keep a lid on the forces it had unleashed. Tamm is not sure the current regime will suffer the same fate as the Qing, but as he makes clear, China is a complicated, almost unknowable place, no matter how much time you spend in its grasp. [Macgowan/OttawaCitizen/3October2010]

Soviet Spy Case Similar to Current Debate: Philadelphia Lawyers' Pro Bono Defense of a Man Who Sold Nuclear Secrets. Under attack from outside, the nation is gripped by fear of an enemy whose destructive power and reach remain a terrifying unknown.

Authorities launch a dragnet and arrest dozens of suspects. A handful of lawyers step forward to represent the accused - and they are vilified, sometimes by lawyers within their own firms.

It all sounds a bit like the bitter debate that has swirled around the pro bono representation of hundreds of accused al-Qaeda operatives by lawyers from some of the nation's most prominent firms.

But a similar scenario played out decades earlier in the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg nuclear-spying case. Then, an obscure Philadelphia chemist named Harry Gold spent years passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets leaked to him by a German-born physicist working on the allies' crash program in New Mexico to develop an atomic bomb, the Manhattan Project.

Public revulsion at Gold's crime, coupled with fear of the Soviets, who only months earlier in September of 1949 had detonated their first atomic bomb, made representing Gold a hazardous career choice.

Yet it was a chance two Philadelphia lawyers of blue-blood lineage and impeccable conservative credentials decided to take.

Shortly after Gold's arrest at his home in Northeast Philadelphia, the two lawyers with the firm of Pepper Hamilton L.L.P. stepped forward. John D.M. Hamilton was a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and favorite lawyer of Philadelphia's powerful Pew family; Augustus Ballard came from a lustrous Philadelphia legal family. His grandfather had founded Ballard Spahr L.L.P.

Their work quite possibly saved Gold's life; it most certainly changed their careers forever.

"These two lawyers are the only heroes in the whole saga," says historian and author Allen Hornblum, who details Gold's life and espionage activities in a new book: The Invisible Harry Gold, published by Yale University Press. "They stuck with him for 22 years."

That Gold was central to the Soviet goal of pilfering U.S. nuclear technology is little in doubt. He was the Soviet's only courier to physicist Klaus Fuchs, part of the British team that helped Americans design nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Every few months, Gold would schedule a vacation from his job as a chemist at Philadelphia General Hospital, and travel to Santa Fe, N.M., among other places, where he would meet Fuchs and pick up detailed drawings and instructions about the nation's nascent atomic bomb program, and then deliver them to a Soviet handler in New York.

Julius Rosenberg, a well-documented member of the same Soviet network, and his wife, whose role in the spying operation was somewhat less certain, were executed in 1953, and are better known than Gold.

But Gold's work for the Soviets probably was much more central to the success of their atomic program, if only because Fuchs had given him nearly complete design details of the American bomb.

There are many fascinating aspects in Hornblum's book - the wrenching descriptions of Depression-era Philadelphia, in which Gold was raised, the late-night walks through the streets of Center City by Gold and his Soviet handler, and clandestine spy meetings at the Franklin Institute.

But perhaps the most striking is the decision of Hamilton, a quintessential establishment figure, to take up Gold's defense.

Hamilton had been raised in prosperous circumstances in Topeka, Kan., and went to prep school at Phillips Andover Academy in Massachusetts before graduating from Northwestern University. He forged a career as a lawyer and state legislator in Kansas and played a key role in Alf Landon's 1936 presidential campaign, when Landon made him national GOP chair.

Hamilton also was a highly successful commercial lawyer, and a favorite of the Pew family, of the Sun Oil fortune, who brought him to Philadelphia.

He was intrigued by Gold, an intelligent, hardworking lover of opera, literature, and the Philadelphia Phillies, whose main character flaw, apart from the stunning dishonesty of his spying career, was his inability to say no - to coworkers and friends asking for loans, to employers urging him to work harder, to the Soviet operatives he eventually connected with.

Just as important to Hamilton and Ballard was the principle that an accused criminal, no matter how heinous the offense, was entitled to a defense.

