USA > History > 2010 > C.I.A. (I)

C.I.A. Secrets Could Surface

in Swiss Nuclear Case

December 23, 2010
The New York Times
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
and DAVID E. SANGER

A seven-year effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to hide its relationship with a Swiss family who once acted as moles inside the world’s most successful atomic black market hit a turning point on Thursday when a Swiss magistrate recommended charging the men with trafficking in technology and information for making nuclear arms.

The prospect of a prosecution, and a public trial, threatens to expose some of the C.I.A.’s deepest secrets if defense lawyers try to protect their clients by revealing how they operated on the agency’s behalf. It could also tarnish what the Bush administration once hailed as a resounding victory in breaking up the nuclear arms network by laying bare how much of it remained intact.

“It’s like a puzzle,” Andreas Müller, the Swiss magistrate, said at a news conference in Bern on Thursday. “If you put the puzzle together you get the whole picture.”

The three men — Friedrich Tinner and his two sons, Urs and Marco — helped run the atomic smuggling ring of A. Q. Khan, an architect of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb program, officials in several countries have said. In return for millions of dollars, according to former Bush administration officials, the Tinners secretly worked for the C.I.A. as well, not only providing information about the Khan network’s manufacturing and sales efforts, which stretched from Iran to Libya to North Korea, but also helping the agency introduce flaws into the equipment sent to some of those countries.

The Bush administration went to extraordinary lengths to protect the men from prosecution, even persuading Swiss authorities to destroy equipment and information found on their computers and in their homes and businesses — actions that may now imperil efforts to prosecute them.

While it has been clear since 2008 that the Tinners acted as American spies, the announcement by the Swiss magistrate on Thursday, recommending their prosecution for nuclear smuggling, is a turning point in the investigation. A trial would bring to the fore a case that Pakistan has insisted is closed. Prosecuting the case could also expose in court a tale of C.I.A. break-ins in Switzerland, and of a still unexplained decision by the agency not to seize electronic copies of a number of nuclear bomb designs found on the computers of the Tinner family.

One of those blueprints came from an early Chinese atomic bomb; two more advanced designs were from Pakistan’s program, investigators from several countries have said.

Ultimately, copies of those blueprints were found around the globe on the computers of members of the Khan network, leading investigators to suspect that they made their way to Iran, North Korea and perhaps other countries. In 2003, atomic investigators found one of the atomic blueprints in Libya and brought it back to the United States for safekeeping.

Mr. Müller, the Swiss magistrate, investigated the Tinner case for nearly two years. He said Thursday that his 174-page report recommended that the three men face charges for “supporting the development of atomic weapons” in violation of Swiss law.

They are accused of supplying Dr. Khan’s operation with technology used to make centrifuges, the machines that purify uranium into fuel for bombs and reactors. Dr. Khan then sold the centrifuges to Libya, Iran and North Korea and perhaps other countries.

Mr. Müller’s recommendation comes as a new book describes previously unknown details of the C.I.A.’s secret relationship with the Tinners, which appears to have started around 2000.

The book, “Fallout,” by Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz, scheduled to be published next month, tells how the C.I.A. sent the men coded instructions, spied on their family, tried to buy their silence and ultimately had the Bush administration press Switzerland to destroy evidence in an effort to keep the Tinners from being indicted and testifying in open court.

Ms. Collins is a freelance writer and investigator, and her husband, Mr. Frantz, is a former investigations editor for The New York Times and a former managing editor of The Los Angeles Times. He currently works on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The C.I.A. has never commented on its relationship with the Tinners. But the story has leaked out, in bits and pieces, after news reports of Dr. Khan’s illicit atomic sales forced Pakistan’s government to expose the atomic ring and place Dr. Khan under house arrest. But Pakistan never allowed him to be interrogated by the C.I.A. or international nuclear inspectors, perhaps out of fear that he would implicate other Pakistani senior officials.

As a result, there has never been a full accounting of his activities, few of his associates have been tried or jailed, and there are strong indications that some of his suppliers are still operating.

But if the Pakistanis were worried about revelations surrounding Dr. Khan and whom he might have worked with in the Pakistani military and political hierarchy, the C.I.A. was worried about the Tinners.

The new book says the Bush administration grew so alarmed at possible disclosures of C.I.A. links to the family that in 2006 Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice lobbied Swiss officials to drop their investigation.

The book says the C.I.A. broke into a Tinner home in 2003 and found that the family possessed detailed blueprints for several types of nuclear bombs.

Paula Weiss, a spokeswoman for the C.I.A., declined to comment, and lawyers for the Tinners did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Tinners have said that they were not aware that the equipment they supplied was intended for nuclear weapons projects.

Based on Swiss investigators’ findings, the book suggests that the bomb designs may have spread to a half dozen outposts of Dr. Khan’s empire around the globe — including Thailand, Malaysia and South Africa — and sharply criticizes the C.I.A. for leaving those plans in the hands of people suspected of being nuclear traffickers.

In late 2007, the Swiss government, under strong American pressure, decided to drop legal proceedings on espionage charges against the Tinners and other charges against a number of C.I.A. operatives who had operated on Swiss soil in violation of the country’s laws.

In early 2008, the more limited investigation on trafficking charges inched forward with great difficulty because the Swiss government — again at the behest of United States officials — had destroyed an enormous trove of computer files and other material documenting the business dealings of the atomic family. That action led to an uproar in the Swiss Parliament.

But in 2008 Swiss investigators discovered that 39 Tinner files scheduled for destruction had been overlooked, giving the authorities fresh insights into the ring’s operation — and new life for the legal case.

In his news conference on Thursday, Mr. Müller harshly criticized the Swiss government for having “massively interfered in the wheels of justice by destroying almost all the evidence.” He added that the government had also ordered the federal criminal police not to cooperate with his investigation.

If the Tinners are formally charged and their case goes to trial in Switzerland, they face up to 10 years in prison if they are found guilty of breaking laws on the export of atomic goods. All three men spent time in Swiss jails pending the outcome of the espionage and trafficking inquiries. The time they have already spent in jail would count toward any possible sentence.

In early 2009, Marco Tinner was freed after more than three years of investigative detention, and his brother Urs was released in late 2008 after more than four years in jail. Their father, Friedrich, was released in 2006.

Mr. Müller recommended that, in addition to charges of atomic smuggling, Marco Tinner should be accused of money laundering.

The Swiss attorney general is now studying the magistrate’s report and will decide next year whether to file charges against the Swiss family of atomic spies and entrepreneurs.

David Jolly contributed reporting from Paris.

C.I.A. Secrets Could Surface in Swiss Nuclear Case, NYT, 23.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/24/world/europe/24nukes.html

Officials:

CIA Station Chief Pulled

From Islamabad

December 17, 2010
Filed at 9:35 a.m. EST
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) — The CIA has pulled its top spy out of Pakistan after threats were made against his life, current and former U.S. officials said, an unusual move for the U.S. and a complication on the front lines of the fight against al-Qaida.

The CIA station chief was in transit Thursday after a Pakistani lawsuit earlier this month accused him by name of killing civilians in missile strikes. The Associated Press is not publishing the station chief's name because he remains undercover and his name is classified.

CIA airstrikes from unmanned aircraft have successfully killed terrorist leaders but have led to accusations in Pakistan that the strikes kill innocent people. The U.S. does not acknowledge the missile strikes, but there have been more than 100 such attacks this year — more than double the amount in 2009.

The lawsuit blew the American spy's cover, leading to threats against him and forcing the U.S. to call him home, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

CIA officials' "serious concerns" for the station chief's safety led to the decision to bring him home, a U.S. official said. A spokeswoman for the spy agency, Jennifer Youngblood, declined to comment.

The Pakistani lawsuit also named CIA Director Leon Panetta and Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

The station chief's name has been published by local media covering the lawsuit and demonstrations related to it. Demonstrators in the heart of the capital have carried placards bearing the officers's name and urging him to leave the country.

Shahzad Akbar, the lawyer bringing the case, said he got the name from local journalists. He said he named the man because he wanted to sue a CIA operative living within the jurisdiction of the Islamabad court.

A Pakistani intelligence officer said the country's intelligence service, the ISI, knew the identity of the station chief, but had "no clue" how his name was leaked.

The officer spoke on condition of anonymity because his agency, like many around the world, does not allow its operatives to be named in the media.

The CIA's work is unusually difficult in Pakistan, one of the United States' most important and at times frustrating counterterrorism allies.

The station chief in Islamabad operates as a secret general in the U.S. war against terrorism. He runs the Predator drone program targeting terrorists, handles some of the CIA's most urgent and sensitive tips and collaborates closely with Pakistan's ISI, one of the most important relationships in the spy world.

Almost a year ago seven CIA officers and contractors were killed when a suicide bomber attacked a CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan. Six other agency officers were wounded in the attack, one of the deadliest in CIA history.

It's rare for a CIA station chief to see his cover blown. In 1999, an Israeli newspaper revealed the identity of the station chief in Tel Aviv. In 2001, an Argentine newspaper printed a picture of the Buenos Aires station chief and details about him. In both instances, the station chiefs were recalled to the U.S.

_____

Associated Press writer Chris Brummitt in Islamabad contributed to this report.

