Section I - INTELLIGENCE HIGHLIGHTS

Russian "Spy" Challenges Deportation from UK. Lawyers for a Russian woman detained in Britain on suspicion of spying challenged her deportation order Thursday, claiming she was the innocent victim of a bungled secret service operation.

Ekaterina Zatuliveter, who worked as an assistant to governing Liberal Democrat lawmaker Mike Hancock, was detained last week pending deportation to Russia.

Hancock's office said the 25-year-old was arrested on the ground that her presence in Britain "was not conducive to the public good."

Zatuliveter denies any wrongdoing.

MI5, Britain's domestic intelligence service, has the job of "protecting the security of this country and I respect that," Zatuliveter said in a statement released by her lawyers.

"I fully cooperated with them when they questioned me. I have nothing to hide and was only doing my job as a parliamentary researcher," she said.

Her lawyer, Tessa Gregory, said Zatuliveter is a highly educated woman who has been wrongly painted by British media as a "honey trap Russian spy who has used her feminine charms to infiltrate Parliament."

British media this week splashed candid photos of Zatuliveter clad in a bikini top and hula skirt. Some reports alleged Hancock, who sits on Parliament's defense committee, gave her access to official defense policy documents.

Hancock did not immediately return calls for comment Thursday.

The case bears some similarity to that of Anna Chapman, the attractive operative who had her British citizenship revoked in July after she pleaded guilty in the United States to procuring information for a foreign government. She and nine others were sent to Russia from the U.S. in a swap for four Russians accused of spying for the West.

Gregory said MI5 officials interviewed Zatuliveter several times prior to her Dec. 5 arrest, and that Home Office officials raided her house without warning before detaining her.

The lawyer said the government has failed to provide any evidence that Zatuliveter is a threat to national security. On Thursday her law firm challenged the government's decision to deport the Russian, and Gregory also is seeking Zatuliveter's immediate release from a detention center, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) north of London, where she is being held.

Alexander Sternik, charge d'affaires at the Russian Embassy in London, told reporters Thursday that its contact with Zatuliveter has been limited to issuing her a passport.

The diplomat, the most senior Russian official in Britain, said "some quarters" wanted to use the story to undermine already fragile British-Russian relations. He also criticized Britain's government for failing to alert the embassy about the arrest or to explain the case.

"We have not received, although we insisted on this, any clarification as to the motives and the reasons that this detention was made," Sternik said.

The Home Office and Foreign Office declined to comment on the case. [Hui/AP/9December2010]

Boeing Suit Over CIA Renditions Goes to Supreme Court. Five detainees seeking to sue a Boeing subsidiary allegedly involved in secret CIA flights that landed them in foreign torture chambers took their case to the US Supreme Court on Thursday.

The detainees are asking the court to reinstate their claims of compensation for "unlawful abduction, arbitrary detention and torture," which were dismissed by a lower court.

The secret flights were used in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks to transfer "war on terror" suspects to third countries for interrogation, where many said they were imprisoned and tortured.

The five detainees - an Egyptian, an Italian, a Yemeni, and an Ethiopian and Iraqi who legally reside in Britain -- had sued Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen Dataplan, but the White House said allowing the suit would expose "state secrets."

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) first filed the case in May 2007 on behalf of the detainees - two of whom are still imprisoned in Egypt and Morocco - in a bid to end the transfers, known as "extraordinary rendition."

The ACLU alleged they were kidnapped, transported to foreign countries between 2001 and 2003 by Jeppesen Dataplan and tortured in the custody of either the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or local security forces.

In April 2009, a smaller panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco backed the plaintiffs and ordered the case to go forward in a victory for those seeking court sanctions against former president George W. Bush's counter-terrorism policies.

But President Barack Obama - despite distancing himself from such policies - appealed the ruling to the same court, where a full panel dismissed the case in September.

"To date, not a single victim of the Bush administration's torture program has had his day in a US court," Ben Wizner, Litigation Director of the ACLU National Security Project, said Thursday.

"The government has misused the 'state secrets' privilege to deny justice to torture victims and to shield their torturers from liability," he added.

The Supreme Court will decide whether to hear the case in the coming months. [AFP/9December2010] 

Double Agent Honored. Russia this week unveiled a memorial plaque to British double agent Kim Philby at the headquarters of the Foreign Intelligence Service in Moscow, the Echo of Moscow radio station reported.

The head of the Foreign Intelligence Service, Mikhail Fradkov, unveiled the memorial to Philby at a ceremony also attended by his widow Rufina Pukhova, the radio station reported.

Philby, who died in 1988, was a decorated member of British intelligence who worked as a spy for the Soviet Union. He was exposed in 1963 as one of the so-called Cambridge Five spy ring and defected to Moscow.

A sculptural relief on the memorial depicts Philby as the two-headed Roman god Janus, architect Alexei Tikhonov, who designed the memorial with sculptor Igor Novikov, told the Echo of Moscow.

"It was quite a controversial decision - we were very afraid about how professionals would react to it," he said.

The memorial also features a quotation from Philby saying that "I look back at the life I led as given to the service of a cause that I sincerely and passionately believe is right," Tikhonov said in Russian. [IAfrica/9December2010] 

Army Sees Future of Intelligence in the Cloud. The Army's efforts to enlist cloud computing to modernize its intelligence capabilities is in step with similar efforts across the military services.

A key part of the Army approach will be to empower commanders, program managers and soldiers to develop tools and applications on their own, within a set of servicewide standards, Mary Lynn Schnurr, director of Intelligence Community Information Management for the Army Intelligence Chief Information Officer, said today at Army IT Day in Vienna, Va.

After a brief video outlining the near-future capabilities the Army hopes to field, Schnurr described in detail what these systems will be, such as cloud-based data and information management architecture, orbital and airborne intelligence and communications assets, and advanced biometric technology.

Biometrics are vital to identifying enemy leaders and as a security feature for future systems. She described one prototype technology that will provide war-fighters with smart sunglasses with built-in video cameras and projected displays on the wearer's lenses. Soldiers will be able to capture images of enemy combatants and record their voices for analysis and identification matching.

Another key feature that Army intelligence is laying out is the Land Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance network, which will be a part of the larger LandWarNet enterprise.

The Army is also working to consolidate hundreds of data centers involved with military intelligence. Schnurr said that the goal is to reduce the number to just three facilities in Wiesbaden, Germany; Fort Bragg, N.C.; and Hawaii for intelligence analysis and storage.

These centers will coordinate with other intelligence community cryptographic and geospatial data facilities and their respective clouds. Schnurr said that there is no reason for Army intelligence to store data that can be accessed from other government sources.

Other areas that the Army is exploring in its intelligence cloud efforts are reusing software for additional operational and cost-saving flexibility. Schnurr said that the service must move past 18-to-36-month software-development cycles, noting that in the private-sector applications are made within days or weeks. [DefenseSystems/9December2010] 

Court Rejects El-Masri Suit Against German Government. A German court rejected a lawsuit filed by Khaled el-Masri seeking to force Berlin into prosecuting suspected CIA agents who he alleges illegally detained him nearly eight years ago as part of the U.S. rendition program.

The Cologne Administrative Court, in a ruling on Dec. 7, supported Berlin's decision not to seek the Americans' extradition after Washington told the Germans in 2007 it would reject any attempts to prosecute its agents, citing national security concerns. The ruling was published on Friday.

The court ruled that "the German government's decision not to seek the extradition of the agents, despite the arrest warrant issued by a German court, was legal."

El-Masri's lawyer said he and his client were considering whether to appeal the ruling. They have one month to do so.

El-Masri, 44, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, says he was illegally detained by CIA agents while entering Macedonia on New Year's Eve 2003 and then transferred to a CIA-run prison in Afghanistan, where he says he was beaten, sodomized and injected with drugs.

Five months later, el-Masri says, he was dumped on a hilltop in Albania.

U.S. officials have never publicly commented on the case, but diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks website show that diplomats in Germany and Macedonia were at pains to keep the case out of the news and the court.

In a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Skopje, Macedonia, dated Feb. 6, 2006, then-Prime Minister Vlado Buckovski is cited as promising the U.S. ambassador he would continue to refuse local press requests to discuss the el-Masri case.

Buckovski goes on to ask if the ambassador could speak to his German counterpart, "suggesting that the Germans were putting pressure on the Macedonians to be more forthcoming," according to the cable, which says the ambassador refused.

Another cable originating from the U.S. Embassy in Berlin in 2007 cites the deputy chief of mission, John M. Koenig, as telling the German deputy national security adviser that issuing warrants for the agents "would have a negative impact on our bilateral relationship."

El-Masri's lawyer, Manfred Gnjidic, said the leaked documents "clearly show" the "massive efforts" on the part of the U.S. government to keep el-Masri's case out of the courts. He expressed hope they would help him win justice for his client.

"We all know what happened, the question has been how can we prove it?" Gnjidic said.

El-Masri is serving an unrelated two-year prison sentence for attacking the mayor of his home town in 2009. [AP/9December2010] 

Afghanistan Tribesman Submits Application to Register FIR Against CIA Station Chief. Karim Khan, whose brother and son were killed in a drone strike, on Monday submitted an application for the registration of a First Investigation Report (FIR) against Central Investigation Agency's (CIA) Station Chief Jonathan Banks.

Khan submitted the application in the secretariat police station Islamabad, where he was accompanied by his lawyer.

Sources informed that the police will forward the application to the prosecution department to seek legal opinion in this regard.

The decision to register the FIR will be taken once the prosecution department gives its opinion.

Talking to the media outside the police station, Khan appealed for legal action with regard to his application.

Khan, a local journalist from Mirali town in North Waziristan, had earlier sent a $500 million claim for damages to the US Defence Secretary Robert Gates, CIA chief Leon Panetta and its station head in Islamabad Jonathan Banks. [Tribune/13December2010]

Australian Intelligence Chiefs Fear Nuclear War Between Israel and Tehran. Australian intelligence agencies fear that Israel might launch military strikes against Iran and that Tehran's pursuit of nuclear capabilities could draw the US and Australia into a potential nuclear war in the Middle East.

Australia's top intelligence agency has also privately undercut the hardline stance towards Tehran of the United States, Israeli and Australian governments, saying that Iran's nuclear program is intended to deter attack and that it is a mistake to regard Iran as a ''rogue state''.

The warnings about the dangers of nuclear conflict in the Middle East are given in a secret US embassy cable obtained by WikiLeaks and provided exclusively to the Herald. They reflect views obtained by US intelligence liaison officers in Canberra from across the range of Australian intelligence agencies.