Judging from the way the Gold case played out, civil rights protections and courtroom procedures at the time seemed lax. Federal Judge Patrick McGranery disclosed during one hearing that he'd had ex parte communications with Herbert Hoover about the case, an acknowledgment that today would cause a criminal case to implode.

Hornblum writes that the FBI, after wearing Gold down with repeated visits and searches of his home in May 1950, got him to admit his espionage activities. They then holed up with Gold for days in a hotel room, where they continued to pump him for information.

Ballard and Hamilton realized early on that the case against Gold was weak, if only because he had been questioned for days without a lawyer. The case itself was based almost entirely on Gold's abject and fulsome confession.

But corroborating testimony from Fuchs was not possible because the British government had imprisoned Fuchs in the United Kingdom for giving up British nuke secrets to the Soviets. It was not clear that the Brits would allow him to come to the United States to testify.

Meantime, the Americans, in a major breakthrough, had deciphered Soviet cables showing that Gold had been one of their operatives.

Yet, use of that information in court would compromise the Americans' own counterintelligence.

If Gold retracted his confession, it was game over for the government. That would have placed Hamilton and Ballard in the delicate position of potentially winning the release of a detested enemy spy.

And that simply would not have gone over well at the Merion Cricket Club.

But it wasn't going to play out that way. Gold made a full confession.

Gold was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison, and was released after serving 16. He died in August of 1972, during heart surgery, having spent the final years of his life as a chemist at John F. Kennedy Hospital.

Ballard, who died two years ago, and Hamilton, who passed away in 1973, both went on at different times to chair Pepper Hamilton and were revered at the firm. They remained as Gold's lawyers for the rest of his life, never receiving a dime. [Mondics/Philly.com/3October2010] 

Obituaries

Frank A. Ecker, CIA Employee and Former Rockville Mayor, Dies at 89. Frank A. Ecker, 89, a former Central Intelligence Agency budget examiner who was mayor of Rockville from 1962 to 1968, died Sept. 18 at Asbury Methodist Village in Gaithersburg of respiratory failure.

Dr. Ecker worked for the CIA from 1964 to 1974 and retired as head of the budget office. In 1956, he began his career in local politics as a Rockville City Council member. While he was mayor, Dr. Ecker oversaw the city's revitalization efforts and helped lead an early urban renewal plan that redeveloped what is now the Rockville Town Center. He also helped establish the Rockville-Montgomery Swim Club and Civic Center Park. He was the Montgomery County public advocate for assessments and taxation from 1974 to 1984.

Francis Adolph Ecker was born in Brillion, Wis., and received a bachelor's degree in 1942 and a master's degree in 1947, both in political science from the University of Wisconsin. He received a doctorate in political science from the University of Michigan in 1954. During World War II, he served in the Navy as a Japanese language officer. He later worked for the State Department and what is now the Office of Management and Budget before joining the CIA. He moved to Rockville in 1954 and had been a Gaithersburg resident since 2001.

Survivors include his wife of 63 years, the former Florence "Flossie" Kent, of Gaithersburg; three children, Kathleen M. Ecker of Santa Rosa, Calif., Christopher J. Ecker of Gaithersburg and Joseph G. Ecker of Middleburg; a brother; and five grandchildren. [Wiseman/WashingtonPost/28September2010] 

Georgy Arbatov, Soviet Foreign Policy Guru, Dies. Russian state television says Georgy Arbatov, a foreign policy adviser to Soviet presidents from Leonid Brezhnev to Mikhail Gorbachev, has died. He was 87.

The TV report said Arbatov died Friday but did not give the cause of death.

Arbatov, the Soviet Union's top America-watcher, was especially close to Yuri Andropov, the former KGB chief and Soviet leader between 1982 and 1984.

From 1967 to 1995 Arbatov founded, then ran the U.S. and Canada Institute, an advisory body to Soviet authorities.

He remained its honorary director thereafter.