    Officials: CIA Station Chief Pulled From Islamabad, NYT, 17.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/12/17/us/politics/AP-US-Pakistan-CIA.html

Jailed Afghan Drug Lord

Was Informer on U.S. Payroll

December 11, 2010
The New York Times
By JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON — 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.

A Shifting Policy

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.

Concerns, but No Action

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 attaché 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?’ ”

Business, Not Ideology

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.

    Jailed Afghan Drug Lord Was Informer on U.S. Payroll, NYT, 11.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/world/asia/12drugs.html

C.I.A. Was Warned About Man

Who Bombed Afghan Base,

Inquiry Finds

October 19, 2010
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON — Three weeks before a Jordanian double agent set off a bomb at a remote Central Intelligence Agency base in eastern Afghanistan last December, a C.I.A. officer in Jordan received warnings that the man might be working for Al Qaeda, according to an investigation into the deadly attack.

But the C.I.A. officer did not tell his bosses of suspicions — brought to the Americans by a Jordanian intelligence officer — that the man might be planning to lure Americans into a trap, according to the recently completed investigation by the agency. Later that month the Qaeda operative, a Jordanian doctor, detonated a suicide vest as he stood among a group of C.I.A. officers at the base.

The internal investigation documents a litany of breakdowns leading to the Dec. 30 attack at the Khost base that killed seven C.I.A. employees, the deadliest day for the spy agency since the 1983 bombing of the American Embassy in Beirut. Besides the failure to pass on warnings about the bomber, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, the C.I.A. investigation chronicled major security lapses at the base in Afghanistan, a lack of war zone experience among the agency’s personnel at the base, insufficient vetting of the alleged defector and a murky chain of command with different branches of the intelligence agency competing for control over the operation.

Some of these failures mirror other lapses that have bedeviled the sprawling intelligence and antiterrorism community in the past several years, despite numerous efforts at reform.

The report found that the breakdowns were partly the result of C.I.A. officers’ wanting to believe they had finally come across the thing that had eluded them for years: a golden source who could lead them to the terror network’s second highest figure, Ayman al-Zawahri.

As it turned out, the bomber who was spirited onto a base pretending to be a Qaeda operative willing to cooperate with the Americans was actually a double agent who detonated a suicide vest as he stood among a group of C.I.A. officers. “The mission itself may have clouded some of the judgments made here,” said the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, who provided details of the investigation to reporters on Tuesday.

Mr. Panetta said that the report did not recommend holding a single person or group of individuals directly accountable for “systemic failures.”

“This is a war,” he said, adding that it is important for the C.I.A. to continue to take on risky missions.

The investigation, conducted by the agency’s counterintelligence division, does, however, make a series of recommendations to improve procedures to vet sources and require that C.I.A. field officers share more information with their superiors.

Mr. Panetta said that he also ordered that a team of counterintelligence experts join the C.I.A. counterterrorism center, and to thoroughly vet the agency’s most promising informants. It is unclear whether any action will be taken against the C.I.A. operative in Jordan who chose not to pass on the warning.

The agency is a closed society that makes precious little public about its operations. It is sometimes loath to investigate itself, and at times has resisted punishing people for failures.

In 2005, for instance, Director Porter J. Goss rejected the recommendation of an internal review that “accountability boards” be established to determine which senior C.I.A. officials should be blamed for intelligence breakdowns before the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Goss said that punishing top officers “would send the wrong message to our junior officers about taking risks.”

Current and former C.I.A. officials said that the decision not to hold officers directly responsible for the bombing was partly informed by an uncomfortable truth: some of those who may have been at fault were killed in the bombing.

In particular, the officials said there was particular care about how much fault to assign to Jennifer Matthews, a Qaeda expert at the C.I.A. who was the chief of the Khost base and who died in the attack.

One former C.I.A. officer with Afghanistan experience said there was bitter internal debate at the spy agency over whether Ms. Matthews — who had little field experience — ought to singled out for blame for the security lapses that allowed the bomber, Mr. Balawi, onto the base.

“There’s a lot of built-up emotion over this, because one of the primary people accused is Jennifer, and she’s not here to defend herself,” he said.

Several family members of the victims of the Khost attack, reached by telephone and e-mail on Tuesday, declined to comment about the C.I.A. report. Mr. Panetta said that families would be informed about the report’s conclusions in the coming days.

The warnings about Mr. Balawi came from a Jordanian intelligence officer. Mr. Panetta said that it appeared that the C.I.A. operative in Amman, Jordan, was dismissive of them because he suspected that the Jordanian was jealous that one of his colleagues had a close relationship with Mr. Balawi, and might have been trying to scuttle the operation.

As he detailed the report’s conclusions, the C.I.A. director provided new details about the unraveling of, and deadly conclusion to, Mr. Balawi’s operation.

Mr. Panetta said that the General Intelligence Department, the Jordanian spy service that is a close C.I.A. ally, had first told the Americans that Mr. Balawi might be willing to become a C.I.A. informant. Over a period of months, he said, the Jordanian doctor provided information from the tribal area of Pakistan to establish bona fides with his handlers.

A meeting at the Khost base was set up for the Americans to meet Mr. Balawi in person, to discuss specific ways that the Jordanian doctor might be able to consistently pass along information to the C.I.A.

Mr. Panetta said that because he was considered a reliable source, normal security procedures were eased: Mr. Balawi was not subjected to screening at the perimeter of the Khost base, and a large group of C.I.A. officers gathered to greet him when he arrived.

C.I.A. officers became suspicious however, when Mr. Balawi chose to get out of the car on the side opposite the security personnel, who were waiting to pat him down. The security guards drew their guns, and Mr. Balawi detonated his suicide vest.

The force of the bomb killed the seven C.I.A. employees, the Jordanian intelligence officer who was Mr. Balawi’s handler, and an Afghan driver. Six more C.I.A. officers were wounded in the attack, but Mr. Panetta said that the bomb could have been deadlier had Mr. Balawi’s car — which blunted the explosion — had not been in between the bomber and most of the Americans.

Current and former American officials said that the final report on the Khost attack went through several drafts, in part because an already complex investigation was made even more difficult by the bomb’s devastating impact.

As Mr. Panetta said, “A lot of the evidence here died with the people.”

    C.I.A. Was Warned About Man Who Bombed Afghan Base, Inquiry Finds, NYT, 19.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/20/world/asia/20intel.html

C.I.A. Steps Up Drone Attacks

in Pakistan to Thwart Taliban

September 27, 2010
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON — The C.I.A. has drastically increased its bombing campaign in the mountains of Pakistan in recent weeks, American officials said. The strikes are part of an effort by military and intelligence operatives to try to cripple the Taliban in a stronghold being used to plan attacks against American troops in Afghanistan.

As part of its covert war in the region, the C.I.A. has launched 20 attacks with armed drone aircraft thus far in September, the most ever during a single month, and more than twice the number in a typical month. This expanded air campaign comes as top officials are racing to stem the rise of American casualties before the Obama administration’s comprehensive review of its Afghanistan strategy set for December. American and European officials are also evaluating reports of possible terrorist plots in the West from militants based in Pakistan.

The strikes also reflect mounting frustration both in Afghanistan and the United States that Pakistan’s government has not been aggressive enough in dislodging militants from their bases in the country’s western mountains. In particular, the officials said, the Americans believe the Pakistanis are unlikely to launch military operations inside North Waziristan, a haven for Taliban and Qaeda operatives that has long been used as a base for attacks against troops in Afghanistan.

Beyond the C.I.A. drone strikes, the war in the region is escalating in other ways. In recent days, American military helicopters have launched three airstrikes into Pakistan that military officials estimate killed more than 50 people suspected of being members of the militant group known as the Haqqani network, which is responsible for a spate of deadly attacks against American troops.

Such air raids by the military remain rare, and officials in Kabul said Monday that the helicopters entered Pakistani airspace on only one of the three raids, and acted in self-defense after militants fired rockets at an allied base just across the border in Afghanistan. At the same time, the strikes point to a new willingness by military officials to expand the boundaries of the campaign against the Taliban and Haqqani network — and to an acute concern in military and intelligence circles about the limited time to attack Taliban strongholds while American “surge” forces are in Afghanistan.

Pakistani officials have angrily criticized the helicopter attacks, saying that NATO’s mandate in Afghanistan does not extend across the border in Pakistan.

As evidence of the growing frustration of American officials, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Afghanistan, has recently issued veiled warnings to top Pakistani commanders that the United States could launch unilateral ground operations in the tribal areas should Pakistan refuse to dismantle the militant networks in North Waziristan, according to American officials.

“Petraeus wants to turn up the heat on the safe havens,” said one senior administration official, explaining the sharp increase in drone strikes. “He has pointed out to the Pakistanis that they could do more.”

Special Operations commanders have also been updating plans for cross-border raids, which would require approval from President Obama. For now, officials said, it remains unlikely that the United States would make good on such threats to send American troops over the border, given the potential blowback inside Pakistan, an ally.

But that could change, they said, if Pakistan-based militants were successful in carrying out a terrorist attack on American soil. American and European intelligence officials in recent days have spoken publicly about growing evidence that militants may be planning a large-scale attack in Europe, and have bolstered security at a number of European airports and railway stations.

“We are all seeing increased activity by a more diverse set of groups and a more diverse set of threats,” said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano before a Senate panel last week.