"The AIC's [Australian intelligence community's] leading concerns with respect to Iran's nuclear ambitions centre on understanding the time frame of a possible weapons capability, and working with the United States to prevent Israel from independently launching unco-ordinated military strikes against Iran,'' the US embassy in Canberra reported to Washington in March last year.

"They are immediately concerned that Iran's pursuit of nuclear capabilities would lead to a conventional war - or even nuclear exchange - in the Middle East involving the United States that would draw Australia into a conflict.''

Australian concerns about a unilateral Israeli military strike against Iran are also recorded in another US embassy cable, sent to Washington in December 2008, reporting on discussions between the then chief of Australia's top intelligence agency, the Office of National Assessments (ONA), Peter Varghese, and the head of the US State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), the assistant secretary of state, Randall Fort.

The embassy's report of the meeting, which included senior officers and analysts from both intelligence agencies, says that "ONA seniors and analysts were particularly interested in A/S Fort and INR's assessments on Israeli 'red lines' on Iran's nuclear program and the likelihood of an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear facilities''.

A cable sent in July 2008 further records that the former prime minister Kevin Rudd was ''deeply worried'' that the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's intransigence concerning Tehran's nuclear program meant that the window for a diplomatic solution was closing and that "Israel may feel forced to use 'non-diplomatic' means".

Last week Mr. Rudd called on Israel, which has a large undeclared nuclear arsenal, to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty as part of a broader effort to head off the development of an Iranian nuclear weapons capability and to establish the Middle East as a nuclear weapon-free zone.

The US embassy's report in March last year told Washington the Australian government was "more broadly concerned about the potential for renewed nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, driving south-east Asian states to abandon the [nuclear non-proliferation treaty] and pursue their own nuclear capabilities, which could introduce a direct threat to the Australian homeland".

Australian intelligence views on Iran were solicited by US officials in response to a request from Washington to ascertain reactions to the possibility that the US might seek to engage Tehran in dialogue on security.

The cables confirm the presence in Canberra of representatives of all US national intelligence agencies - the CIA, National Security Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, National Geospatial Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency and the FBI.

US intelligence liaison officers engaged all their Australian counterpart agencies on the Iran question - including ONA, the office of the National Security Adviser, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, the Defense Intelligence Organization, the Defense Signals Directorate, the Defense Imagery and Geospatial Organization, the Defense Science and Technology Organization, and the Australian Security Intelligence Organization.

In its July 2009 report to Washington, the embassy noted that the Australian intelligence community "has increased its collection and analytic efforts on Iran over the past decade, demonstrating Australia's strategic commitment to engage substantively as a significant US partner on Iran''.

US diplomats expressed "high confidence'' that the Australian government would have no objections to US efforts to engage Iran, noting that while Australian troops remained stationed in Afghanistan "the Australians will look to increased US engagement with Iran to improve upon creating a realistic framework for an accelerated reduction and eventual cessation of Iranian support to the Taliban, al-Qaeda and related groups, and Hezbollah. Simultaneously, Australia will look for increased US-Iranian engagement to lead to a more stable governance environment for Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and the Levant''.

The cable on the December 2008 intelligence exchange on Iran reported Mr. Varghese's view that possible conflict between Israel and Iran "clearly represented the greatest challenge to [Middle East] stability - and ONA was focusing most of its attention on Tehran because of it''.

ONA analysts expressed the view that the Iranian government appeared determined to acquire nuclear weapons, though this would probably be driven by the desire to deter Israel and the US than an intention to strike against other Middle East states.

"ONA viewed Tehran's nuclear program within the paradigm of 'the laws of deterrence', noting that Iran's ability to produce a weapon may be 'enough' to meet its security objectives,'' the US embassy reported to Washington.

"Nevertheless, Australian intelligence viewed Tehran's pursuit of full self-sufficiency in the nuclear fuel cycle, long-standing covert weapons program, and continued work on delivery systems as strong indicators that Tehran's preferred end state included a nuclear arsenal.''

ONA analysts told their US counterparts that they were not alone in this assessment, asserting "while China and Russia remain opposed to it, they view Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons as inevitable''.

But ONA urged a balanced view of Tehran as a sophisticated diplomatic player rather than a "rogue state" liable to behave impulsively or irrationally. Mr. Varghese said ONA was telling the Australian government: ''It's a mistake to think of Iran as a 'rogue state'.''

The embassy cable reported: ''ONA analysts assessed that Tehran 'knows' about its lack of certain capabilities, but plays 'beyond its hand' very skillfully. ONA analysts commented that Iran's Persian culture was a key factor in understanding its strategic behaviour, commenting that a 'mixture of hubris and paranoia' pervades Iranian attitudes that in turn shape Tehran's threat perceptions and policies.

"ONA judged that Iran's activities in Iraq - both overt and covert - represented an extreme manifestation of Iranian strategic calculus, designed to 'outflank' the US in the region."

However, the Australian intelligence analysts "asserted that 20 years of hostility [towards the US] and associated rhetoric aside, regime attitudes 'have fairly shallow roots', and the most effective means by which Tehran could ensure its national security would be a strategic relationship with the US via some 'grand bargain'.'' [Dorling/SMH/13December2010]

President Obama Announces More Key Administration Posts. Today, President Barack Obama announced his intent to nominate the following individuals to key Administration posts:

Peter B. Lyons, Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy, Department of Energy Denise E. O'Donnell, Director of the Bureau of Justice Assistance, Department of Justice Stephanie O'Sullivan, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, Directorate of National Intelligence David Shear, Ambassador to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Department of State.

The President also announced his intent to appoint Harvey S. Wineberg as a Member of the President's Advisory Council on Financial Capability. His biography is below.

President Obama said, "The American people will be greatly served by the talent and dedication these individuals will bring to their new roles. I am proud to have them serve in this Administration, and I look forward to working with them in the months and years ahead."

President Obama announced his intent to nominate the following individuals to key Administration posts:

Peter B. Lyons, Nominee for Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy, Department Energy

Dr. Peter B. Lyons is currently the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Office of Nuclear Energy at the Department of Energy (2009-present). Previous to this appointment, Dr. Lyons served as a Commissioner of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission from 2005 until his term ended in 2009. From 2003 to 2005, Dr. Lyons served as Science Advisor on the staff of U.S. Senator Pete Domenici and the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, where he focused on military and civilian uses of nuclear technology, national science policy, and nuclear non-proliferation. From 1997 to 2003, Dr. Lyons was assigned by the Los Alamos National Laboratory to serve as Science Advisor on the staff of U.S. Senator Pete Domenici and the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, where he focused on military and civilian uses of nuclear technology, national science policy, and nuclear non-proliferation. From 1969 to 1996, Dr. Lyons held several positions at the Los Alamos National Laboratory including: Director for Industrial Partnerships, Deputy Associate Director for Energy and Environment, and Deputy Associate Director-Defense Research and Applications. Dr. Lyons has published more than 100 technical papers, holds three patents related to fiber optics and plasma diagnostics, and served as chairman of the NATO Nuclear Effects Task Group for five years. Dr. Lyons is a Fellow of the American Nuclear Society, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He received his Ph.D. in Nuclear Astrophysics from the California Institute of Technology (1969) and his undergraduate degree in Physics and Mathematics from the University of Arizona (1964).

Denise E. O'Donnell, Nominee for Director, Bureau of Justice Assistance, Department of Justice. Denise E. O'Donnell recently served as New York State Deputy Secretary for Public Safety, where she oversaw 11 homeland security and criminal justice agencies with a combined annual budget of $4.7 billion. From 2007 to 2010, Ms. O'Donnell served as Commissioner of the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, where she managed several crime reduction efforts, including the collection and analysis of crime data, criminal background investigations, juvenile justice, and the administration of state and federal criminal justice grants. Prior to her appointment, Ms. O'Donnell was a litigation partner at Hodgson Russ, LLP. During the Clinton Administration, she was appointed as United States Attorney for the Western District of New York (1997-2001). Ms. O'Donnell joined the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District in 1985 as a prosecutor and was later promoted to First Assistant U.S. Attorney in 1993. Earlier in her career, she served as a law clerk to the late Justice M. Dolores Denman of the New York Appellate Division, Fourth Department. Ms. O'Donnell is currently active on various legal and professional organizations, including the New York State Justice Task Force, the Criminal Justice Council of the New York City Bar Association, and the Criminal Justice Section of the New York State Bar Association. She has lectured at the SUNY Buffalo School of Law and with the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Legal Education. Ms. O'Donnell holds a B.A. from Canisius College and an M.S.W and J.D., summa cum laude, from the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Stephanie O'Sullivan, Nominee for Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Stephanie O'Sullivan serves as the Associate Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Prior to this role, Ms. O'Sullivan led the Directorate of Science and Technology (DS&T), the part of the Agency responsible for developing and deploying innovative technology in support of intelligence collection and analysis. Earlier in her career, she held various management positions in the DS&T, where her responsibilities included systems acquisition and research and development in fields ranging from power sources to biotechnology. Ms. O'Sullivan joined the CIA in 1995, after working as an engineer for the Office of Naval Intelligence. Before that she was a member of the technical staff at TRW, a former corporation involved in the aerospace, automotive and credit reporting industries, among others. She holds a B.S. in Civil Engineering from the Missouri School of Mines.

David Shear, Nominee for Ambassador to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Department of State. David Shear is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service. Since 2009, he has served as Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Previously, he was Director of the Office of Chinese Affairs. Prior to that, he served as Deputy Chief of Mission for the U.S. Embassy in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Other overseas assignments include Tokyo, Beijing, and Sapporo. Washington assignments include Deputy Director, Office of Korean Affairs; Special Assistant to Under Secretary for Political Affairs; Desk Officer, Office of Japanese Affairs; Deputy Director, East Asia Office of Regional Affairs; Desk Officer, Office of Chinese and Mongolian Affairs; and Third Secretary, U.S. Mission to the United Nations. Mr. Shear received a B.A. from Earlham College and an M.A. from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

President Obama announced his intent to appoint the following individual to a key Administration post:

Harvey S. Wineberg, Appointee for Member, President's Advisory Council on Financial Capability Harvey S. Wineberg is the founding partner of Wineberg Solheim Howell & Shain, P.C., a Chicago based CPA firm offering a wide range of accounting and financial services to individuals and small businesses. Mr. Wineberg is a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and has been designated by them as a Personal Financial Specialist and is a member of the Illinois Society of Certified Public Accountants. He is also a member of the Illinois Bar. For 30 years he served as a Director and member of the Audit Committee of the Mid-Town Bank of Chicago. He was also President of the Board of the Roger Baldwin Foundation of the Illinois ACLU, a member of the Columbus Hospital of Chicago Foundation Board, and served as the Treasurer of President Obama's 2004 Senate campaign. In 1998, Mr. Wineberg authored a book about his life and his practice entitled "Thanks For Your Trust." He served in the U.S. Navy as a Commissary and Fiscal Officer. [Whitehouse/9December2010] 

Former Korean Teachers Get Compensation for False Espionage Charges. A Seoul court ordered the government to pay 20.7 billion won (US$18.1 million) in compensation to eight former teachers and their families for their suffering from an espionage case fabricated by the military government in the 1980s.