Arbatov was awarded the highest Soviet scientific distinction in 1974, named Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. [AP/1October2010] 

Jobs

Part-Time Consultants. My firm is looking for part-time consultants with skills in computer forensics, forensic accounting and auditing, accident reconstruction, languages, etc. for part-time work with an investigative and litigation support consulting firm. We prefer active and retired law enforcement, intelligence, professionals and professors. Anyone who is interested may contact: info@rgirodLLC.com

Dr. Robert J. Girod, Sr.

Coming Events

EVENTS IN COMING TWO MONTHS....

MANY Spy Museum Events in October and November with full details are listed on the AFIO Website at www.afio.com. The titles for some of these are in detail below and online.

9 October 2010, 2 pm - Kennebunk, ME - The Maine Chapter hosts Israeli Col. (Ret.) Jonathan Fighel on Palestinian terrorism, Global Jihad, and the Use of the Internet for Terrorist Plots.

Col. Fighel has broad knowledge, both academic and operational, of Islamic terror groups and their funding, Palestinian terrorism, global jihad, and the use of the internet in terrorism.  He has served in various operational intelligence gathering posts and a number of command positions on the West Bank, including Governor of Ramallah, Jenin and Tul-Karm.  He is currently senior researcher at the International Policy Institute for Counter Terrorism (ICT) in Herzliya, Israel and head of the Prosecuting Terrorism Intelligence Unit there.  Founded in 1996, the ICT is described as  the leading academic institute for counter-terrorism in the world.  Its mission is facilitating international cooperation in the global struggle against terrorism.  A respected media commentator, Col. Fighel is frequently invited to lecture on security matters related to counter-terrorism to law enforcement agencies around the world including the Israeli Security Agency, FBI, N.Y. Police, and Scotland Yard.  Col. Fighel holds an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from Tel Aviv University where he is currently a Ph.D. candidate.  The meeting, which begins at 2 pm, is open to the public, will be held at the Community House, 8 Temple Street, Kennebunkport, across from the Kennebunkport Post Office, uphill from the municipal parking lot.  For information call 967-4298. 

Tuesday, 12 October 2010 - Tampa, FL - AFIO Suncoast Florida Chapter Luncheon Meeting featuring Rep. Kevin C. Ambler (R) AFB Officer's Club.

SPEAKER: Representative Kevin C. Ambler, District 47, who serves in the Florida State House of Representatives. District 47 is located in Northwest Hillsborough County. Representative Ambler attended Cornell University on a four-year Air Force ROTC scholarship where he received his Bachelor of Science degree in economics in 1983. Upon graduation, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Air Force. In 1986, he received his J.D. from Southwestern University School of Law in Los Angeles, California. Soon after, he was appointed as an Air Force judge advocate and assigned to the Office of the Staff Judge Advocate, MacDill Air Force Base, Florida, where he served for nearly 5 years in several positions including Chief of Claims, Chief of Legal Assistance, Chief of Military Justice and Chief of the Civil Law division. During this same time, he also was appointed by the U.S. Attorney General as a Special Assistant United States Attorney and was responsible for prosecuting criminal cases in federal court against civilians arising on MacDill AFB. Later, his responsibilities expanded to defending the United States in federal court in medical malpractice and personal injury cases arising under the Federal Tort Claims Act. Representative Ambler entered private practice and transferred to the Air Force Reserves in 1991. During his first year as a reservist, he was awarded the Harmon Award by the Air Force Judge Advocate General as the Most Outstanding Reserve Judge Advocate in the U.S. Air Force. Representative Ambler's other military decorations include the Air Force Achievement Medal, two Air Force Meritorious Service Medals, and two National Defense Services Medals.
RSVP no later than October 7th with the names of any guests. Check-in at 1130 hours; opening ceremonies, lunch and business meeting at noon, followed by our speaker, who will be announced. We have maintained the all-inclusive cost at $15. The cash wine and soda bar will open at 1100 hours for those that wish to come early to socialize. You must present your $15 check payable to "Suncoast Chapter, AFIO" (or cash) at check-in to cover the luncheon. Should you not have a 'bumper sticker' or ID card for access to MacDill AFB, please so state in your RSVP. Be sure to include your license number, name on drivers license and state of issue for yourself and for any guests you are bringing on base. Anyone with special roster gate access should proceed to the Bayshore Gate. If you need directions, please let us know. The main gate will send you to the visitor's center and they will not be able to help you enter the base, only give you directions to the Bayshore Gate. To register: afiosuncoastvp@aol.com