The senior administration official said the strikes were intended not only to attack Taliban and Haqqani fighters, but also to disrupt any plots directed from or supported by extremists in Pakistan’s tribal areas that were aimed at targets in Europe. “The goal is to suppress or disrupt that activity,” the official said.

The 20 C.I.A. drone attacks in September represent the most intense bombardment by the spy agency since January, when the C.I.A. carried out 11 strikes after a suicide bomber killed seven agency operatives at a remote base in eastern Afghanistan.

According to one Pakistani intelligence official, the recent drone attacks have not killed any senior Taliban or Qaeda leaders. Many senior operatives have already fled North Waziristan, he said, to escape the C.I.A. drone campaign.

Over all the spy agency has carried out 74 drone attacks this year, according to the Web site The Long War Journal, which tracks the strikes. A vast majority of the attacks — which usually involve several drones firing multiple missiles or bombs — have taken place in North Waziristan.

The Obama administration has enthusiastically embraced the C.I.A.’s drone program, an ambitious and historically unusual war campaign by American spies. According to The Long War Journal, the spy agency in 2009 and 2010 has launched nearly four times as many attacks as it did during the final year of the Bush administration.

One American official said that the recent strikes had been aimed at several groups, including the Haqqani network, Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban. The United States, he said, hopes to “keep the pressure on as long as we can.”

But the C.I.A.’s campaign has also raised concerns that the drone strikes are fueling anger in the Muslim world. The man who attempted to detonate a truck filled with explosives in Times Square told a judge that the C.I.A. drone campaign was one of the factors that led him to attack the United States.

In a meeting with reporters on Monday, General Petraeus indicated that it was new intelligence gathering technology that helped NATO forces locate the militants killed by the helicopter raids against militants in Pakistan.

In particular, he said, the military has expanded its fleet of reconnaissance blimps that can hover over hide-outs thought to belong to the Taliban in eastern and southern Afghanistan.

The intelligence technology, General Petraeus said, has also enabled the expanded campaign of raids by Special Operations commandos against Taliban operatives in those areas.


Rod Nordland and Alissa J. Rubin contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan, and Ismail Khan from Peshawar, Pakistan.

    C.I.A. Steps Up Drone Attacks in Pakistan to Thwart Taliban, NYT, 27.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/world/asia/28drones.html

Court Dismisses a Case

Asserting Torture by C.I.A.

September 8, 2010
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled that former prisoners of the C.I.A. could not sue over their alleged torture in overseas prisons because such a lawsuit might expose secret government information.

The sharply divided ruling was a major victory for the Obama administration’s efforts to advance a sweeping view of executive secrecy powers. It strengthens the White House’s hand as it has pushed an array of assertive counterterrorism policies, while raising an opportunity for the Supreme Court to rule for the first time in decades on the scope of the president’s power to restrict litigation that could reveal state secrets.

By a 6-to-5 vote, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit dismissed a lawsuit against Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a Boeing subsidiary accused of arranging flights for the Central Intelligence Agency to transfer prisoners to other countries for imprisonment and interrogation. The American Civil Liberties Union filed the case on behalf of five former prisoners who say they were tortured in captivity — and that Jeppesen was complicit in that alleged abuse.

Judge Raymond C. Fisher described the case, which reversed an earlier decision, as presenting “a painful conflict between human rights and national security.” But, he said, the majority had “reluctantly” concluded that the lawsuit represented “a rare case” in which the government’s need to protect state secrets trumped the plaintiffs’ need to have a day in court.

While the alleged abuses occurred during the Bush administration, the ruling added a chapter to the Obama administration’s aggressive national security policies.

Its counterterrorism programs have in some ways departed from the expectations of change fostered by President Obama’s campaign rhetoric, which was often sharply critical of former President George W. Bush’s approach.

Among other policies, the Obama national security team has also authorized the C.I.A. to try to kill a United States citizen suspected of terrorism ties, blocked efforts by detainees in Afghanistan to bring habeas corpus lawsuits challenging the basis for their imprisonment without trial, and continued the C.I.A.’s so-called extraordinary rendition program of prisoner transfers — though the administration has forbidden torture and says it seeks assurances from other countries that detainees will not be mistreated.

The A.C.L.U. vowed to appeal the Jeppesen Dataplan case to the Supreme Court, which would present the Roberts court with a fresh opportunity to weigh in on a high-profile test of the scope and limits of presidential power in counterterrorism matters.

It has been more than 50 years since the Supreme Court issued a major ruling on the state-secrets privilege, a judicially created doctrine that the government has increasingly used to win dismissals of lawsuits related to national security, shielding its actions from judicial review. In 2007, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of a similar rendition and torture ruling by the federal appeals court in Richmond, Va.

The current case turns on whether the executive can invoke the state-secrets privilege to shut down entire lawsuits, or whether that power should be limited to withholding particular pieces of secret information. In April 2009, a three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit adopted the narrower view, ruling that the lawsuit as a whole should proceed.

But the Obama administration appealed to the full San Francisco-based appeals court. A group of 11 of its judges reheard the case, and a narrow majority endorsed the broader view of executive secrecy powers. They concluded that the lawsuit must be dismissed without a trial — even one that would seek to rely only on public information.

“This case requires us to address the difficult balance the state secrets doctrine strikes between fundamental principles of our liberty, including justice, transparency, accountability and national security,” Judge Fisher wrote. “Although as judges we strive to honor all of these principles, there are times when exceptional circumstances create an irreconcilable conflict between them.”

Ben Wizner, a senior A.C.L.U. lawyer who argued the case before the appeals court, said the group was disappointed in the ruling.

“To this date, not a single victim of the Bush administration’s torture program has had his day in court,” Mr. Wizner said. “That makes this a sad day not only for the torture survivors who are seeking justice in this case, but for all Americans who care about the rule of law and our nation’s reputation in the world. If this decision stands, the United States will have closed its courts to torture victims while providing complete immunity to their torturers.”

Some plaintiffs in the case said they were tortured by C.I.A. interrogators at an agency “black site” prison in Afghanistan, while others said they were tortured by Egypt and Morocco after the C.I.A. handed them off to foreign security services.

The lead plaintiff is Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian citizen and legal resident of Britain who was arrested in Pakistan in 2002. He claimed he was turned over to the C.I.A., which flew him to Morocco and handed him off to its security service.

Moroccan interrogators, he said, held him for 18 months and subjected him to an array of tortures, including cutting his penis with a scalpel and then pouring a hot, stinging liquid on the open wounds.

Mr. Mohamed was later transferred back to the C.I.A., which he said flew him to its secret prison in Afghanistan. There, he said, he was held in continuous darkness, fed sparsely and subjected to loud noise — like the recorded screams of women and children — 24 hours a day.

He was later transferred again to the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he was held for an additional five years. He was released and returned to Britain in early 2009 and is now free.

There were signs in the court’s ruling that the majority felt conflicted. In a highly unusual move, the court ordered the government to pay the plaintiffs’ legal costs, even though they lost the case and had not requested such payment.

Judge Fisher, who was a senior Justice Department official before President Bill Clinton appointed him to the bench in 1999, also urged the executive branch and Congress to grant reparations to victims of C.I.A. “misjudgments or mistakes” that violated their human rights if government records confirmed their accusations, even though the courthouse was closed to them.

_

He cited as precedent payments made to Latin Americans of Japanese descent who were forcibly sent to United States internment camps during World War II. But the five dissenting judges criticized the realism of that idea, noting that those reparations took five decades.

“Permitting the executive to police its own errors and determine the remedy dispensed would not only deprive the judiciary of its role, but also deprive plaintiffs of a fair assessment of their claims by a neutral arbiter,” Judge Michael Daly Hawkins wrote.

After the A.C.L.U. filed the case in 2007, the Bush administration asked a district judge to dismiss it, submitting public and classified declarations by the C.I.A. director at the time, Michael Hayden, arguing that litigating the matter would jeopardize national security.

The trial judge dismissed the case. As an appeal was pending, Mr. Obama won the 2008 presidential election. Although he had criticized the Bush administration’s frequent use of the state-secrets privilege, in February 2009 his weeks-old administration told the appeals court that it agreed with the Bush view in that case.

In September 2009, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. issued a new state-secrets privilege policy requiring high-level approval, instructing officials to try to avoid shutting down lawsuits if possible, and forbidding its use with a motive of covering up lawbreaking or preventing embarrassment.

The administration told the court that using the privilege in the Jeppesen Dataplan case complied with that policy.

Judge Fisher agreed that “the government is not invoking the privilege to avoid embarrassment or to escape scrutiny of its recent controversial transfer and interrogation policies, rather than to protect legitimate national security concerns.”

Jeppesen Dataplan and the C.I.A. referred questions to the Justice Department, where a spokesman, Matthew Miller, praised its new standards.

“The attorney general adopted a new policy last year to ensure the state-secrets privilege is only used in cases where it is essential to protect national security, and we are pleased that the court recognized that the policy was used appropriately in this case,” Mr. Miller said.

    Court Dismisses a Case Asserting Torture by C.I.A., NYT, 8.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/09/us/09secrets.html

CIA Pays Many

In Karzai Administration: Report

August 27, 2010
Filed at 2:03 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By REUTERS

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The CIA is making payments to a significant number of officials in Afghan President Hamid Karzai's administration, The Washington Post reported on Friday.

Citing current and former U.S. officials, the paper said the payments were long-standing in many cases and intended to help the agency maintain a source of information within the Afghan government.