The eight primary plaintiffs were indicted on false espionage charges in 1982 when they were serving as teachers at a high school in Gunsan, about 270 kilometers south of Seoul. At that time, they had a meeting to discuss a pro-democracy move under the Chun Doo-hwan military government that ruled the nation from 1981-87, but were falsely accused of forming an anti-state organization. In a 1983 ruling, they were sentenced to one to seven years in jail and served their terms.

The victims applied for a retrial in 2008 on the recommendation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a special committee established in 2005 to investigate past atrocities, and filed a suit against the government seeking reparation after being acquitted of the charges.

The Seoul Central District Court said the case against the teachers was fabricated and their confessions were made under duress, holding the government liable to compensate them.

The defendants were illegally arrested without a warrant and stood trial, and they were banned from meeting with lawyers and their families and were grilled by (authorities) under a frightened state," the court said. "The government should compensate for the damage from illegal conduct."

The court said it set the amount considering the victims' loss of jobs and post-traumatic stress disorders as well as their families' pain from being stigmatized from their espionage charges. The compensation includes interest accumulated from the year of their illegal arrest in 1982. [Kim/Yonhap/12December2010] 

FBI To Send Experts to Sweden to Investigate Suicide Blast. The US agency FBI is sending seven bomb experts to Sweden to help investigate the weekend suicide attack claimed by an Islamist group, Sweden's intelligence agency said Monday.

The suicide bomber caused the twin blasts in a busy area of downtown Stockholm Saturday evening, in an attack probably meant to wreak carnage among Christmas shoppers.

"The FBI is sending a group of seven experts to Sweden," Saepo spokeswoman Sara Kvarnstroem told AFP. "From what I understand, they offered their help after Saturday's events and we said yes."

Islamic website Shumukh al-Islam named Taymour Abdelwahab as the attacker, saying he had "carried out the martyrdom operation in Stockholm."

A Swedish prosecutor said investigators were almost sure it was the same man.

In messages before the blasts, the bomber said he targeted Sweden over its military presence in Afghanistan and support of artist Lars Vilks, who drew the Prophet Mohammed with the body of a dog in 2007.

British and Norwegian authorities had also offered to help in the investigation, Swedish Justice Minister Beatrice Ask told the TT news agency. [AP/14December2010] 

Iran Slams Mossad, CIA, MI6. Iran has arrested suspects with links to the Mossad, CIA and MI6 in the slaying of a nuclear scientist and plotting more attacks, an Iranian official alleges.

"The three spy agencies of Mossad, CIA and MI6 played a role in these attacks," the Fars news agency quoted Intelligence Minister Heidar Moslehi as saying regarding the recent attack on two nuclear scientists in Tehran. The Mossad is Israel's intelligence arm, while the CIA is a U.S. intelligence agency and MI6 is Britain's international spy agency.

His accusations came amid reports in the London-based al-Sharq-al-Awsat quoting an Iranian source as saying Israel's Mossad had attempted to assassinate President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during his recent visit to Lebanon.

The source said the Mossad had used Iranian opposition elements, some of whom reside in Syria and Iraq, to carry out the assassination, Ynetnews.com said.

Last week, bombs placed on the cars of two Iranian nuclear scientists in Tehran exploded as they headed for work at Shahid Beheshti University. Majid Shahriari was killed in the blast, and Fereydoun Abbasi and his wife suffered minor injuries.

In January, nuclear scientist Massoud Ali Mohammadi was killed by a Tehran bomb blast.

Iranian officials did not elaborate on the number of people arrested but hinted more arrests were possible, the news agency said.

"The members of this team have been trained in a neighboring country and based on their confessions, they planned to carry out other assassinations," Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi said at a press conference this week. [UPI/8December2010] 

Former Afghan Spy Chief Slams Taliban Talks. Peace talks with the Taliban will lead to disaster unless the insurgent group is disarmed first, Afghanistan's former intelligence chief said Thursday.

Amrullah Saleh, who headed Afghanistan's spy agency from 2004 until earlier this year, said the key to peace with the Taliban is cutting off their support from Pakistan and disarming and dismantling the group before allowing them to operate as a normal political party.

"Demobilize them, disarm them, take their headquarters out of the Pakistani intelligence's basements," Saleh said. "Force the Taliban to play according to the script of democracy," he added, predicting the party would ultimately fail, "in a country where law rules, not the gun ... not the law of intimidation."

Saleh said the United States should give Pakistan a deadline of July 2011 to pursue top insurgents inside their borders or threaten to send in U.S. troops to do the job.

Saleh, who headed the Afghan National Directorate of Security until he resigned last June from Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government, warned an audience at the National Press Club that failure to cut off Pakistani support would allow the Taliban to only pretend to make peace, then sweep back to power after NATO troops leave.

The former spy chief's comments display the dissension at the highest levels of Afghan political society over whether to engage the Taliban in talks, or keep fighting them. His criticism of Pakistan also highlights the widespread suspicion among Afghanistan's elites that the neighboring power continues to allow militants to flourish inside Afghanistan.

U.S. officials have said that such a deal is key to drawing down U.S. and NATO troops, starting in July 2011, with eventual handover to Afghan forces in 2014.

Saleh said this year's surge of U.S. troops had accomplished a "temporary effect" of securing some territory, but failed to change the "fundamentals."

"The Taliban leadership has not been captured or killed," he said. "Al-Qaida has not been defeated."

He added: "The current strategy still believes Pakistan is honest, or at least 50 percent honest." Still, he predicted Pakistan would continue to support the Taliban and other proxies to try to maintain influence in Afghanistan.

Saleh ran Afghanistan's intelligence service after serving in the mostly ethnic Tajik Afghan Northern Alliance, which battled the Taliban before the U.S. invasion. Many members of Tajik regions together with other Afghan minorities have warned of another Afghan civil war if Karzai makes a deal with Taliban.

Saleh criticized his former administration, without naming Karzai, claiming that "political Kabul" was out of touch with the rest of the country, and too often publicly at odds with NATO.

One Pakistani official approached Saleh afterward and asked privately whether Saleh respected the fact that the Pakistani intelligence service had lost 550 officers since the war on terror began in 2001.

The official said Saleh acknowledged this was true, but insisted more cooperation between the two countries was needed and stood by his claims that Pakistan supports the Taliban.

The Pakistani said he ended the chat saying he was glad Saleh had at least backed talks with the Taliban, with conditions. The official related his comments on condition of anonymity, as he was not authorized to speak to the media.

One of Pakistan's former spy chiefs, who also spoke at the conference, predicted the only way to drive a wage between the Taliban and al-Qaida is peace talks offering the insurgents a way to leave fighting and join the governing process in Afghanistan.

Retired Pakistani Gen. Ehsan ul Haq said peace talks with the Taliban were the only way to drive the group apart from Al-Qaida. Haq said as long as the two groups were comrades at arms, they would continue to cooperate despite their differences.

Haq, former head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, said neither Pakistan nor the west had managed to defeat the Taliban with what he called a militarized counterinsurgency strategy. Within Pakistan, he said, the civilian government had failed to backfill the areas the army had won back from the militants.

He said western policies of hunting al Qaida on the ground in Afghanistan, and by drone in Pakistan, has simply fueled their recruitment. [Dozier/WashingtonPost/9December2010]

Quarter of Guantanamo Freed Take Up Arms. A quarter of the detainees released from Guantanamo prison have likely joined global insurgencies or terror groups, the US director of national intelligence said in a report Tuesday.

Of the 598 inmates released from the US facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where suspected militants were rounded up after the September 11, 2001 attacks, 150 have either taken up arms or become involved in financing or recruitment, it said.

"Eighty-one (13.5 percent) are confirmed and 69 (11.5 percent) are suspected of reengaging in terrorist or insurgent activities after transfer," the intelligence oversight agency said.

Of those, the intelligence community believes 13 are dead, 54 are in custody and 83 remain at large, the report said.

It added, however, that of the 66 detainees released since January 2009, when President Barack Obama ordered a wide-ranging review of inmates, just two are confirmed and three are suspected of returning to combat.

But it added that "the number of former detainees identified as reengaged in terrorist or insurgent activity will increase."

Obama ordered Guantanamo prison shut down within a year in his January 2009 Executive Order, but he missed his deadline because of knotty legal issues and difficulties in finding third countries to take detainees.

The controversial detention center has long been a rallying point for anti-American sentiment and has been criticized by human rights groups.

But Obama's Republican opponents seized on the latest report as proof that the administration was acting too hastily in trying to close the facility.

"Unfortunately, these latest numbers make clear that fulfilling a campaign promise to close Guantanamo Bay is overriding what should be the administration's first priority - protecting Americans from terrorists," Kit Bond, the top Republican on the Senate intelligence committee, said.

"If one of these dangerous detainees attacks our troops or civilians, I don't know how the Administration will explain to the American people that we had him in custody, knew the risk he could return to the fight, and let him go anyway."

The prison, located on the Guantanamo naval base in Cuba, currently holds around 170 detainees, including three who have been convicted and 58 who have been placed in indefinite detention without trial.

Scores of other inmates have been transferred to third countries, where they have been released.

Efforts to try some Guantanamo detainees in civilian courts were dealt a major blow last month when a jury cleared a former inmate of all but one of the 286 charges brought against him for the 1998 US embassy bombings in Africa. [AP/8December2010] 

US Court Rejects Plea For Sparing Radical Muslim Cleric's Life. A federal court in Washington on Tuesday threw out a lawsuit that sought to restrain the Obama administration from hunting down a radical Muslim cleric with proven links to al-Qaeda terror outfit, it has been reported. The Obama administration had okayed in April the capture or killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American cleric of Yemeni descent, linked to several terror plots from the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center to the Fort Hood shootings in 2009.