Tuesday, 12 October 2010 - Columbia, MD - The NCMF [National Cryptologic Museum Foundation] Annual Meeting

There will be a panel discussion in the morning on "The Future of the Intelligence Community -- Too Big, Too Small, Just Right?" The panel will be moderated by Patrick Weadon and the panel will consist of Mr. Rich Haver, Lt. Gen (Ret) Ken Minihan and Ms. Rachel Martin. There will be a discussion on various aspects of the Cyber Command in the afternoon session. Details are available on the NCMF Web site at www.cryptologicfoundation.org. Invitations will be mailed to all active members shortly

12-13 October 2010 - McLean, VA - NMIA Fall Counterintelligence Symposium - event will be held at the SECRET/NOFORN level

There have been significant changes to U.S. Counterintelligence in 2010, as well as challenges and opportunities.  Hear the latest information on CI from the premier DIA Defense Counterintelligence and HUMINT Center Senior intelligence leaders from DIA who will discuss the entire CI Enterprise and CI training.  Army, Navy, and Air Force leadership will address the latest changes to their organizations from their services perspective. The various Combatant Command CI representatives will provide the current CI picture from their particular geographic areas.  A special Army and NATO CI unit will address CI issues in a wartime environment. The FBI will weigh in by discussing the latest issues concerning domestic CI threats and responses to them. The critical areas of CI analysis and the CI interface with cyber will round out the symposium. To register or for more information visit: https://www.123signup.com/event?id=mnszh

Wednesday, 13 October 2010 - Albuquerque, NM - AFIO's Tom Smith New Mexico Chapter meets at Hyatt Regency Tamaya Resort

Contact Pete Bostwick at foreigndevil@yahoo.com to register for this luncheon meeting of the chapter. Takes place at the Hyatt Regency Tamaya Resort, Santa Ana Reservation. 11:00 AM: Buffet Lunch Served 11:30 AM.
$20.00 per person, including tax and gratuity. Since their staff must plan in advance for the right number of attendees, we will need an advance commitment from those planning to attend. We request that as soon as you decide (but NLT 7 Oct), please place your reservation with: 505-898-2649

13 October 2010 - Scottsdale, AZ - "The FBI's Evolving Domestic Intelligence Mission" is theme of AFIO Arizona Chapter Meeting by two FBI Professionals.

Mr. Steve Hooper and Mr. Mark Gygi will discuss the "FBI's Evolving Domestic Intelligence Mission." Hooper and Mr. Mark Gygi, who co-manage the Phoenix FBI's overall Intelligence Program, will be speaking on the FBI's Evolving Domestic Intelligence Mission, with an emphasis on how this intelligence mission impacts locally on things like the South-West border. Hooper has been an FBI Special Agent for more than 25 years. He has served in Portland, Baltimore, Annapolis, and FBI Hqs. He was detailed to CIA's Counterterrorism Center for a period after 9/11. He has been in the Phoenix office for 3 years, where he serves as Assistant Special Agent-in-Charge (ASAC) of the intelligence program. Gygi has been involved in the U.S. intelligence community for more than 25 years, having lived and served abroad for 13 plus years. His overseas assignments took him to Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and East Asia. As a senior officer he is currently detailed to the Phoenix FBI to co-manage the intelligence program for that Bureau office. He has been in Phoenix for 2 and 1/2 years. Event is being held at: McCormick RANCH GOLF COURSE (7505 McCormick Parkway, Scottsdale AZ 85258 ~ Phone 480.948.0260). Our meeting fees are as follows: $20.00 for AFIO members, $22.00 for guests. For reservations or questions, please email Simone sl@4smartphone.net or simone@afioaz.org or call and leave a message on 602.570.6016. Art Kerns, president@afioaz.org.