Some Karzai aides were CIA informants and others received payments to ensure their accessibility, the Post said, citing a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The CIA payments have continued despite concerns that the agency is backing corrupt officials, the report said.

The Post said CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano disputed the official's characterization, saying, "This anonymous source appears driven by ignorance, malice or both."

Corruption and governance in Afghanistan are being scrutinized in Washington as U.S. President Barack Obama plans a strategy review in December, a month after mid-term Congressional elections will be held and amid sagging support for the war.

The Washington Post also cited a former CIA official as saying that the CIA payments to Afghan officials were necessary because "the head of state is not going to tell you everything" and because Karzai often seems unaware of moves that members of his own government make.

Obama pressured Karzai earlier this year to do more to root out corruption, which Washington says complicates efforts to win over the population to the effort by foreign and Afghan forces to fight a widening insurgency.

In addition to cleaning up Afghan governance, Obama's war strategy hinges on building up the country's army and police forces to take over security responsibility.

The New York Times reported on Thursday that one of Karzai's key national security advisors who is under investigation for allegedly soliciting bribes was on the CIA payroll.

Karzai's half-brother, Ahmad Wali Karzai, a businessman and political power broker in Kandahar has been widely accused of amassing a vast fortune from the drug trade, intimidating rivals and having links to the CIA, charges he strongly denies.

(Reporting by JoAnne Allen; Editing by Sandra Maler)

    CIA Pays Many In Karzai Administration: Report, NYT, 27.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/08/27/world/international-us-afghanistan-usa-cia.html

Key Karzai Aide in Corruption Inquiry

Is Linked to C.I.A.

August 25, 2010
The New York Times
By DEXTER FILKINS and MARK MAZZETTI

KABUL, Afghanistan — The aide to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan at the center of a politically sensitive corruption investigation is being paid by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to Afghan and American officials.

Mohammed Zia Salehi, the chief of administration for the National Security Council, appears to have been on the payroll for many years, according to officials in Kabul and Washington. It is unclear exactly what Mr. Salehi does in exchange for his money, whether providing information to the spy agency, advancing American views inside the presidential palace, or both.

Mr. Salehi’s relationship with the C.I.A. underscores deep contradictions at the heart of the Obama administration’s policy in Afghanistan, with American officials simultaneously demanding that Mr. Karzai root out the corruption that pervades his government while sometimes subsidizing the very people suspected of perpetrating it.

Mr. Salehi was arrested in July and released after Mr. Karzai intervened. There has been no suggestion that Mr. Salehi’s ties to the C.I.A. played a role in his release; rather, officials say, it is the fear that Mr. Salehi knows about corrupt dealings inside the Karzai administration.

The ties underscore doubts about how seriously the Obama administration intends to fight corruption here. The anticorruption drive, though strongly backed by the United States, is still vigorously debated inside the administration. Some argue it should be a centerpiece of American strategy, and others say that attacking corrupt officials who are crucial to the war effort could destabilize the Karzai government.

The Obama administration is also racing to show progress in Afghanistan by December, when the White House will evaluate its mission there. Some administration officials argue that any comprehensive campaign to fight corruption inside Afghanistan is overly ambitious, with less than a year to go before the American military is set to begin withdrawing troops.

“Fighting corruption is the very definition of mission creep,” one Obama administration official said.

Others in the administration view public corruption as the single greatest threat to the Afghan government and the American mission; it is the corrupt nature of the Karzai government, these officials say, that drives ordinary Afghans into the arms of the Taliban. Other prominent Afghans who American officials have said were on the C.I.A.’s payroll include the president’s half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, suspected by investigators of playing a role in Afghanistan’s booming opium trade. Earlier this year, American officials did not press Mr. Karzai to remove his brother from his post as the chairman of the Kandahar provincial council. Mr. Karzai denies any monetary relationship with the C.I.A. and any links to the drug trade.

Mr. Salehi was arrested by the Afghan police after, investigators say, they wiretapped him soliciting a bribe — in the form of a car for his son — in exchange for impeding an American-backed investigation into a company suspected of shipping billions of dollars out of the country for Afghan officials, drug smugglers and insurgents.

Mr. Salehi was released seven hours later, after telephoning Mr. Karzai from his jail cell to demand help, officials said, and after Mr. Karzai forcefully intervened on his behalf.

The president sent aides to get him and has since threatened to limit the power of the anticorruption unit that carried out the arrest. Mr. Salehi could not be reached for comment on Wednesday. A spokesman for President Karzai did not respond to a list of questions sent to his office, including whether Mr. Karzai knew that Mr. Salehi was a C.I.A. informant.

A spokesman for the C.I.A. declined to comment on any relationship with Mr. Salehi.

“The C.I.A. works hard to advance the full range of U.S. policy objectives in Afghanistan,” said Paul Gimigliano, a spokesman for the agency. “Reckless allegations from anonymous sources don’t change that reality in the slightest.”

An American official said the practice of paying government officials was sensible, even if they turn out to be corrupt or unsavory.

“If we decide as a country that we’ll never deal with anyone in Afghanistan who might down the road — and certainly not at our behest — put his hand in the till, we can all come home right now,” the American official said. “If you want intelligence in a war zone, you’re not going to get it from Mother Teresa or Mary Poppins.”

Last week, Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat, flew to Kabul in part to discuss the Salehi case with Mr. Karzai. In an interview afterward, Mr. Kerry expressed concern about Mr. Salehi’s ties to the American government. Mr. Kerry appeared to allude to the C.I.A., though he did not mention it.

“We are going to have to examine that relationship,” Mr. Kerry said. “We are going to have to look at that very carefully.”

Mr. Kerry said he pressed Mr. Karzai to allow the anticorruption unit pursuing Mr. Salehi and others to move forward unhindered, and said he believed he had secured a commitment from him to do so.

“Corruption matters to us,” a senior Obama administration official said. “The fact that Salehi may have been on our payroll does not necessarily change any of the basic issues here.”

Mr. Salehi is a political survivor, who, like many Afghans, navigated shifting alliances through 31 years of war. He is a former interpreter for Abdul Rashid Dostum, the ethnic Uzbek with perhaps the most ruthless reputation among all Afghan warlords.

Mr. Dostum, a Karzai ally, was one of the C.I.A.’s leading allies on the ground in Afghanistan in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The agency employed his militia to help rout the Taliban from northern Afghanistan.

Over the course of the nine-year-old war, the C.I.A. has enmeshed itself in the inner workings of Afghanistan’s national security establishment. From 2002 until just last year, the C.I.A. paid the entire budget of Afghanistan’s spy service, the National Directorate of Security.

Mr. Salehi often acts as a courier of money to other Afghans, according to an Afghan politician who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared retaliation.

Among the targets of the continuing Afghan anticorruption investigation is a secret fund of cash from which payments were made to various individuals, officials here said.

Despite Mr. Salehi’s status as a low-level functionary, the Afghan politician predicted that Mr. Karzai would never allow his prosecution to go forward, whatever the pressure from the United States. Mr. Salehi knows too much about the inner workings of the palace, he said.

“Karzai will protect him,” the politician said, “because by going after him, you are opening the gates.”

Mr. Salehi is a confidant of some of the most powerful people in the Afghan government, including Engineer Ibrahim, who until recently was the deputy chief of the Afghan intelligence service. Earlier this year, Mr. Salehi accompanied Mr. Ibrahim to Dubai to meet leaders of the Taliban to explore prospects for peace, according to a prominent Afghan with knowledge of the meeting.

Mr. Salehi was arrested last month in the course of a sprawling investigation into New Ansari, a money transfer firm that relies on couriers and other rudimentary means to move cash in and out of Afghanistan.

New Ansari was founded in the 1990s when the Taliban ruled most of Afghanistan. In the years since 2001, New Ansari grew into one of the most important financial hubs in Afghanistan, transferring billions of dollars in cash for prominent Afghans out of the country, most of it to Dubai.

New Ansari’s offices were raided by Afghan agents, with American backing, in January. An American official familiar with the investigation said New Ansari appeared to have been transferring money for wealthy Afghans of every sort, including politicians, insurgents and drug traffickers.

“They were moving money for everybody,” the American official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The flow of capital out of Afghanistan is so large that it makes up a substantial portion of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product. In an interview, a United Arab Emirates customs official said it received about $1 billion from Afghanistan in 2009. But the American official said the amount might be closer to $2.5 billion — about a quarter of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product.

Much of the New Ansari cash was carried by couriers flying from Kabul and Kandahar, usually to Dubai, where many Afghan officials maintain second homes and live in splendorous wealth.

An American official familiar with the investigation said the examination of New Ansari’s books was providing rich insights into the culture of Afghan corruption.

“It’s a gold mine,” the official said.

Following the arrest, Mr. Salehi called Mr. Karzai directly from his cell to demand that he be freed. Mr. Karzai twice sent delegations to the detention center where Mr. Salehi was held. After seven hours, Mr. Salehi was let go.

Afterward, Gen. Nazar Mohammed Nikzad, the head of the Afghan unit investigating Mr. Salehi, was summoned to the Presidential Palace and asked by Mr. Karzai to explain his actions.

“Everything is lawful and by the book,” a Western official said of the Afghan anticorruption investigators. “They gather the evidence, they get the warrant signed off — and then the plug gets pulled every time.”