He was placed on a "US target list" of people it had authorized to kill or capture, maintained by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of people the U.S. authorities believe are planning attacks against America.

Dismissing the lawsuit filed by Awlaki's father, presiding judge John Bates observed that Awlaki senior could not approach the court on his son's behalf. The court also noted that the matter ought to be decided by the executive and not the judiciary.

Awlaki who was born in the U.S. state of New Mexico spent his early years in Yemen where he studied Islamic theology and later returned to the U.S. His fiery preachings in English endorsing use of violence as a religious duty endeared Awlaki to Muslim radicals.

After completing his university education with a Master's in Education, Awlaki became an Imam at a mosque in Fort Collins, Colorado, before returning to San Diego in 1996, where he took charge of the city's Masjid Ar-Ribat al-Islami mosque.

During the stint there his sermons were attended by Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, two of the hijackers involved in the 9/11 attacks of 2001. Later, he shifted to the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, and the following year he left for Britain delivering a series of lectures to Muslim youths there.

In 2004, Awlaki went back to Yemen and secured a job at al-Iman University in the capital Sanaa headed by Abdul-Majid al-Zindani, a cleric proscribed a terrorist by both the U.S. and U.N. for his links with al-Qaeda.

He is believed to have met Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian youth accused of trying to blow up an American airliner on Christmas Day at al-Iman University, where the latter was studying Arabic ahead of his training and indoctrination by al-Qaeda in Yemen.

It was also found that Awlaki gave religious advice to U.S. Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan who was charged with the killing 13 soldiers at the Fort Hood military base.

Despite the Yemeni government's resolve to root out religious extremism from its soil, defense analysts say its loose grip on the country might well mean that it could easily slip into anarchy. [RTTNews/8December2010]

Section II - CONTEXT & PRECEDENCE

The Curious Life of the US Diplomat, Uncloaked. A diplomat's life is not just caviar and coattails. It's rubbery fish in Brussels, a nauseating revolving restaurant in Kazakhstan and an epic three-day Muslim wedding featuring "stupendous" quantities of booze, a golden pistol, dancing women, the scent of danger and cauldrons of cows boiled whole.

It's not all receptions and speeches. It's also the psychological terror of getting a phone call saying your spouse has died in an accident - but not really. A diplomat's life can also be a rather exasperating bull session with a British prince who lords it over everyone in the room.

The secret cables surfacing in the WikiLeaks disclosures offer myriad glimpses into the world of diplomacy, that oh-so-guarded enterprise.

American diplomats, it turns out, are not stuffy at all. They are raconteurs, adventurers and under-the-radar operatives. Some may even be spies.

Think of the rapier wit of James Bond, the gravity of John Adams in the Court of St. James's and the groovy antics of Austin Powers.

Together, the cables suggest the former Soviet Union is party central. Oil wealth, corruption, an intimidating security service, oligarchies and hearty appetites for hedonism make for a potent brew in Russia and the republics that split away.

And U.S. Embassy officials, known in cable-speak as emboff, are flies on the wall.

They shadowed the Kazakh prime minister as he danced with abandon at a nightclub ("Emboff lingered close to Masimov's group"). They reported having "eyes on" a defense minister who liked to loosen up in the "'homo sovieticus' style - i.e., drinking oneself into a stupor." They strolled not just the palaces and villas of those in government but the hideaway mansions of the political elites who really pull the strings.

For sheer voyeurism, it is hard to top a cable signed by William J. Burns, now a top State Department official, when he was ambassador to Russia. The cable reported from a lavish August 2006 wedding at the summer home of the chief of Dagestan's oil company in Russia's North Caucasus region - a compound where the entire floor of a grotto is the glass ceiling of a massive aquarium. (No word on sharks circling underneath.)

In marrying his son to a classmate, the oilman Gadzhi Makhachev presided over a bizarre affair drawing together revelers from the wilds and from the establishment - "the slick to the Jurassic," as the cable put it. The pro-Kremlin Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who came with a small army, danced "clumsily with his gold-plated automatic stuck down in the back of his jeans" and joined the host in showering children with $100 bills before disappearing into the night.

The unidentified U.S. diplomats in attendance inadvertently insulted a drunken security service colonel when they would not let him add cognac to their wine, despite his protestation that "it's practically the same thing."

"We were inclined to cut the Colonel some slack," says the cable. "He is head of the unit to combat terrorism in Dagestan, and Gadzhi told us that extremists have sooner or later assassinated everyone who has joined that unit."

It was all in a day's work for diplomats seeking to understand the politics of clan, alliance, land and ethnicity, as the cable described the currents coursing through the party.

Just as an army marches on its stomach, food is the fuel of diplomacy. In Dagestan, that meant watching fragments of boiled carcasses dumped on a table for the guests.

For Richard E. Hoagland, ambassador to Kazakhstan, it meant meeting his Chinese counterpart for dinner in a fancy hotel built by China's national petroleum company in Astana. The Chinese ambassador preferred to talk in a public place or the U.S. Embassy because he feared his own quarters were bugged.

America's eyes and ears at that June 2009 meeting soaked up the architecture, the menu and much else. America's belly, though, was a bit wobbly that day.

"The marble lobby is impressive, if a bit too totalitarian-austere," said the cable signed by Hoagland. "We were the only guests in the restaurant, although an untouched full buffet was laid out. The revolving restaurant provides a spectacular panorama of Astana, and the empty steppe beyond, but it seems to revolve at varying speeds and sometimes can be a bit too fast on a full stomach and after a few glasses of wine."

In Kyrgyzstan, the top U.S. diplomat joined a hotel brunch in October 2008 to brief British royalty, Prince Andrew, before his meetings with local officials. Ambassador Tatiana Gfoeller's cable barely conceals annoyance with the prince.

"Astonishingly candid, the discussion at times verged on the rude (from the British side)," it says. As with the other cables, it is signed by the ambassador but appears to have been written by a lower-level diplomat at the event.

Andrew is diplomatically described as "super-engaged" as he rails about British anti-corruption investigators interfering with business deals, curses journalists for poking their noses into everything and displays "almost neuralgic patriotism" whenever the U.S. and Britain come up in the discussion.

"The Americans don't understand geography," the cable quotes him as saying. "Never have. In the U.K., we have the best geography teachers in the world!" The prince talked so much the meeting went twice as long as planned.

The life of a diplomat is one of risk, too.

More than 200 Americans have died in diplomatic service, starting with William Palfrey, lost at sea in 1780. They have perished from disease, murder, natural disasters and trying to save others.

Danger always lurks in the age of terrorism, just as in all times of war and calamity. But diplomats have to watch their backs everywhere.

A November 2009 cable signed by John Beyrle, now ambassador to Russia, set the scene for FBI Director Robert Mueller before his visit with law enforcement and security counterparts. It sketched a growing climate of harassment of U.S. diplomats by elements of the Federal Security Service, or FSB.

"Family members have been the victims of psychologically terrifying assertions that their USG (U.S. government) employee spouses had met accidental deaths," the embassy reported. "Home intrusions have become far more commonplace and bold, and activity against our locally engaged Russian staff continues at a record pace.

"We have no doubt that this activity originates in the FSB. Counterintelligence challenges remain a hallmark of service at Embassy Moscow."

Decades earlier, the cables show, U.S. diplomats in Tehran tried to comprehend the Iranian revolution in its earliest throes and explain to Washington the near impossibility of reasoning with Iranians.

Bruce Laingen, charge d'affaires, signed a biting critique of what he saw as the Iranian mindset, contending "statements of intention count for almost nothing," ''the single dominant aspect of the Persian psyche is an overriding egoism," ''cultivation of goodwill for goodwill's sake is a waste of effort," and the "almost total Persian preoccupation with self ... leaves little room for understanding points of view other than one's own."

Laingen was on to something - impending trouble. A few months after, ideologues overran the embassy and diplomats lived the lives of hostages for 444 days. [AP/7December2010] 

Ex-Intelligence Official Blasts Pollard Lobbying.  Jonathan Pollard's ex-wife Anne and her father were settled in Israel by the government there this week, the latest chapter in a renewed campaign to free the confessed spy.

Israel has angled periodically for Pollard's release since 1998, when it admitted, after 13 years of denials, that the former naval intelligence analyst was not a rogue agent but an officially sanctioned spy.

Last September Prime Minster Binyamin Netanyahu relit the fires under the case when, according to Israeli Army Radio, he asked the Obama administration to release Pollard in exchange for a temporary halt in Israel's construction of Jewish settlements.

A month later Lawrence Korb, an assistant secretary of defense at the time of Pollard's arrest in 1985, asked President Obama in a public letter to commute Pollard's sentence to time served - 25 years. A handful of members of Congress seconded the call, which has been bitterly resisted by U.S. intelligence agencies.

Now another key official at the time of Pollard's arrest, former FBI and Navy lawyer M.E. "Spike" Bowman, is weighing in - against his release - in a forthcoming article.

"Since I was the only person who actually touched all aspects of the case I thought it was incumbent on me to lay out the facts," Bowman, the top legal adviser to Navy intelligence at the time, and who later worked as senior counsel at the FBI and as deputy director of the National Counterintelligence Executive, told SpyTalk.

In a piece written for a forthcoming journal of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, founded years ago to support the CIA, Bowman notes that there have been "few rebuttals of this escalation of calls for Pollard's release...mainly because so few were cognizant of the scope of Pollard's disclosures, or the misuses of those disclosures, and the damage they did to our own operations and sources."

The true extent of the spy's damage remains locked in government vaults, Bowman writes, "because when a plea agreement was reached, it was no longer necessary to litigate issues that could have exposed the scope of Pollard's treachery - and the exposure of classified systems."

But the retired Navy captain singles out three of Pollard's leaks, the first being "the daily report from the Navy's Sixth Fleet Ocean Surveillance Information Facility (FOSIF) in Rota, Spain, a top-secret document filed every morning reporting all that had occurred in the Middle East during the previous twenty-four hours, as recorded by the NSA's most sophisticated monitoring devices."

"Probably the most serious disclosure (of those of which we are aware) was the TOP SECRET NSA RAISIN manual, which lists the physical parameters of every known signal [or electronic communication], notes how we collect signals around the world, and lists all the known communications links then used by the Soviet Union," Bowman writes.

"It is certainly the thing that stood out in the mind of the sentencing judge; particularly when Pollard alleged at sentencing that there really was no harm done. The judge interrupted and brought him up short, pointing specifically to disclosure of the RAISIN manual."