Wednesday, 20 October 2010, noon – 1 pm – Stealing Atomic Secrets: The Invisible Harry Gold - a program at the International Spy Museum.

Harry Gold was literally the man who handed the Soviets the plans for America's nuclear bomb. A Russian-Jewish immigrant from Switzerland, he became a spy for the Soviets while studying chemistry in the United States during the depths of the Great Depression. His KGB code names, such as "Goose" and "Mad," belied his importance as a liaison to important spies within the scientific and engineering communities. During World War II, he was entrusted to be the KGB's handler for physicist Klaus Fuchs, who had burrowed deep into the Manhattan Project, America's super-secret program to build an atom bomb. After Gold's arrest in 1950, his testimony helped send Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair. Journalist and historian Allen Hornblum will help us understand how a decent and well-intentioned man helped commit the greatest scientific theft of the twentieth century.
Free! No registration required! Join the author for an informal chat and book signing. More information at www.spymuseum.org

22 October 2010, Noon luncheon - - Washington, DC - The ABA Standing Committee on Law and National Security luncheon at University Club
The luncheon features Richard Clarke on "Cyber Security." To register contact Holly McMahon, Staff Director, at 202-662-1035 or at hmcmahon@staff.abanet.org More information at www.abanet.org/natsecurity

Saturday, 23 October 2010, 10 am - Coral Gables, FL - "How We Know That You Are Lying: Explorations in the Science of Polygraphy" with John Palmatier, PhD -- at the AFIO Miami Chapter

Dr. John J. Palmatier of Slattery Associates/Dawn Associates [ www.polygraphexperts.com] speaks at this Saturday morning event hosted by the AFIO Ted Shackley Miami Chapter. The fee is $10 for AFIO member; $25 for guests. No charge for U.S. Government employees, military, students, faculty or law enforcement.
RSVP with check to Tom Spencer, 999 Ponce de Leon Blvd Ste 520, Coral Gables, FL 33134. Questions to 305 648-0940 or email TRSMiami@aol.com

28 October 2010, 0930- 1715 - Newport News, VA - AFIO Hampton Roads Chapter hosts 2nd Annual Workshop on National Security and Intelligence

Location: Christopher Newport University, Newport News. Theme: Maritime and Port Security
We seek sponsorship at all levels to help cover costs. Please advise if you know of a company or organization that might like to sponsor the event.
Sponsorships start at $250. RSVP: Melissa Saunders mwsaunders@cox.net

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.

29-31 October 2010 - Middletown, RI - The New England Chapter of the Naval Cryptologic Veterans Association (NCVA-NE) will hold a Fall Mini-Reunion. Event takes place at the Newport Beach Hotel and Suites. The registration cut-off date is September 29, 2010. For additional information, call (518) 664-8032 or visit http://web.meganet.net/kman/mr2010b.htm.

Tuesday, 2 November 2010, 6:30 pm - Washington, DC - Attack on Mumbai: A New Paradigm for Terrorism? - a program at the International Spy Museum.

"One of the gunmen seemed to be talking on a mobile phone even as he used his other hand to fire off rounds." — Nisar Suttar, eyewitness, November 2008
On 26 November 2008, ten highly trained and disciplined men used covert intelligence and off-the-shelf technology to terrorize and immobilize the city of Mumbai, killing 166 people and wounding over 300. The attackers were able to effectively overwhelm the Mumbai police and Indian security forces utilizing integrated tactics, superior weaponry, and sophisticated covert communications that provided their Pakistani handlers with "real time" command and control as events unfolded. This change in tactics has presented a challenge for the West: how can we find ways to defend against similar attacks in the future? 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, has thoroughly researched the planning and technology behind the attack. Using videotape of the surviving attacker's confession and intercepts of terrorist voice communications during the assault, he will offer a strategic overview of the attacks and explore the tactical phases, and the use by the terrorists of "commercial off-the-shelf" (COTS) technologies and the Internet. Tickets: $12.50 per person. Seating is limited. Register at www.spymuseum.org