This is not the first time that Afghan prosecutors have run into resistance when they have tried to pursue an Afghan official on corruption charges related to New Ansari.

Sediq Chekari, the minister for Hajj and Religious Affairs, was allowed to flee the country as investigators prepared to charge him with accepting bribes in exchange for steering business to tour operators who ferry people to Saudi Arabia each year. Mr. Chekari fled to Britain, officials said. Afghanistan’s attorney general issued an arrest warrant through Interpol.

American officials say a key player in the scandal is Hajji Rafi Azimi, the vice chairman of Afghan United Bank. The bank’s chairman, Hajji Mohammed Jan, is a founder of New Ansari. According to American officials, Afghan prosecutors would like to arrest Mr. Azimi but so far have run into political interference they did not specify. He has not been formally charged.

In the past, some Western officials have expressed frustration at the political resistance that Afghan prosecutors have encountered when they have tried to investigate Afghan officials. Earlier this year, the American official said that the Obama administration was considering extraordinary measures to bring corrupt Afghan officials to justice, including extradition.

“We are pushing some high-level public corruption cases right now, and they are just constantly stalling and stalling and stalling,” the American official said of the Karzai administration.

Another Western official said he was growing increasingly concerned about the morale — and safety — of the Afghan anticorruption prosecutors.

So far, the Afghan prosecutors have not folded. The Salehi case is likely to resurface — and very soon. Under Afghan law, prosecutors have a maximum of 33 days to indict a person after his arrest. Mr. Salehi was arrested in late July.

That means Afghan prosecutors may soon come before the Afghan attorney general, Mohammed Ishaq Aloko, to seek an indictment. It will be up to Mr. Aloko, who owes his job to Mr. Karzai, to sign it.

“They are all just doing their jobs,” the Western official said. “They are scared for their lives. They are scared for their families. If it continues, they will eventually give up the fight.”


Dexter Filkins reported from Kabul, and Mark Mazzetti from Washington. Helene Cooper contributed reporting from Washington.

    Key Karzai Aide in Corruption Inquiry Is Linked to C.I.A., NYT, 25.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/world/asia/26kabul.html

WikiLeaks Releases CIA Memo

on U.S. Terror Recruits

August 25, 2010
Filed at 5:04 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By REUTERS
 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The WikiLeaks website released a secret CIA memo on Wednesday warning of fallout if the United States came to be seen as an "exporter of terrorism," given al Qaeda's interest in American recruits.

The document by the CIA's so-called "Red Cell" was the latest classified memo to be published by the whistle-blowing website, which last month released more than 70,000 secret U.S. military documents on the war in Afghanistan.

It has threatened to release some 15,000 more, despite Pentagon criticism that the leaks endangered the lives of sources and exposed sensitive intelligence gathering methods to enemy fighters.

The three-page CIA memo released by WikiLeaks did not appear to expose any state secrets and one U.S. official quipped it was hardly a "blockbuster." Indeed Red Cell reports are meant to provoke thought, rather than provide an authoritative assessment.

But it addressed the hypothetical and highly sensitive question about the potential impact on the United States if allies saw it as a nation whose citizens frequently operate abroad to carry out acts of terrorism.

It said the United States could lose leverage over allies to cooperate on terrorism -- particularly on "extra-judicial activities." Foreign governments might even take the extraordinary step of secretly extracting U.S. citizens suspected of carrying out extremist acts abroad.

"Primarily we have been concerned about al Qaeda infiltrating operatives into the United States to conduct terrorist attacks, but AQ may be increasingly looking for Americans to operate overseas," the document proposes.

"Undoubtedly al Qaeda and other terrorist groups recognize that Americans can be great assets in terrorist operations overseas."

It said U.S. citizens are valuable to terrorist organizations because they are harder to detect. They don't fit the typical Arab-Muslim profile and can easily communicate with leaders through their "unfettered" access to the Internet and other methods, the report said.

WIDELY DISTRIBUTED

The CIA played down the paper's significance, noting Red Cell teams of analysts were tasked with taking up hypothetical scenarios and presenting alternate views, divergent from mainstream thinking.

"These sorts of analytic products -- clearly identified as coming from the Agency's 'Red Cell'-- are designed simply to provoke thought and present different points of view," said spokesman George Little.

Such documents are widely distributed within the U.S. intelligence community, as opposed to more restricted, highly classified material.

The report cited cases of Americans involved in alleged plots in Pakistan, India and elsewhere and said "contrary to common belief, the American export of terrorism or terrorists is not a recent phenomenon."

It said the United States had a certain amount of leverage with allies on extradition requests following the September 11, 2001, attacks, but warned that could change.

"If the US were seen as an 'exporter of terrorism,' foreign governments could request a reciprocal arrangement that would impact US sovereignty," it said.

It said foreign governments could request information on U.S. citizens or request their "rendition," or the secret, extra-judicial transfer of a terrorism suspect abroad.

"U.S. refusal to cooperate with foreign government requests for extradition might lead some governments to consider secretly extracting U.S. citizens," the report said.

It also warned of potential obstruction of U.S. efforts and cited an Italian case against CIA agents, who were convicted last year of kidnapping a terrorism suspect in Milan and flying him to Egypt, where he says he was tortured during questioning.

"The proliferation of such cases would not only challenge US bilateral relations with other countries but also damage global counterterrorism efforts," it said.

(Editing by Eric Beech)

    WikiLeaks Releases CIA Memo on U.S. Terror Recruits, NYT, 25.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/08/25/news/news-us-usa-cia-wikileaks.html

Drone Strikes Pound West Pakistan

May 11, 2010
The New York Times
By JANE PERLEZ and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH

KARACHI, Pakistan — American drone aircraft fired 18 missiles at militants in Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal region on Tuesday, killing at least 14 fighters and wounding four, a security official and a resident of the area said.

The missiles struck a region known as Datta Khel on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border where Taliban and Qaeda fighters prepare for operations against United States and NATO troops in Afghanistan.

The unusually intense drone attack was the third since a failed car bombing in Times Square 10 days earlier. Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American charged in the attempted attack, has told American investigators he visited North Waziristan to train under the auspices of the Pakistani Taliban.

There was no indication that the strikes on Tuesday were retaliation for the bombing attempt.

Rather, the attack by the American drones, which are operated by the Central Intelligence Agency, appeared to be a continuation of the air campaign to degrade the capabilities of Al Qaeda, the Pakistani Taliban and the Afghan Taliban fighters now working together in North Waziristan. There have been more than 30 drone attacks against militants in the tribal areas in 2010, almost all of them in North Waziristan.

A resident of Miranshah, the capital of North Waziristan, said in a telephone interview Tuesday he saw a truck stacked with empty coffins heading for Datta Khel after the attack.

According to this account, a missile hit a vehicle carrying four militants, and other missiles slammed into tents erected by the militants in the nearby Zair Ghundai area, close to the border with Afghanistan.

The intensity of the drone attacks in the past few months has forced militants to resort to more temporary quarters, like tents, and to keep on the move.

The resident said that six drones had been seen over Datta Khel and at least four were still hovering over the area after the attack in the early hours of Tuesday.

The militants killed in the attack belonged to the forces of Sadiq Noor, a commander who is loyal to the Haqqani network, which specializes in operations in Afghanistan, the resident said.

Militants loyal to Mr. Noor staged an ambush last month against Pakistani soldiers based in North Waziristan that killed at least seven soldiers, security officials said.

    Drone Strikes Pound West Pakistan, NYT, 11.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/world/asia/12pstan.html

Doctors Who Aid Torture

June 7, 2010
The New York Times
 

Disturbing new questions have been raised about the role of doctors and other medical professionals in helping the Central Intelligence Agency subject terrorism suspects to harsh treatment, abuse and torture.

The Red Cross previously documented, from interviews with “high-value” prisoners, that medical personnel helped facilitate abuses in the C.I.A.’s “enhanced interrogation program” during the Bush administration. Now Physicians for Human Rights has suggested that the medical professionals may also have violated national and international laws setting limits on what research can be performed on humans.

The physicians’ group, which is based in Cambridge, Mass., analyzed a wide range of previously released government documents and reports, many of them heavily censored. It found that the Bush administration used medical personnel — including doctors, psychologists and physician assistants — to help justify acts that had long been classified by law and treaty as illegal or unethical and to redefine them as safe, legal and effective when used on terrorism suspects.

The group’s report focused particularly on a few issues where medical personnel played an important role — determining how far a harsh interrogation could go, providing legal cover against prosecution and designing future interrogation procedures. The actual monitoring data are not publicly available, but the group was able to deduce from the guidelines governing the program what role the health professionals played, assuming they followed the rules.

In the case of waterboarding, a technique in which prisoners are brought to the edge of drowning, health professionals were required to monitor the practice and keep detailed medical records. Their findings led to several changes, including a switch to saline solution as the near-drowning agent instead of water, ostensibly to protect the health of detainees who ingest large volumes of liquid but also, the group says, to allow repeated use of waterboarding on the same subject.

Another government memorandum concluded from medical observations on 25 detainees that combining several techniques — say a face slap with water dousing or a stress kneeling position — caused no more pain than when the techniques were used individually. That was used to justify the application of multiple techniques at the same time.