Bowman also writes that "Pollard disclosed information to the Israelis that could prevent the U.S. from monitoring Israeli activities in the Middle East - clearly a foreign policy nightmare."

Pollard admitted to prosecutors that his handlers at the Israeli Embassy often goaded him for better-quality information, Bowman says.

"[H]is initial handler told him that they already receive 'SECRET' level material from the United States. What they needed was the TOP SECRET data they were not yet receiving."

Hard copies of the documents Pollard stole in 18 months could "fill a room that is six feet by six feet by ten," Ronald Olive, the top Navy investigator in the Pollard case, told SpyTalk.

"No other spy in the history of the United States stole so many secrets, so highly classified, in such a short period of time," he maintains.

Bowman also takes aim at Korb's contention that Pollard has been unduly punished, arguing in his open letter to Obama that "the average sentence for Pollard's offence" - stealing secrets for "friendly" countries - "is two to four years, and under current guidelines the maximum sentence is 10 years."

But Bowman, as well as a counterintelligence officer involved in Pollard's case who insisted on anonymity, says Korb's math is skewed.

"The supporters who claim that the sentence of Pollard was disproportionate to the crime cite three to four cases where Americans sold or gave documents to non-adversary countries like Saudi Arabia, Ecuador and El Salvador," the CIA officer said. "These were a handful of secrets, and those who committed the crime were sentenced proportionately. What Pollard's crew has done is to take these handfuls of cases and then extrapolated the sentences saying that Pollard has served far longer than the 'average' spy who spied for 'friendly services.' "

In fact, the average sentence for those caught spying for the Russians, not counting the 365-year term given to Jerry A. Whitworth, part of the infamous John Walker family spy ring, was over 36 years. Three spies other than Pollard, including Russian mole Aldrich Ames, were given life sentences.

Of course, Pollard didn't just spy for Israel, although that was far and away his main benefactor.

"Intelligence officials have unofficially detailed instances of additional disclosures to other nations," Bowman writes. "These officials said that Pollard had given classified documents to Pakistan, South Africa and two other countries they declined to identify."

Some the documents Pollard gave Israel ended up in Moscow, according to various reports, but as one investigator in the case told SpyTalk, "there are only two countries that know the facts - Russia and Israel. Which leads me to believe we will never know the truth. '

Pollard's current wife, Esther, wrote in the Jerusalem Post Monday that the statement of support by Korb, and another from his former Israeli handler Rafi Eitan claiming that Washington had reneged on a verbal pledge to release Pollard after 10 years, "provide Israel with the golden key to open Jonathan's jail cell."

It's long past time, she said, for Netanyahu to go public with a demand to Washington that Pollard be released.

So far, however, the prime minister has refused to pick up the megaphone. And judging by Bowman's forthcoming piece, his private pleas will, likewise, fall short. [Stein/WashingtonPost/8December2010]

A Glimpse at Positions at the CIA and NSA. It is hard to keep up with the ever-changing global developments in technology, but that is the mission of those who work for such government agencies as the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency.

The classified work these agencies undertake means there are a multitude of positions in the fields of science, engineering and technology that hold the nation's security as their utmost goal.

"We're always looking for engineers, computer scientists and other technically qualified applicants who can advance our vital mission of keeping America safe," CIA spokeswoman Paula Weiss said. "Anyone with a scientific or technical background who would like to apply his or her skills to our intelligence mission should check out our Web site to see the wide range of opportunities we offer. It's helpful to have an interest in world affairs, overseas experience or language skills, but it's not necessary."

Not surprisingly, the CIA is on the cutting edge of technological developments, and it develops and implements many state-of-the-art technologies in order to help the agency fulfill its mission of gathering foreign intelligence.

Among the positions the CIA is currently recruiting for are electrical engineer, materials engineer, mechanical engineer, programs management engineer and systems engineer. In the science, technology and weapons areas, positions are open for research scientist; science, technology and weapons analyst; technical/targeting analyst; machinist; and technical operations officer.

CIA employees come from a variety of academic and professional disciplines and experiences. The agency's recruitment Web site lists various career paths. In addition to science, engineering and technology positions, there are jobs in areas such as National Clandestine Service, languages and support services, to name a few.

Requirements for CIA jobs include U.S. citizenship as well as successful results from a thorough medical exam, polygraph test and background investigation.

If you are considering a job in the intelligence field, the CIA offers undergraduate student internships or co-ops as well as graduate studies. The programs combine educational and practical work experiences that complement students' preferred academic fields. Students receive a salary and benefits.

Another of the country's foremost intelligence agencies, the National Security Agency, is also actively recruiting for students, professionals and transitioning military.

The NSA Web site notes that "intelligence and imaginative critical thinking skills" are important attributes for applicants. In the technology fields, positions are available in computer science, computer/electrical engineering, information assurance and security, among others. Posted on the NSA's Web site under "Hot Jobs" are computer scientists, software developers and software engineers.

"For diverse, technologically savvy people looking to work in cutting-edge areas of IT, it really doesn't get much better than the National Security Agency," Lori Weltmann, NSA recruitment marketing manager, said. NSA is a leader in the intelligence community in areas such as network management and compliance, cyber defense, biometrics and wireless mobility.

"And we're not new to any of this," Weltmann continued. "We've been leaders for years. Given the increasingly complex and rapidly changing world of global communication, our need for qualified people with technology skills continues to grow. In fiscal year 2011, we plan to hire more than 1,500 new workers - more than half of whom will have skills in areas such as computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering and mathematics. A career at NSA offers the opportunity to work with the best and brightest, shape the course of the world and secure your own future."

As at the CIA, U.S. citizenship and a thorough background investigation are required for prospective NSA employees.

Professional development is an important aspect of working at NSA, and career development programs are available in numerous disciplines including computer science, information assurance, business and others. There is also the opportunity to pursue your education at outside educational institutions, as well as at the NSA's own National Cryptologic School.

For more information on career opportunities at the CIA or NSA, visit cia.gov or nsa.gov. [Sorgen/WashingtonPost/12December2010]

Jailed Afghan Drug Lord Was Informer on U.S. Payroll. When Hajji Juma Khan was arrested and transported to New York to face charges under a new American narco-terrorism law in 2008, federal prosecutors described him as perhaps the biggest and most dangerous drug lord in Afghanistan, a shadowy figure who had helped keep the Taliban in business with a steady stream of money and weapons.

But what the government did not say was that Mr. Juma Khan was also a longtime American informer, who provided information about the Taliban, Afghan corruption and other drug traffickers. Central Intelligence Agency officers and Drug Enforcement Administration agents relied on him as a valued source for years, even as he was building one of Afghanistan's biggest drug operations after the United States-led invasion of the country, according to current and former American officials. Along the way, he was also paid a large amount of cash by the United States.

At the height of his power, Mr. Juma Khan was secretly flown to Washington for a series of clandestine meetings with C.I.A. and D.E.A. officials in 2006. Even then, the United States was receiving reports that he was on his way to becoming Afghanistan's most important narcotics trafficker by taking over the drug operations of his rivals and paying off Taliban leaders and corrupt politicians in President Hamid Karzai's government.

In a series of videotaped meetings in Washington hotels, Mr. Juma Khan offered tantalizing leads to the C.I.A. and D.E.A., in return for what he hoped would be protected status as an American asset, according to American officials. And then, before he left the United States, he took a side trip to New York to see the sights and do some shopping, according to two people briefed on the case.

The relationship between the United States government and Mr. Juma Khan is another illustration of how the war on drugs and the war on terrorism have sometimes collided, particularly in Afghanistan, where drug dealing, the insurgency and the government often overlap.

To be sure, American intelligence has worked closely with figures other than Mr. Juma Khan suspected of drug trade ties, including Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president's half brother, and Hajji Bashir Noorzai, who was arrested in 2005. Mr. Karzai has denied being involved in the drug trade.

Afghan drug lords have often been useful sources of information about the Taliban. But relying on them has also put the United States in the position of looking the other way as these informers ply their trade in a country that by many accounts has become a narco-state.

The case of Mr. Juma Khan also shows how counternarcotics policy has repeatedly shifted during the nine-year American occupation of Afghanistan, getting caught between the conflicting priorities of counterterrorism and nation building, so much so that Mr. Juma Khan was never sure which way to jump, according to officials who spoke on the condition that they not be identified.

When asked about Mr. Juma Khan's relationship with the C.I.A., a spokesman for the spy agency said that the "C.I.A. does not, as a rule, comment on matters pending before U.S. courts." A D.E.A. spokesman also declined to comment on his agency's relationship with Mr. Juma Khan.

His New York lawyer, Steven Zissou, denied that Mr. Juma Khan had ever supported the Taliban or worked for the C.I.A.

"There have been many things said about Hajji Juma Khan," Mr. Zissou said, "and most of what has been said, including that he worked for the C.I.A., is false. What is true is that H. J. K. has never been an enemy of the United States and has never supported the Taliban or any other group that threatens Americans."

A spokeswoman for the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, which is handling Mr. Juma Khan's prosecution, declined to comment.

However, defending the relationship, one American official said, "You're not going to get intelligence in a war zone from Ward Cleaver or Florence Nightingale."

At first, Mr. Juma Khan, an illiterate trafficker in his mid-50s from Afghanistan's remote Nimroz Province, in the border region where southwestern Afghanistan meets both Iran and Pakistan, was a big winner from the American-led invasion. He had been a provincial drug smuggler in southwestern Afghanistan in the 1990s, when the Taliban governed the country. But it was not until after the Taliban's ouster that he rose to national prominence, taking advantage of a record surge in opium production in Afghanistan after the invasion.

Briefly detained by American forces after the 2001 fall of the Taliban, he was quickly released, even though American officials knew at the time that he was involved in narcotics trafficking, according to several current and former American officials. During the first few years of its occupation of Afghanistan, the United States was focused entirely on capturing or killing leaders of Al Qaeda, and it ignored drug trafficking, because American military commanders believed that policing drugs got in the way of their core counterterrorism mission.

Opium and heroin production soared, and the narcotics trade came to account for nearly half of the Afghan economy.

By 2004, Mr. Juma Khan had gained control over routes from southern Afghanistan to Pakistan's Makran Coast, where heroin is loaded onto freighters for the trip to the Middle East, as well as overland routes through western Afghanistan to Iran and Turkey. To keep his routes open and the drugs flowing, he lavished bribes on all the warring factions, from the Taliban to the Pakistani intelligence service to the Karzai government, according to current and former American officials.