Wednesday, 10 November 2010, 5 pm - by voice conference - The Miami-Dade Chapter of AFIO hosts their Annual Meeting and Elections by telephone conference. These Elections will be for Officers and Directors. The Elective Officers are President, President-Elect, Secretary and Treasurer. All officers and directors must be members of the National organization and be current in dues. All officers must also be directors. There will be no less than 9 directors. We are giving this notice in advance for the 2011 year ( starting January 1, 2011), so that you can be thinking about your role in the leadership for next year. Current President Tom Spencer will not be standing for election either as an officer or a director, since it is time for a change. Please consider becoming an active member of the chapter for a few years, starting 2011. To participate, contact Tom Spencer at trsmiami@aol.com or at 305-790-4715 for details.

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

SPYCRUISE�: A National Security Educational Lecture/Seminar Series. The CI Centre and Henley-Putnam University are sponsoring a new SpyCruise�, November 13-20, 2010. Join them on the Holland American MS Eurodam as they set sail from Ft. Lauderdale, FL to the Grand Turks, San Juan, St. Thomas and Half Moon Cay in the Caribbean. Speakers include former DCI’s Porter Goss and Gen. Michael Hayden plus many others. AFIO member and retired CIA operations officer Bart Bechtel continues his role as the “SpySkipper.” For more information about this year’s SpyCruise�, go to: http://spytrek.com/spycruise.html. RESERVATIONS: www.DFunTravel.com or call 1-888-670-0008.
Fees for an eight day cruise: $1,199 inside cabin; $1269 Ocean View Cabin; $1449 Verandahs; $1979 Suites. Price includes program, taxes, port charges and gratuities. Colorful brochure here.

Thursday, 18 November 2010, 11:30 am Colorado Springs, CO - The Rocky Mountain Chapter presents Vice President William D. Kappel, Applied Weather Associates, Monument, CO who will speak on Global Warming. Both science and intelligence have to work with incomplete and sometimes contradicting data. How can a valid conclusion be reached with reasonable confidence? The sample topic we will examine is global warming, specifically if it is human induced. A topic, that is controversial, has lots of scientific data and opinion, is either very important for future world stability and security if true but not perceived as true now, or for unnecessary large economic disruption if not true but perceived as true now. To be held at the new location AFA... Eisenhower Golf Course Club House. Please RSVP to Tom VanWormer at robsmom@pcisys.net

Thursday, 18 November 2010, 6:30 pm - "Uneasy Alliance: The CIA and ISI in Pakistan" at the International Spy Museum

"CIA and ISI operatives depend on each other for their lives…" - so says an anonymous senior ISI official, December 2009
As the U.S. hunts down Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan, the CIA appears to be working closely with the Pakistan Intelligence Service (ISI). But the two services have a long and rocky history with frequent betrayal by ISI members saying one thing, and aiding the Taliban behind-the-scenes. While the ISI has helped with the capture of Afghan Taliban leaders, some they have released Taliban figures they caught on their own. What is the future of this relationship? Are the CIA and ISI endgames compatible? Join this panel of experts as they explore what's opinions of what's happening on the ground in Pakistan and a few predictions for the future: Farhana Ali, senior lecturer, AFPAK Team, Booz, Allen & Hamilton; Seth Jones, RAND analyst and author of Counterinsurgency in Pakistan; and Shuja Nawaz, director, South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council of the United States.
Fee: Tickets: $12.50 To register, visit www.spymuseum.org

Monday 13 December 2010, 5:30 pm - New York, NY - "Status of US Intelligence Capabilities" by former CIA Officer Aris Pappas, is theme of NY Metro Chapter Meeting
Speaker: Aris Pappas, CIA 32 years - Over this period he was an Analyst, Managed Operations, and held other Senior Positions. Now a Senior Director with Microsoft Corporation. Topic: "Status of Our Intelligence Capabilities"
Registration 5:30 PM Meeting 6:00 PM.
Cost $40. Includes three course buffet dinner, cash bar.
Location: Manhattan "3 West Club" 3 West 51st Street
Advance Reservations Required: Email afiometro@yahoo.com or telephone Jerry Goodwin 347-334-1503 347-334-1503 .

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

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