The group concludes that health professionals who facilitated these practices were in essence conducting research and experimentation on human subjects. The main purposes of such research, the group says, were to determine how to use various techniques, to calibrate the levels of pain and to create a legal basis for defending interrogators from potential prosecution under antitorture laws. The interrogators could claim that they had acted in good faith in accord with medical judgments of safety and had not intended to inflict extreme suffering.

The report from the physicians’ group does not prove its case beyond doubt — how could it when so much is still hidden? — but it rightly calls on the White House and Congress to investigate the potentially illegal human experimentation and whether those who authorized or conducted it should be punished. Those are just two of the many unresolved issues from the Bush administration that President Obama and Congressional leaders have swept under the carpet.

    Doctors Who Aid Torture, NYT, 7.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/opinion/08tue1.html

C.I.A. Document

Details Destruction of Tapes

April 15, 2010
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON — Porter J. Goss, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, in 2005 approved of the decision by one of his top aides to destroy dozens of videotapes documenting the brutal interrogation of two detainees, according to an internal C.I.A. document released Thursday.

Shortly after the tapes were destroyed at the order of Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the head of the C.I.A.’s clandestine service, Mr. Goss told Mr. Rodriguez that he “agreed” with the decision, according to the document. He even joked after Mr. Rodriguez offered to “take the heat” for destroying the tapes.

“PG laughed and said that actually, it would be he, PG, who would take the heat,” according to one document, an internal C.I.A. e-mail message.

According to current and former intelligence officials, Mr. Goss did not approve the destruction before it happened, and was displeased that Mr. Rodriguez did not consult him or the C.I.A.’s top lawyer before giving the order for the tapes to be destroyed.

It was previously known that Mr. Goss had been told by his aides in November 2005 that the tapes had been destroyed. But a number of documents released Thursday provide the most detailed glimpse yet of the deliberations inside the C.I.A. surrounding the destroyed tapes, and of the concern among officials at the spy agency that the decision might put the C.I.A. in legal jeopardy.

The documents detailing those deliberations, including two e-mail messages from a C.I.A. official whose name has been excised, were released as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The e-mail messages also reveal that top White House officials were angry that the C.I.A. had not notified them before the tapes were destroyed. The e-mail messages mention a conversation between Harriet E. Miers, the White House counsel, and John A. Rizzo, the C.I.A.’s top lawyer, in which Ms. Miers was “livid” about being told after the fact.

“Rizzo is clearly upset, because he was on the hook to notify Harriet Miers of the status of the tapes because it was she who had asked to be advised before any action was taken,” according to one of the e-mail messages.

In 2002, C.I.A. operatives in Thailand videotaped the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, two Qaeda suspects whom the C.I.A. was holding in secret in that country. More than a hundred tapes were made, and many were kept in a safe in the C.I.A. station in Bangkok. According to former C.I.A. officials, Mr. Rodriguez ordered the tapes destroyed in November 2005 because he feared that if the tapes were to become public it would put undercover C.I.A. officers in legal and physical jeopardy.

According to one of the e-mail messages released Thursday, Mr. Rodriguez told Mr. Goss that the tapes, taken out of context, would make the C.I.A. “look terrible; it would be devastating to us.”

The destruction of the tapes is the subject of a Justice Department criminal investigation that has stretched on for more than two years. The investigation is led by John Durham, a federal prosecutor in Connecticut.

Mr. Goss and other former C.I.A. officers have testified before a grand jury hearing evidence as part of the investigation, former intelligence officials said.

A spokesman for Mr. Goss declined to comment on Thursday evening.

Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, said: “For more than two years, a Department of Justice prosecutor has been looking into the matter. The agency has cooperated fully with that inquiry and will, of course, continue to do so. We hope that this issue is resolved soon.”

In a telephone interview on Thursday, Mr. Rizzo said he was not at the meeting recounted in the e-mail messages, but said “Porter never once indicated to me that he agreed with the decision.”

“I thought he was as upset as I was for not being told,” he said.

Mr. Rizzo said that White House officials agreed with him that destroying the tapes was a bad idea, and that they expected to be informed before the C.I.A. made any decisions about their fate.

“They said don’t do anything without telling them in advance,” he said.

One American official familiar with the matter cautioned that the e-mail messages were merely the account of one unnamed C.I.A. official, not the results of a formal investigation.

“It’s a little risky to draw cosmic conclusions from something like that,” he said.

The destruction of the interrogation tapes was first revealed by The New York Times in December 2007.

    C.I.A. Document Details Destruction of Tapes, NYT, 15.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/us/16tapes.html

C.I.A. Deaths Prompt Surge

in U.S. Drone Strikes

January 23, 2010
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON — Since the suicide bombing that took the lives of seven Americans in Afghanistan on Dec. 30, the Central Intelligence Agency has struck back against militants in Pakistan with the most intensive series of missile strikes from drone aircraft since the covert program began.

Beginning the day after the attack on a C.I.A. base in Khost, Afghanistan, the agency has carried out 11 strikes that have killed about 90 people suspected of being militants, according to Pakistani news reports, which make almost no mention of civilian casualties. The assault has included strikes on a mud fortress in North Waziristan on Jan. 6 that killed 17 people and a volley of missiles on a compound in South Waziristan last Sunday that killed at least 20.

“For the C.I.A., there is certainly an element of wanting to show that they can hit back,” said Bill Roggio, editor of The Long War Journal, an online publication that tracks the C.I.A.’s drone campaign. Mr. Roggio, as well as Pakistani and American intelligence officials, said many of the recent strikes had focused on the Pakistani Taliban and its leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, who claimed responsibility for the Khost bombing.

The Khost attack cost the agency dearly, taking the lives of the most experienced analysts of Al Qaeda whose intelligence helped guide the drone attacks. Yet the agency has responded by redoubling its assault. Drone strikes have come roughly every other day this month, up from about once a week last year and the most furious pace since the drone campaign began in earnest in the summer of 2008.

Pakistan’s announcement on Thursday that its army would delay any new offensives against militants in North Waziristan for 6 to 12 months is likely to increase American reliance on the drone strikes, administration and counterterrorism officials said. By next year, the C.I.A. is expected to more than double its fleet of the latest Reaper aircraft — bigger, faster and more heavily armed than the older Predators — to 14 from 6, an Obama administration official said.

Even before the Khost attack, White House officials had made it clear to Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence, and Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, that they expected significant results from the drone strikes in reducing the threat from Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban, according to an administration official and a former senior C.I.A. official with close ties to the White House.

These concerns only heightened after the attempted Dec. 25 bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner. While that plot involved a Nigerian man sent by a Qaeda offshoot in Yemen, intelligence officials say they believe that Al Qaeda’s top leaders in Pakistan have called on affiliates to carry out attacks against the West. “There’s huge pressure from the White House on Blair and Panetta,” said the former C.I.A. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern about angering the White House. “The feeling is, the clock is ticking.”

After the Khost bombing, intelligence officials vowed that they would retaliate. One angry senior American intelligence official said the C.I.A. would “avenge” the Khost attack. “Some very bad people will eventually have a very bad day,” the official said at the time, speaking on the condition he not be identified describing a classified program.

Today, officials deny that vengeance is driving the increased attacks, though one called the drone strikes “the purest form of self-defense.”

Officials point to other factors. For one, Pakistan recently dropped restrictions on the drone program it had requested last fall to accompany a ground offensive against militants in South Waziristan. And tips on the whereabouts of extremists ebb and flow unpredictably.

A C.I.A. spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, declined to comment on the drone strikes. But he said, “The agency’s counterterrorism operations — lawful, aggressive, precise and effective — continue without pause.”

The strikes, carried out from a secret base in Pakistan and controlled by satellite link from C.I.A. headquarters in Virginia, have been expanded by President Obama and praised by both parties in Congress as a potent weapon against terrorism that puts no American lives at risk. That calculation must be revised in light of the Khost bombing, which revealed the critical presence of C.I.A. officers in dangerous territory to direct the strikes.

Some legal scholars have questioned the legitimacy under international law of killings by a civilian agency in a country where the United States is not officially at war. This month, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act for government documents revealing procedures for approving targets and legal justifications for the killings.

Critics have contended that collateral civilian deaths are too high a price to pay. Pakistani officials have periodically denounced the strikes as a violation of their nation’s sovereignty, even as they have provided a launching base for the drones.

The increase in drone attacks has caused panic among rank-and-file militants, particularly in North Waziristan, where some now avoid using private vehicles, according to Pakistani intelligence and security officials. Fewer foreign extremists are now in Miram Shah, North Waziristan’s capital, which was previously awash with them, said local tribesmen and security officials.

Despite the consensus in Washington behind the drone program, some experts are dissenters. John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School who frequently advises the military, said, “The more the drone campaign works, the more it fails — as increased attacks only make the Pakistanis angrier at the collateral damage and sustained violation of their sovereignty.”

If the United States expands the drone strikes beyond the lawless tribal areas to neighboring Baluchistan, as is under discussion, the backlash “might even spark a social revolution in Pakistan,” Mr. Arquilla said.

So far the reaction in Pakistan to the increased drone strikes has been muted. Last week, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani of Pakistan told Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration’s senior diplomat for Afghanistan and Pakistan, that the drones undermined the larger war effort. But the issue was not at the top of the agenda as it was a year ago.

Hasan Askari Rizvi, a military analyst in Lahore, said public opposition had been declining because the campaign was viewed as a success. Yet one Pakistani general, who supports the drone strikes as a tactic for keeping militants off balance, questioned the long-term impact.