The scale of his drug organization grew to stunning levels, according to the federal indictment against him. It was in both the wholesale and the retail drug businesses, providing raw materials for other drug organizations while also processing finished drugs on its own.

Bush administration officials first began to talk about him publicly in 2004, when Robert B. Charles, then the assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement, told Time magazine that Mr. Juma Khan was a drug lord "obviously very tightly tied to the Taliban." Such high-level concern did not lead to any action against Mr. Juma Khan. But Mr. Noorzai, one of his rivals, was lured to New York and arrested in 2005, which allowed Mr. Juma Khan to expand his empire.

In a 2006 confidential report to the drug agency reviewed by The New York Times, an Afghan informer stated that Mr. Juma Khan was working with Ahmed Wali Karzai, the political boss of southern Afghanistan, to take control of the drug trafficking operations left behind by Mr. Noorzai. Some current and former American counternarcotics officials say they believe that Mr. Karzai provided security and protection for Mr. Juma Khan's operations.

Mr. Karzai denied any involvement with the drug trade and said that he had never met Mr. Juma Khan. "I have never even seen his face," he said through a spokesman. He denied having any business or security arrangement with him. "Ask them for proof instead of lies," he added.

Mr. Juma Khan's reported efforts to take over from Mr. Noorzai came just as he went to Washington to meet with the C.I.A. and the drug agency, former American officials say. By then, Mr. Juma Khan had been working as an informer for both agencies for several years, officials said. He had met repeatedly with C.I.A. officers in Afghanistan beginning in 2001 or 2002, and had also developed a relationship with the drug agency's country attach� in Kabul, former American officials say.

He had been paid large amounts of cash by the United States, according to people with knowledge of the case. Along with other tribal leaders in his region, he was given a share of as much as $2 million in payments to help oppose the Taliban. The payments are said to have been made by either the C.I.A. or the United States military.

The 2006 Washington meetings were an opportunity for both sides to determine, in face-to-face talks, whether they could take their relationship to a new level of even longer-term cooperation.

"I think this was an opportunity to drill down and see what he would be able to provide," one former American official said. "I think it was kind of like saying, 'O.K., what have you got?' "

While the C.I.A. wanted information about the Taliban, the drug agency had its own agenda for the Washington meetings - information about other Afghan traffickers Mr. Juma Khan worked with, as well as contacts on the supply lines through Turkey and Europe.

One reason the Americans could justify bringing Mr. Juma Khan to Washington was that they claimed to have no solid evidence that he was smuggling drugs into the United States, and there were no criminal charges pending against him in this country.

It is not clear how much intelligence Mr. Juma Khan provided on other drug traffickers or on the Taliban leadership. But the relationship between the C.I.A. and the D.E.A. and Mr. Juma Khan continued for some time after the Washington sessions, officials say.

In fact, when the drug agency contacted him again in October 2008 to invite him to another meeting, he went willingly, believing that the Americans wanted to continue the discussions they had with him in Washington. He even paid his own way to Jakarta, Indonesia, to meet with the agency, current and former officials said.

But this time, instead of enjoying fancy hotels and friendly talks, Mr. Juma Khan was arrested and flown to New York, and this time he was not allowed to go shopping.

It is unclear why the government decided to go after Mr. Juma Khan. Some officials suggest that he never came through with breakthrough intelligence. Others say that he became so big that he was hard to ignore, and that the United States shifted its priorities to make pursuing drug dealers a higher priority.

The Justice Department has used a 2006 narco-terrorism law against Mr. Juma Khan, one that makes it easier for American prosecutors to go after foreign drug traffickers who are not smuggling directly into the United States if the government can show they have ties to terrorist organizations.

The federal indictment shows that the drug agency eventually got a cooperating informer who could provide evidence that Mr. Juma Khan was making payoffs to the Taliban to keep his drug operation going, something intelligence operatives had known for years.

The federal indictment against Mr. Juma Khan said the payments were "in exchange for protection for the organization's drug trafficking operations." The alleged payoffs were what linked him to the Taliban and permitted the government to make its case.

But even some current and former American counternarcotics officials are skeptical of the government's claims that Mr. Juma Khan was a strong supporter of the Taliban.

"He was not ideological," one former official said. "He made payments to them. He made payments to government officials. It was part of the business."

Now, plea negotiations are quietly under way. A plea bargain might keep many of the details of his relationship to the United States out of the public record. [Guttenfelder/NYTimes/12December2010] 

Section III - COMMENTARY

WikiLeaks: How Could One Person Leak So Much Classified Material? by Marc Ambinder.  To date, Bradley Manning stands accused only of providing a classified video of U.S. operations in Iraq to WikiLeaks. But U.S. government officials say they consider Manning the prime suspect behind the flood of documents that have wound up being promulgated by the group determined to bust U.S. secrecy.

Manning, 23, seems like an unlikely culprit. Trained as an intelligence analyst, awarded a Top Secret clearance, deployed to Iraq with the 2nd Brigade Combat Team of the Army's 10th Mountain Division in 2007, he's a mere PFC, or Private First Class, not an Aldrich Ames, the elite spy who leaked to the Soviets. Instead of working at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., or doing secret drops in Vienna, Manning's days were spent in an air-conditioned shack inside a small forward-deployed compound in Iraq.

Skeptics of the government's case against Manning wonder how one young soldier, operating with a couple of computers in the middle of desert, could access and download so much classified information and do so undetected for so long. Indeed, it appears Manning might not have come under suspicion at all had he not confided in a reformed hacker named Adrian Lamo, and had Lamo, a civilian, not reported Manning's musings to the U.S. Army.

But in the modern military, which relies on information as much as bullets and bunkers, it's easier than one might think to gain access to classified material and to disseminate it, according to interviews with numerous officials.

Manning's job was to make sure that other intelligence analysts in his group had access to everything that they were entitled to see. That included incoming intelligence streams from across the world on something called the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS), the Department of Defense's computer network for Top Secret information. Manning also had access to another information stream dubbed the Secure Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet), the Pentagon's server for information classified as Secret. (Secret and Top Secret are differing levels of classifications for materials.)

Using keyword searches and a knowledge of routing nomenclature, any intelligence analyst - even if he's sitting in a shack in Iraq - can access pretty much any piece of data classified at the level of access he has. Analysts are given updated documents like this unclassified list of every military operating unit and its e-mail designator. The lists can be accessed through an unsecure and unpublicized Joint Chiefs of Staff file transfer network. Another document lists every single mail routing address by location, even for unacknowledged locations like the Air Force test site in "Area 51" near Las Vegas.

Information and intelligence at the Top Secret level can't be transferred off of those computers easily. To transfer information from the SIPRNet to unclassified networks, analysts like Manning use proprietary computers called SNAP. About 1,500 are deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to TeleCommunications Systems, the company that builds them. SNAP, which stands for SIPR-NIPR Access Point, "allows you to bring stuff from the low side to the high side and vice versa, securely," one current user of the program said. The user asked to remain anonymous in order to share sensitive but unclassified insights into how analysts perform their work. Information on an unclassified computer can be transferred to a stick drive, burned onto a CD or simply e-mailed away.

The important thing to know is that diplomatic cables are no longer transmitted over wires to clattering teletype machines. They're sent via e-mail over secured networks, and they are also stored on servers until they're erased. Cables and incident reports from the field are stored on servers in the form of PST files - PS stands for "personal storage" - e-mail archives that Microsoft's Outlook program uses to compress and store data.

So how did Manning allegedly manage to get access to the diplomatic cables? They're transmitted via e-mail in PDF form on a State Department network called ClassNet, but they're stored in PST form on servers and are searchable. If Manning's unit needed to know whether Iranian proxies had acquired some new weapon, the information might be contained within a diplomatic cable. All any analyst has to do is to download a PST file with the cables, unpack them, SNAP them up or down to a computer that is capable of interacting with a thumb drive or a burnable CD, and then erase the server logs that would have provided investigators with a road map of the analyst's activities. But analysts routinely download and access large files, so such behavior would not have been seen as unusual.

Manning is alleged to have started to provide WikiLeaks with the information in the fall of 2009. His access to computer systems was cut off in late May of 2010. The Army's charging document accuses him of downloading "more than" 50 classified State Department cables to his personal computer.

The Department of Defense has tried to make sure that analysts don't abuse the privilege of all-source access while ensuring that they don't operate under an umbrella of constant fear and suspicion or suffer from the kind of stovepiping or compartmentalization that led to pre-9/11 intelligence failures when one agency wouldn't talk with another.

About 60 percent of DoD computers now are monitored by a Host-Based Security System that detects unusual patterns of download and access activity on SIPRNet, according to Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman. SNAP tools have also been modified. Analysts seeking to upgrade or downgrade information must do so in a supervised setting, Whitman said in an e-mail to defense reporters on Sunday.

The U.S. Central Command has begun security reviews of protocols at forward-deployed settings like Hammer in Iraq, where Manning spent several years. "Insider threat working groups" have been established, and commanding officers are being trained to detect behavioral changes in their young analysts.

And the Office of Management and Budget has ordered "each department or agency that handles classified information" to establish a security assessment team that would make sure that users don't have "broader access than is necessary to do their jobs effectively."

But the tension between access, which is critical for tactical intelligence, and operational security, which is critical for protecting secrets, is tight. In wartime, the number of young, fresh-out-of-school analysts granted security clearances skyrockets as demand for intelligence increases exponentially. In this instance, if Manning is indeed the culprit, all it took was one disaffected young man with a rudimentary knowledge of computer systems to bring down an entire edifice of code names, secret networks, compartmented channels, and protected information. [Ambinder/YahooNews/1December2010]

Strategy Page: A Poor Career Choice. In the United States, the FBI arrested a 22 year old navy intelligence specialist, who was offering to sell American secrets, long term, to the highest bidder. The young spy was caught by the FBI, who detected his efforts, and approached him in the guise of a foreign government, to do business. The sailor delivered, and was arrested.

Throughout the Cold War, the Russians found that greed was the best way to get Americans to betray their country. That's only one of the five reasons for spying. The others are ideology (there were never enough American communists to supply the Russians needs), conscience (people who spy because they believe their government is wrong), compromise (the Russians often used sex, the Honey Trap, to ensnare Americans and coerce them to spy) and ego (people who get off on doing something dangerous, like treason).

