Fascinating interview with intelligence historian Matthew Aid, author of new book Intel Wars, on NPR’s Fresh Air Well worth listening to. Why America’s Spies Struggle To Keep Up “In Intel Wars, historian Matthew Aid details how bureaucratic policies and a glut of raw data have weakened the intelligence community in its war against would-be terrorists.”
Category Archives: intelligence
Cryptome: declassified account of two CIA officers who spent 20 years imprisoned by Chinese
Cryptome has published a previously classified account of John T. Downey and Richard G. Fecteau, two CIA officers captured on a mission to exfiltrate a dissident from China in 1952. From Two CIA Prisoners in China, 1952-73, itself derived from Two CIA Prisoners in China, 1952-73, Extraordinary Fidelity, by Nicholas Dujmovic
This article draws extensively on operational files and other internal CIA records that of necessity remain classified. Because the true story of these two CIA officers is compelling and has been distorted in many public accounts, it is retold here in as much detail as possible, despite minimal source citations. Whenever possible, references to open sources are made in the footnotes.
U.S. alleged to have ignored warnings from three sources that informant was assisting terrorists
From D.E.A. Deployed Mumbai Plotter Despite Warning, by Ginger Thompson, Eric Schmitt and Souad Mekhennet of The New York Times (dated 7 November 2010):
American authorities sent David C. Headley, a small-time drug dealer and sometime informant, to work for them in Pakistan months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, despite a warning that he sympathized with radical Islamic groups, according to court records and interviews. Not long after Mr. Headley arrived there, he began training with terrorists, eventually playing a key role in the 2008 attacks that left 164 people dead in Mumbai.
The October 2001 warning was dismissed, the authorities said, as the ire of a jilted girlfriend and for lack of proof. Less than a month later, those concerns did not come up when a federal court in New York granted Mr. Headley an early release from probation so that he could be sent to work for the United States Drug Enforcement Administration in Pakistan. It is unclear what Mr. Headley was supposed to do in Pakistan for the Americans.
“All I knew was the D.E.A. wanted him in Pakistan as fast as possible because they said they were close to making some big cases,” said Luis Caso, Mr. Headley’s former probation officer.
On Sunday, while President Obama was visiting India, he briefed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the status of his administration’s investigation of Mr. Headley, including the failure to act on repeated warnings that he might be a terrorist. A senior United States official said the inquiry has concluded that while the government received warnings, it did not have strong enough evidence at the time to act on them. “Had the United States government sufficiently established he was engaged in plotting a terrorist attack in India, the information would have most assuredly been transferred promptly to the Indian government,” the official said in a statement to The New York Times. The statement did not make clear whether any American agencies would be held accountable.
[pullquote] One Warning May Have Been Withheld from Court during Sentencing [/pullquote]
In recent weeks, United States government officials have begun to acknowledge that Mr. Headley’s path from American informant to transnational terrorist illustrates the breakdowns and miscommunications that have bedeviled them since the Sept. 11 attacks. Warnings about his radicalism were apparently not shared with the drug agency that made use of his ties in Pakistan.
The director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., began an investigation into Mr. Headley’s government connections after reports last month that two of the former drug dealer’s ex-wives had gone to American authorities between 2005 and 2008, before the Mumbai attacks, to say they feared he was plotting with terrorists. Combined with the earlier warning from the former girlfriend, three of the women in Mr. Headley’s life reported his ties to terrorists, only to have those warnings dismissed.
An examination of Mr. Headley’s story shows that his government ties ran far deeper and longer than previously known. One senior American official knowledgeable about the case said he believed that Mr. Headley was a D.E.A. informant until at least 2003, meaning that he was talking to American agencies even as he was learning to deal with explosives and small arms in terrorist training camps.
D.E.A. Deployed Mumbai Plotter Despite Warning via NYTimes.com
For background, see the BBC’s excellent (and award-winning) Special Report on the 2008 Mumbai Attacks.
Intellipedia – agencies using wikis to share intel
This is encouraging. Although not without limitations, and still in early days, the U.S. government is using a wiki to share and analyze intelligence:
Intellipedia is an online system for collaborative data sharing used by the United States Intelligence Community (IC). It was established as a pilot project in late 2005 and formally announced in April 2006 and consists of three wikis running on JWICS, IPRNet
, and Intelink-U . The levels of classification allowed for information on the three wikis are Top Secret, Secret, and Sensitive But Unclassified FOUO information, respectively. They are used by individuals with appropriate clearances from the 16 agencies of the IC and other national-security related organizations, including Combatant Commands and other federal departments. The wikis are not open to the public. Continue reading
Canadian controversy about Afghan torture
Via PiePalace.ca: Sorry to say that we’ve just become aware that, last November, a
Richard Colvin by Pawel Dwulit for the Toronto Star
career Canadian diplomat blew the whistle on Afghani torture of prisoners turned over by Canadian troops.
a senior Canadian diplomat, Richard Colvin, who told a parliamentary committee last week that “the likelihood is that all the Afghans we handed over were tortured” during his time as second in command at the embassy in Kabul in 2006 and 2007.
Ian Austen, General Says Canada Fears for Afghans (The New York Times, November 22, 2009).
In the same piece, Austen reports a “vigorous campaign by the Conservative government to discredit [Colvin’s] testimony.” Continue reading
Separating signal from noise, or re-reading a message with the expectation of different words
Writing in the context of the discovery process in civil litigation, Anne Kershaw and Joseph Howie write in Law Technology News of the fallacy of reviewing identical copies
of electronic messages as if each were, in effect, a separate paper document.
In civil litigation, this increases delay and cost.
In the context of intelligence analysis – particularly open-source – it’s a point ignored at the risk of missing important data – or reviewing it too late. A single item duplicated in volume is still a single item – the first is signal, the others merely noise.