One of the most valuable American spies the Russians ever recruited was basically an FBI agent with ego issues. Nine years ago, the FBI arrested one of its veteran counterintelligence agents, Robert Hanssen, for espionage. Hanssen worked for Russia from 1985 until 2001, earning $1.4 million in the process. For the Russians, Hanssen was the Perfect Spy. He was the much feared, and long suspected, Russian mole in the American intelligence establishment. Hanssen didn't do it just for the money, that was just how he kept score.

Hanssen had something of a Walter Mitty complex, seeing himself as a dashing secret agent. Since he was a senior agent working in counterintelligence, he was in a position to know who the FBI was currently looking for and how best to avoid getting caught. But he didn't have access to a top secret FBI/CIA "Mole Hunting Squad," which eventually arrested him. The FBI, much to Hanssen's distress, had a Perfect Spy of its own.

Hanssen was a dour and colorless agent. He was one of the FBI's first computer experts. He was quite the professional's professional. For example, he never let the Russians know who he was. The Russians didn't care, as Hanssen provided quality information, which sabotaged dozens of (sometimes very expensive) U.S. spying operations. Hanssen's work also got two U.S. agents in Russia (KGB officers) executed. This last item caused the FBI to call for Hanssen to be executed. That was possible, because, after Aldrich Ames was caught in 1993, and it was revealed that his work got ten U.S. agents executed, the law was changed to make spying that got foreigners working for the U.S. killed, a death-sentence offense. Hanssen avoided execution only by pleading guilty. He is currently serving a life sentence, spending 23 hours a day isolated in his cell.

The damage Hanssen did was considerable, and Hanssen beat the death penalty by speaking freely about what he gave the Russians. Knowing what the Russians know about our spies, and attempts to catch spies (counterintelligence) makes it much easier (although still quite expensive) to repair the damage. Many current American spies were compromised, being watched by the Russians and fed false information. Hanssen's reports to the Russians have made it much more difficult to catch Russian spies. Moreover, since the Cold War ended, Russian espionage has concentrated more on economic targets. Many of their spies are now looking for secret information on new technology and trade negotiations. Post Cold War espionage has been more about making money than winning wars.

In one respect, Hanssen was quite unusual. After the Soviet Union fell, and Russian spymasters could talk somewhat more freely, they admitted that the easiest way to recruit American spies was with money. Hanssen was attracted mainly by the adventure of it all, and apparently spent very little of the money. He admitted as much in his letters to the Russians and stashed the cash in an offshore bank. He was thinking of leaving it to his six kids, long after he retired from the FBI and was less likely to be watched.

In other parts of the world, the Russians could use their preferred (and cheaper) method for recruiting; ideology. But the supply of dedicated communists was drying up in the decade before the Soviet Union fell and the recruiting worldwide was more frequently done with cash.

The Russians also had an advantage in that they did not have any moral scruples, and no pesky Congress or public opinion to crimp their style. The Russians needed these advantages, for although they were able to attract the best and brightest recruits within Russia, the KGB itself was a petty, bureaucratic and paranoid organization. These were not particularly bad traits for an espionage organization that depended so much on spies (or HUMINT - human intelligence operatives). The Russians were always carefully monitoring the loyalty of their own agents. America's greater dependence on "technical means" (satellites and electronic eavesdropping) kept the United States well informed about what Russian military capabilities were.

Another result of the Soviet Union's disintegration was that Russians were even more tempted by cash. Many of their brightest agents left for more profitable civilian opportunities. For the same reason, the best recruits were no longer available. This made it easier for America to recruit Russians and buy information. Numerous long-time Russian spies have thus been compromised by America's buying secrets from former or current Russian intelligence officers. America recruited well-placed Russian agents, who provided information that led to the arrest of Hanssen. In fact, the entire file on Russia's most valuable American spy was delivered to the FBI. Having a Perfect Spy is a considerable advantage, until your enemy gets one of their own. [StrategyPage/9December2010]

Richard C. Holbrooke and the Situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Yesterday the administration's Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard C. Holbrooke, died. On Friday, he had undergone an operation to repair a torn aorta, which was known to be a risky procedure with a low chance of survival. The 21-hour operation finished on Saturday, carried out by his Pakistani-born doctor.

While expressing regret for his relatives, and aware that he achieved much in his lifetime, perhaps the eulogies should be left to those already circulating in the media and online. The New York Times offered a generally positive obituary, describing Holbrooke thus:

A brilliant, sometimes abrasive infighter, he used a formidable arsenal of facts, bluffs, whispers, implied threats and, when necessary, pyrotechnic fits of anger to press his positions. Mr. Obama, who praised Mr. Holbrooke on Monday afternoon at the State Department as "simply one of the giants of American foreign policy," was sometimes driven to distraction by his lectures.

But Mr. Holbrooke dazzled and often intimidated opponents and colleagues around a negotiating table. Some called him a bully, and he looked the part: the big chin thrust out, the broad shoulders, the tight smile that might mean anything. To admirers, however, including generations of State Department prot�g�s and the presidents he served, his peacemaking efforts were extraordinary.

Of all of Obama's appointees, Holbrooke was the most forceful and dynamic. He was also a man of great integrity. Holbrooke was respected by many for his no-nonsense approach to diplomacy. From an air force base in Dayton, Ohio, he was the architect of the Dayton Accords that finally brought an end to the ugly and genocidal civil war that afflicted Bosnia. However, though the results of these accords brought peace in 1995, he had threatened to bomb both sides unless they agreed to come to the negotiating table. European politicians were shocked at his choosing to threaten, rather than cajole, the parties.

When he was appointed to be the Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2009, supporters hoped that his brusque approach could bring some form of resolution to the ongoing conflicts. In practice, Holbrooke supported the rarely-reported drone strikes upon suspected extremist targets. A few such incidents had happened under the Bush administration, but under the current administration they have increased dramatically. While these have taken place with little coverage in the press, allowing the POTUS to give the impression that America is a "friend" to the Muslim world, drones are notoriously indiscriminate killing machines.

Though a very limited number of drone strikes in Waziristan under the Bush administration were used to take out senior Al Qaeda figures, many villagers have also been killed in such attacks. It is undoubtedly true that dangerous ideologues and architects of terror have been annihilated while Richard Holbrooke called the shots, but the sheer number of such attacks and the lowly status of many of the targets have drawn ire from Pakistan. More disturbingly, by attacking houses in erstwhile peaceful village areas, such tactics could easily alienate people on the ground. They could even serve to recruit new members to the Islamist anti-Western "cause."

Similarly, in Afghanistan a total of 1,434 American soldiers have died while they were at war with the Taliban. If one adds in the coalition troops who have laid down their lives in the war against the Taliban, that figure rises to 2,262. The contradictory dealings of the corrupt and manic depressive Afghan president Hamid Karzai - who at one hand wanted to be protected from a Taliban takeover while on the other hand inviting the Taliban to talks - caused outrage. Relatives of fallen troops questioned why their loved ones were sacrificed fighting an enemy that was being indulged by the Afghanistan regime.

Karzai's attempts at rapprochement with the Taliban were also encouraged by Holbrooke, who believed all sides should be brought to the negotiating table. Other obituaries may praise his vision, but Holbrooke's support for sustained drone strikes in Pakistan, and his support for having Taliban in peace talks cannot be praised. Both may have helped to destabilize the Afpak region.

There is no doubt that Richard C. Holbrooke cared deeply about the fate of the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan, but while Taliban activists currently continue to kill American and coalition troops with IEDs, the Taliban should never be included in peace settlements.

Similarly, drone strikes have their place in dealing with terrorists who live in mountainous areas of Pakistan. In these harsh and inaccessible regions even Pakistani troops have failed to suppress extreme Islamists, but overuse of such operations is lazy and ultimately self-defeating.

Afghanistan, despite the pronouncements of the administration which seeks to remove most of its combat forces next year, is no closer to achieving lasting peace than it was five years ago. Pakistan, whose intelligence agency ISI has played both sides - pretending to support America while actively funding the actions of the Taliban in Afghanistan - has been a fickle ally. All drone strikes rely upon intelligence to be successful. With much of that intelligence provided by the ISI, an organization with divided loyalties, drone operations cannot be expected to win peace in the region.

Richard C. Holbrooke's legacy in Bosnia showed that a forceful approach could bring results. 15 years after some of the worst sectarian violence in Europe, there is still peace and political stability in Bosnia and among its immediate neighbors. For that, Holbrooke should be praised.

However, on his legacy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, there is no comparative peace. Pakistan has grown in status as an incubator and exporter of international terrorists. Negotiating with the Taliban is a waste of time. The Taliban have no intention of implementing a society that is remotely "democratic" or law-abiding.

For his fearsome diplomacy in Bosnia Richard Holbrooke scored a great success, but in dealings with Pakistan and Afghanistan, two corrupt and virtually failed states, there was never any hope of success. Implementing a no-fly zone and demanding strict passport control of those entering or leaving the mountain passes connecting the tribal regions to the outside world could provide a solution to these countries' export of terrorism. However, while Pakistan has a corrupt leadership, and with the ISI covertly interfering with the situation on the ground, any well-intentioned measures to bring peace and stability would soon be undermined.

We salute your individualism, your courage and four decades of service to your country, Richard Holbrooke. May you rest in peace. 

But may your strategies in Waziristan also rest in peace. [FamilySecurityMatters/14December2010]

Section IV - EMPLOYMENT AND COMING EVENTS

Employment

Cyber Security Analysts and Digital Investigators wanted: Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) www.pge.com seeks candidates to join and build an Information Security Intelligence & Investigations team. Corporate or government intelligence analysts with experience in the cyber security arena or a proclivity to learn cyber security are encouraged to apply. Openings also exist for forensic investigators or individuals with experience in local, state or federal high tech crime investigations. 

Interested persons should send resume, indicating area of interest, to Ian Thompson at ILT2@pge.com

Coming Educational Events

EDUCATIONAL EVENTS IN COMING TWO MONTHS....

MANY Spy Museum Events in December, January and February 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.

15 December 2010, 1 pm - Washington, DC - LexisNexis will host its next Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) Round Table on "OSINT 2020: The Future of Open Source Intelligence."

LexisNexis will host its next Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) Round Table at the National Press Club on December 15, 2010. Doors open at noon, program to begin at 1:00pm. The focus will continue our theme of “OSINT 2020: The Future of Open Source Intelligence” and will explore the evolving role of traditional media and technology in the future.

The program will include keynote remarks by Mr. Douglas J. Naquin, Director of the DNI Open Source Center followed by a "perspectives" discussion with leading experts among our group of distinguished attendees. The discussion will be based on the future of OSINT as a recognized discipline in strategic and tactical national security decision-making.

Panelists will include:

• Mr. Chet Lunner, former Deputy Under Secretary of Homeland Security in the Office of Intelligence and Analysis
• Ms. Suzanne Spaulding, Principal, Bingham Consulting and Of Counsel, Bingham McCutchen LLP
• Mr. Jeff Stein, Washington Post SpyTalk columnist
• Mr. Thomas Sanderson, Deputy Director and Senior Fellow at Center for Strategic & International Studies, Transnational Threats Project

The OSINT Round Table was created to make a public space for discussion about the government’s needs for Open Source Intelligence in order to facilitate relationships between government officials and private sector leaders. We seek to foster an increasingly responsive open source intelligence infrastructure that meets the needs of national security decision makers.
Register to attend at www.lexisnexis.com/osint

Wednesday, 5 January 2011, noon - 1:00pm - Washington, DC - "Tories: Fighting for the King in America's First Civil War" - at the International Spy Museum

Not simply a struggle between independence-minded colonists and the oppressive British, the American Revolution was also a savage and often deeply personal civil war. Conflicting visions of America pitted neighbor against neighbor and Patriot against Tory on the battlefield, the village green, and even in church. Espionage played a central role, and America's people were forced to face deep questions of loyalty and betrayal. Join author Thomas B. Allen as he tells the story of the Tories, the other Americans, tracing their lives and experiences throughout the revolutionary period. He brings to life a time when the penalty for spying was death, when Philadelphia and New York City were Tory strongholds, and when Long Islanders were forced to swear an oath by the "Almighty and Tremendous God" not to "convey any intelligence" to the British.
WHERE: International Spy Museum: 800 F Street, NW, Washington, DC. Gallery Place/Chinatown Metrorail Station
Free! No registration required! Join the author for an informal chat and book signing.

Tuesday, 11 January 2011, 6:30pm - Washington, DC - "Spies of the Civil Rights Movement" - at the International Spy Museum

"The informant, paid up to $200 a month, helped track King in the days before his murder."—Memphis Commercial Appeal, 12 September 2010
One of the most shocking aspects of the civil rights era are the spies, smear campaigns, and other dirty tricks the U.S. government used to infiltrate and discredit the movement and its leaders—especially Dr. Martin Luther King. Join Rick Bowers, author of Spies of Mississippi: The True Story of the Spy Network that Tried to Destroy the Civil Rights Movement, for a fascinating, behind-the-scenes view of the operatives who infiltrated the movement in the 1950s and '60s. From the extensive, secret, anti-civil rights espionage program waged by the state of Mississippi after Brown vs. Board of Education to the clandestine FBI campaign against King, this overview of a disturbing chapter in domestic intelligence is essential for anyone interested in the rights of citizens in the face of government intrusion and oppression. Bowers draws upon once-secret investigative reports and exclusive interviews with both the spies and the spied-upon to lift the curtain on this shameful period.
WHERE: International Spy Museum: 800 F Street, NW, Washington, DC. Gallery Place/Chinatown Metrorail Station
Tickets: $12.50 per person To register visit: www.spymuseum.org

20 January 2011 – San Francisco, CA – The AFIO Jim Quesada Chapter hosts Supervisory Special Agent (SSA) Steven Merrill, FBI.

SSA Merrill will be speaking about the FBI's first response to the November 2008 Mumbai attacks. The meeting will be held at UICC, 2700 45th Avenue, San Francisco (between Sloat/Wawona): 11:30 AM no host cocktails; noon - luncheon. $25 member rate with advance reservation and payment; $35 non-member. E-mail RSVP to Mariko Kawaguchi (please indicate pot roast or fish): afiosf@aol.com and mail check made out to "AFIO" to: Mariko Kawaguchi, P.O. Box 117578 Burlingame, CA 94011

20 January 2010, 12:30 - 2:30 pm - Los Angeles, CA - AFIO Los Angeles hosts their annual meeting

The AFIO LA-Area Chapters holds their annual chapter meeting at the LMU campus. Pizza lunch will be served, this meeting is open only to L.A. Area chapter members in good standing, no guests. The meeting will cover our objectives and chapter officer elections for 2011. Please RSVP via email AFIO_LA@yahoo.com if you plan to attend the annual meeting.

Thursday, 20 January 2011, 11:30 am - Colorado Springs, CO - Credit Card Fraud - 'Tis the Season - the talk at the Rocky Mountain Chapter by the President of TLC Computer Repair, Jesus Damian
Damian will speak on Credit Card Fraud (CCF). Credit cards are extremely vulnerable to fraud and are used extensively by terrorists. The Internet functions as a mechanism to steal credit card information through hacking, phishing, and other means. An elaborate multi-million dollar CCF scheme by Pakistanis in 2003, was terminated in the Washington, D.C. area. Hamas, Hezbollah and al-Qaeda are extensively involved in CCF. The surprise is how much money can be made at different levels of the schemes. To be held at the new location AFA... Eisenhower Golf Course Club House. Please RSVP to Tom VanWormer at robsmom@pcisys.net

20 January 2011 - Arlington, VA - "Mexican Drug Wars" the topic at this Defense Intelligence Forum
The Forum meets at the Pulcinella Restaurant, 6852 Old Dominion Drive, McLean, VA The speaker will be Colonel Sergio de la Pe�a (USA, Retired), who will speak on Mexican Drug Wars: A Practitioner's Perspective.
A former Foreign Area Officer, Colonel de la Pe�a has eighteen years' experience in Western Hemisphere affairs with emphasis on stopping growth and transport of drugs. He now is Director of Business Development for the Americas for Military Professional Resources, Incorporated. He most recently worked with the Mexican government on countering the drug trade's effect on Mexican security. As Northern Command International Affairs Division chief, he worked closely with Mexican counterparts to craft the theater's security engagement strategy. He served in the International Army Programs Directorate in Army Training and Doctrine Command, as Army Attach� in Venezuela, as Army Section Chief in the US Military Group-Chile, and as commander of the US Military Observer Group-Washington. Colonel de la Pe�a was born in Chihuahua, Mexico. He was commissioned in Air Defense Artillery and is both Airborne and Ranger qualified. He holds a BS from the University of Iowa and a Masters Degree in Military Arts and Science.
Make reservations by 12 January by email to diforum@verizon.net. Include names, telephone numbers, and email addresses. For meal selections, choose among chicken cacciatore, tilapia puttanesca, lasagna, sausage with peppers, or pasta with portabello. Pay at the door with a check for $29 per person payable to DIAA, Inc. THE FORUM DOESN'T TAKE CASH! If you don't have a check, you'll have to have the restaurant charge your credit or debit card $29 and give us the restaurant's copy of the receipt when you check in.

Wednesday, 26 January 2011, 6:30pm - Washington, DC - "An Introduction to Geospatial Intelligence" - at the International Spy Museum

"GEOINT plays a critical role in virtually every Intelligence Community and Department of Defense mission ... "—Vice Admiral Robert B. Murrett, U.S. Navy
Geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) is a rapidly evolving building block of our national security. But what exactly is this high tech discipline that strives to reveal the ground truth? How is it being used to rapidly provide insights into the scope and range of human activity, explore natural features across physical terrain, accurately locate significant events and activities, and precisely measure details above, on, and underneath the Earth's surface. Keith J. Masback, president of the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) and former member of the Defense Intelligence Senior Executive Service at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, leads this overview of GEOINT for the lay person. With the assistance of other experts in the field, he will reveal exciting current applications and explain how data collected by high resolution electronic sensors on satellites, remotely piloted aircraft, and ground vehicles is interpreted by analysts using sophisticated automated systems. Participants will learn basic techniques for extracting information from images, then using real-world problems and data, they will test their own skills as "geospatial intelligence analysts" to discover how GEOINT is transforming how we engage with our world.
WHERE: International Spy Museum: 800 F Street, NW, Washington, DC. Gallery Place/Chinatown Metrorail Station
Tickets: $15.00 per person To register visit: www.spymuseum.org

Tuesday, 1 February 2011, 6:30 pm - Washington, DC - "The Next Decade: An Evening with George Friedman" at the International Spy Museum

Join Author George Friedman for his inside view on ten years that will set the course of the 21st century. In his new book The Next Decade, Friedman directs his penetrating gaze to the immediate future as a follow-up to his bestseller, The Next 100 Years.
George Friedman is the founder and chief executive officer of Stratfor, a private global intelligence firm. Friedman has access to the latest information and intelligence affecting the world today. By combining the insights from his dynamic intelligence network with his extensive background in geopolitical analysis, he is uniquely poised to forecast the events and challenges that will test America and the world in the coming decade.
WHERE: At the International Spy Museum: 800 F Street, NW Washington, DC. Gallery Place/Chinatown Metrorail Station
TICKETS: $15 per person. To register: www.spymuseum.org

Wednesday, 2 February 2011, 10:15 am - Washington, DC - "China's Mole" at the International Spy Museum - Chinese-Americans Filching American Secrets

Former FBI Washington Field Office squad supervisor, Ivian C. Smith, author of Inside: A Top G-Man Exposes Spies, Lies, and Bureaucratic Bungling in the FBI, Smith will take you inside the case that revealed the CIA's leading Chinese linguist, Larry Chin, had been a spy for more than 30 years. Part of the Spy Museum's THE SPIES WITHIN: UNDERCOVER IN THE USA series. WHERE: International Spy Museum: 800 F Street, NW, Washington, DC. Gallery Place/Chinatown Metrorail Station
TICKETS: $112 for all four programs on Feb 2, 9, 16, and 23. (must be purchased through the Smithsonian). To register or for more information, visit www.spymuseum.org

Wednesday, 9 February 2011, 10:15 am - Washington, DC - "Israel's Controversial Spy" at the International Spy Museum - Jewish-Americans Stealing Secrets for Israel

Ron Olive, author of Capturing Jonathan Pollard, and the assistant special agent in charge of counterintelligence in the Washington Naval Investigative Service office when Pollard was arrested, will take you behind the scenes of this case and the ongoing controversy surrounding Pollard's imprisonment. Part of the Spy Museum's THE SPIES WITHIN: UNDERCOVER IN THE USA series.
WHERE: International Spy Museum: 800 F Street, NW, Washington, DC. Gallery Place/Chinatown Metrorail Station
TICKETS: $112 for all four programs on Feb 2, 9, 16, and 23. (must be purchased through the Smithsonian) To register or for more information, visit www.spymuseum.org

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

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