“Has the situation stabilized in the past two years?” asked the general, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Are the tribal areas more stable?” Yes, he said, Baitullah Mehsud, founder of the Pakistani Taliban, was killed by a missile last August. “But he’s been replaced and the number of fighters is increasing,” the general said.

Sabrina Tavernise contributed reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan, and Ismail Khan from Peshawar.

    C.I.A. Deaths Prompt Surge in U.S. Drone Strikes, NYT, 23.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/23/world/asia/23drone.html

Op-Ed Contributor

The Spies Who Got Left in the Cold

January 10, 2010
The New York Times
By ROBERT GRENIER

Arlington, Va.

AS I reflect on disturbing events of recent weeks — the massacre of seven C.I.A. officers in Khost, Afghanistan, and the near bombing of Northwest Flight 253 on its way to Detroit — I can see in my mind’s eye a young man. He is Middle Eastern, with a thin, mustachioed face and pallid skin, and he stands nervously in the middle of a very public square, unnoticed amid a swirling crowd. Glancing furtively at his watch, he begins to walk, as he was instructed, along a prescribed route.

Another young man, an American who is a C.I.A. case officer, has already circled the square, shielded by the passers-by. He is alert to anything out of place, to someone loitering near a motorcycle, to a group of men sitting aimlessly in a car, to anyone who may be paying attention to his source. He is dressed to look like any other dark-haired male of no particular account in this dusty and obscure third-world city in the 1980s. Under the officer’s sweater is a crude bulletproof vest, giving him the barrel-chested look of a wrestler. The vest is of limited protection, but a partial insurance against faults of judgment.

The case officer begins to follow his source at a discreet distance. He knows the young man well, or believes he does. His assessment, upon which his life may depend, is that the source, though a member of a terrorist organization and willing to put his life at risk to meet an American spy, is a physical coward. Personal loyalty is important to him, as is his relationship with the American, from which he hopes to benefit.

Circumstances can change, however, and with them, motivations. In a world of fear and desperation, today’s friend can become tomorrow’s deadly enemy. The case officer is confident that while the source could perhaps find the opportunity to shoot him, he lacks the courage ever to do it himself. While this lack of fortitude may be a blessing, it could easily lead him, if discovered and placed under pressure, to guide others to their American target, to do what he himself could not.

Satisfied at length that no one is watching the source, the case officer suddenly approaches him from behind, grabs him by the elbow and pulls him abruptly down a cobblestone alley, in a direction the source could not have anticipated.

In this case, the officer’s faith is rewarded. The Middle Easterner becomes a valuable asset. But the case officer is not always so fortunate. A year later, in a different city, he has just inherited a new source. Working against the government of a state sponsor of terrorism, the source is what is referred to in the business as a “principal agent,” running his own network of subordinate spies. With the case officer’s encouragement, the principal agent has managed to lure a potential subagent — a childhood friend he considers closer than a brother — out from the police state where he lives. They hold a series of meetings during which the principal agent vets his friend, assesses him and formally recruits him into the network, all under the watchful guidance of the case officer.

As I look back at that young case officer poised at that moment in time, I wish I could speak with him now. I wish I could remind him that his own confidence, his ambition and his desire for success are in fact his worst enemies.

Some of the story concerning that principal agent we will never know. We will never know precisely why one day, in setting up another meeting with his old friend, he ignored his training. He had been told — hadn’t he? — that he must never allow himself to fall into a pattern, that he must never be predictable. And his case officer, in spite of endless soul-searching, would never know whether any of the myriad things he might have done differently would have saved a brave man whom he had sworn to protect.

What we do know is that one evening, the principal agent and his boyhood pal, now his betrayer, had dinner at a shabby seaside restaurant; that they sat at the same table they had occupied the night before; that a group of four men in a car drove slowly around the block twice; that two of the men entered the restaurant and strolled over in front of the principal agent’s table; that each then emptied his pistol into the agent’s chest.


•

In the wake of President Obama’s speech on intelligence last week, there is much soul-searching going on, at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley and elsewhere, about what happened in Khost on Dec. 30. We are told that a Jordanian-born informant betrayed his spymasters and ignited a suicide bomb at a military base, killing those seven C.I.A. employees and wounding at least six more in the greatest blow to American intelligence in two decades. It comes as a cold slap in the face, but one that implicates us all. For these men and women, like the uniformed troops they serve alongside, have assumed great risks, and they have assumed them to keep the rest of us safe at home.

As the wildly divergent news accounts attest, none of us on the outside knows what really happened. But this hasn’t stopped the armchair geniuses who dispense grave platitudes on the enormity of the mistakes made, or the “former officials” who preen for reporters, spouting revelations regarding international intelligence relationships that, if true, are best not spoken of at all.

There may well have been some element of human error or incaution. Young operatives might have allowed their desire to strike a blow against America’s enemies to override their professional caution. (As perhaps I did myself so many years ago.) Or, perhaps, having weighed the risks and gains of the alternatives, the officers simply came up short. In the wilderness of mirrors that defines human intelligence in counterterrorism, the threat of disaster is an inescapable presence.

But for the grace of God, my colleagues and I could have come up similarly short on any number of occasions in Pakistan and Afghanistan during the run-up to 9/11 and the resulting American-led invasion. Brave young men and women met in wild and obscure places with dubious characters; had they not done so, we would not have had the human information network that was vital in routing Al Qaeda and the Taliban so quickly in 2001. Some flew on helicopters deep into Taliban-controlled areas to meet with tribal leaders whom we felt we could trust, but whose followers might have had the means and motivation to murder my colleagues. We fully expected to lose many of our people in those days. That our losses were light in the end was a testament to their courage, their professionalism and, yes, their luck.

The importance of the human intelligence work done by officers like those we lost at Khost is only increasing over time. The growing sophistication of our enemies, as they react to the grievous losses they have suffered, makes us all the more reliant on human spies.

To outsiders, the counterterrorism struggle along the Pakistani-Afghan border can seem antiseptic — a war of drones, of terrorists who simply disappear in a puff of smoke. But make no mistake: the intelligence-led struggle fought in our name is, at its core, every bit as gritty and as visceral as conventional combat. But in this war, you come to know your enemies as well as your friends, and the battlefield encompasses the full scope of human character.

Trainees who aspire to join the National Clandestine Service, the undercover arm of the C.I.A., get careful instruction. They are instilled with a proper regard for their mission, for the laws they must follow, for the sacred obligation to sources, and for their duty to one another. Much stress is placed on loyalty. Loyalty can take many forms, but when all is said and done, loyalty is essentially tribal. That is as true for us as it is for any Afghan. C.I.A. officers undertake risks not for any ideology, but to protect Americans from those who would want only kill them. At a time when calamity is a poignant reminder of the loyalty displayed by C.I.A. officers toward us, we might reflect on what we owe them in return.

Yet over the past two weeks, we have watched the unedifying spectacle of politicians and bureaucrats, mired in a Washington environment defined by political fear, posturing shamelessly over the would-be airline bomber. A wealthy nation that refuses to invest sufficiently in available technology, or to put up with travel delays necessary to see whether passengers are carrying explosives onto airplanes, chooses instead to excoriate the intelligence community for failing to see unerringly into the minds and hearts of men.

Rather than admit to the hard fact that we must always rely on someone’s subjective assessment of tolerable risk, politicians are vilifying those who put together our terrorism watch lists, who are simply following threat protocols. Meanwhile, intelligence analysts who are charged with making subjective judgments as to which of the hundreds of thousands of possible terrorists lurking in their databases merit their focused scrutiny to “connect the dots” are being accused of dereliction for having underestimated the threat from a single African college student.

Sacrificing intelligence operatives out of political expediency is a bipartisan sport. Officials in the George W. Bush administration did not hesitate to blame the spies when it suited them — as though the decision to invade Iraq really depended on intelligence — and the Obama administration is proving, if anything, worse. Last spring’s decision to release secret Justice Department memos on the interrogations of suspected terrorists was a blatantly partisan act. It was designed to win political advantage by holding intelligence officers — whose offense was to follow faithfully their lawful orders — up to opprobrium and scorn. Members of Congress who had enthusiastically encouraged aggressive interrogations in the wake of 9/11 suddenly suffered amnesia when the political zeitgeist shifted.

This is a curious way to reward those who risk everything to defend us. How, in the face of such betrayal, can we expect to bring new generations into the intelligence ranks? It is possible to reward loyalty with loyalty while still insisting on the highest standards of professionalism from our intelligence officers. Indeed, we can better reinforce excellence in intelligence when we judge it with honesty, realism and a sense of proportion. Politicians will behave dishonorably so long as it benefits them. It is up to the rest of us to tell them, “Enough.”

 

Robert Grenier, who spent 27 years with the C.I.A.’s National Clandestine Service, is a business consultant.

    The Spies Who Got Left in the Cold, NYT, 10.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/opinion/10grenier.html

Bomber Who Killed C.I.A. Officers

Appears in Video

January 10, 2010
The New York Times
By STEPHEN FARRELL

AMMAN, Jordan — The Jordanian suicide bomber who killed seven Central Intelligence Agency operatives in Afghanistan last month appeared in a video early Saturday, saying the attack was carried out in revenge for the 2009 killing of the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud.

Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, wearing green camouflage fatigues and carrying a weapon in his lap, appeared in a video on Al Jazeera satellite television denouncing his “enemies,” Jordan and America. Mr. Balawi's father, Khaled, confirmed that the man in the video was his son.

“This is a letter to the enemies of the nation,” the heavily-bearded Mr. Balawi said, referring to the Islamic nation, or ummah. “To the Jordanian intelligence and the American Central Intelligence Agency.” He sat alongside another man in front of a black banner bearing the Islamic credo: “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his Prophet.”

Mr. Balawi, a doctor who worked in a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan, blew himself up on Dec. 30 at a C.I.A. base in Khost, in eastern Afghanistan. He was a double agent who was taken onto the base in Afghanistan because the C.I.A. hoped he might be able to deliver top members of Al Qaeda’s network, according to Western government officials.

Al Jazeera’s Web site said that the video was released to the news organization on Saturday, and that it showed Mr. Balawi “shooting a gun as he describes how the attack would target U.S. and Jordanian intelligence agents.”

In the video, Mr. Balawi said, “We will never forget the blood of our Emir Baitullah Mehsud, God’s mercy upon him.”

The Pakistani television channel Aaj also broadcast a video, and identified the second man seen in it as Hakimullah Mehsud, the new leader of the Taliban in Pakistan.

An eighth person killed in Mr. Balawi’s attack was a Jordanian intelligence officer and distant relative of King Abdullah II of Jordan named Capt. Sharif Ali bin Zeid. He is thought to have been Mr. Balawi’s Jordanian handler who was bringing Mr. Balawi to a meeting of American intelligence officials at the base, Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost, near the Pakistani border.

Before he blew himself up, the bomber had been a popular jihadi writer on Internet Web sites and forums, under the pen name Abu Dujana al-Khorasani. In a statement consistent with comments by Mr. Balawi’s widow, Defne Bayrak, a Turkish journalist living in Istanbul, the man on the video said he would never work for the United States.

“The jihadist who follows God’s way does not put his religion up for auction. And the Jihadist who follows God does not sell his religion, even if they put the sun to his right side and the moon to his left side,” he said.

Of Baitullah Mehsud, who was killed in August 2009 by a C.I.A. drone airstrike, he said, “We shall take revenge for him in America and outside America. He is a trust on behalf of all refugees, who were sheltered by him.

“We will not forget how Emir Baitullah Mehsud used to kiss the hands of the refugees, he used to kiss the hands of the refugees, and this shows how much love he had in his heart for them.”

 

Reem Makhoul contributed reporting from Amman and Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan.

    Bomber Who Killed C.I.A. Officers Appears in Video, NYT, 10.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/world/middleeast/10balawi.html

Suicide Bombing

Puts a Rare Face on C.I.A.’s Work

January 7, 2010
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON — In the fall of 2001, as an anguished nation came to grips with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a slender, soft-spoken economics major named Elizabeth Hanson set out to write her senior thesis at Colby College in Maine. Her question was a timely one: How do the world’s three major faith traditions apply economic principles?

Ms. Hanson’s report, “Faithless Heathens: Scriptural Economics of Judaism, Christianity and Islam,” carried a title far more provocative than its contents, said the professor who advised her. But it may have given a hint of her career to come, as an officer for the Central Intelligence Agency specializing in hunting down Islamic extremists.

That career was cut short last week: Ms. Hanson was one of seven Americans killed in a suicide bombing at a C.I.A. base in the remote mountains of Afghanistan.

In the days since the attack, details of the lives of the victims — five men and two women, including two C.I.A. contractors from the firm formerly known as Blackwater — have begun to trickle out, despite the secretive nature of their work. What emerges is a rare public glimpse of a closed society, a peek into one sliver of the spy agency as it operates more than eight years after the C.I.A. was pushed to the front lines of war.

Their deaths were a significant blow to the agency, crippling a team responsible for collecting information about militant networks in Afghanistan and Pakistan and plotting missions to kill the networks’ top leaders. And in one sign of how the once male-dominated bastion of the C.I.A. has changed in recent years, the suicide bombing revealed that a woman had been in charge of the base that was attacked, Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost Province.

On Wednesday, the operational leader of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan issued a statement praising the work of the suicide bomber, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, and said that the Khost bombing, which also killed a Jordanian intelligence operative, was revenge for the killings of a number of top militant leaders in C.I.A. drone attacks.

“He detonated his fine, astonishing and well-designed explosive device, which was unseen by the eyes of those who do not believe in the hereafter,” said the statement from the Qaeda leader, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, which was translated by the SITE Intelligence Group.

Those who died came from all corners of the United States but were thrown together in one of the most dangerous parts of the world. Several had military backgrounds. One of the fallen C.I.A. employees, a security officer named Scott Roberson, had worked undercover as a narcotics detective in the Atlanta Police Department, according to an obituary, and spent time in Kosovo for the United Nations. Postings on an online memorial site describe a hard-charging motorcyclist with a remarkable recall of episodes of “The Benny Hill Show.”

Another, Harold Brown Jr., was a former Army reservist and father of three who had traveled home from Afghanistan briefly in July to help his family move into a new home in the Northern Virginia suburbs.

Mr. Brown’s mother, Barbara, said in an interview that her son — she had believed he worked for the State Department — had intended to spend a year in Afghanistan, returning home in April. He did not relish the work, she said, and talked little about it.

“The people there just want to live their lives. They’re normal people,” she recalled him saying, adding that he had told her parts of Afghanistan were “just like back in biblical times.”

The base chief, an agency veteran, had traveled to Afghanistan last year as part of the C.I.A.’s effort to augment its ranks in the war zone. After consulting with the C.I.A., The New York Times is withholding some identifying information about the woman. The agency declined to comment about the identities of any of the employees. Some of the names were disclosed by family members. Ms. Hanson’s name was first reported in The Daily Beast, an online magazine.

In a telephone interview, her father, Duane Hanson Jr., said an agency official called several days ago to let him know that his daughter, who he said would have turned 31 next month, had been killed. He knew little of her work, other than that she had been in Afghanistan. “I begged her not to go,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Do you know how dangerous that is? That’s for soldiers.’ ”

The other woman killed, the chief of the Khost base, was, before the Sept. 11 attacks, part of a small cadre of counterterrorism officers focused on the growth of Al Qaeda and charged with finding Osama bin Laden.

Working from a small office near C.I.A. headquarters, the group, known inside the agency as Alec Station, became increasingly alarmed in the summer of 2001 that a major strike was coming. One former officer recalls that the woman had a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of Al Qaeda’s top leadership and was so familiar with the different permutations of the leaders’ names that she could take fragments of intelligence and build them into a mosaic of Al Qaeda’s operations.

“She was one of the first people in the agency to tackle Al Qaeda in a serious way,” said the former officer, who, like some others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because the victims’ identities remain classified.

Two of the dead, Jeremy Wise, 35, a former member of the Navy Seals from Virginia Beach, Va., and Dane Clark Paresi, 46, of Dupont, Wash., were security officers for Xe Services, the firm formerly known as Blackwater.

The company did not respond to a request for comment about the deaths, but they have been widely reported in local newspapers. The Jeremy Wise Memorial on Facebook had 3,189 fans on Tuesday, filled with recollections of Mr. Wise’s childhood as the son of a doctor in Arkansas; his parents currently live in Hope, Bill Clinton’s hometown.

“RIP, Jeremy Wise, American hero,” one wrote.

The suicide bomber has been identified as a Jordanian double agent who was taken onto the base to meet with American officials who thought he was an informant.

In a message to the C.I.A. work force after the attack, President Obama told agency employees that “your triumphs and even your names may be unknown to your fellow Americans.” And indeed, some relatives and friends of the dead did not seem to know of their agency connections.

Ms. Hanson’s economics professor, Michael Donihue, said he was shocked to discover her career path. At Colby, from which she graduated in 2002, she paired her economics major with a minor in Russian language and literature.

“She was a thoughtful person; she had an intellectual curiosity that I really liked,” Professor Donihue said.

Officials in Afghanistan and Washington said the C.I.A. group in Khost had been particularly aggressive in recent months against the Haqqani network, a militant group that has claimed responsibility for dozens of American deaths in Afghanistan. One NATO official in Afghanistan spoke in stark terms about the attack, saying it had “effectively shut down a key station.”

“These were not people who wrote things down in the computer or in notebooks. It was all in their heads,” he said. The C.I.A. is “pulling in new people from all over the world, but how long will it take to rebuild the networks, to get up to speed? Lots of it is irrecoverable. Lots of it.”

James Risen and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Alissa J. Rubin from Kabul, Afghanistan. Kitty Bennett contributed research.

    Suicide Bombing Puts a Rare Face on C.I.A.’s Work, NYT, 7.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/world/asia/07intel.html

C.I.A. Takes On

Bigger and Riskier Role on Front Lines

January 1, 2010
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON — The deaths of seven Central Intelligence Agency operatives at a remote base in the mountains of Afghanistan are a pointed example of the civilian spy agency’s transformation in recent years into a paramilitary organization at the vanguard of America’s far-flung wars.

Even as the C.I.A. expands its role in Afghanistan, it is also playing a greater role in quasi-military operations elsewhere, using drone aircraft to launch a steady barrage of missile strikes in Pakistan and sending more operatives to Yemen to assist local officials in their attempts to roll back Al Qaeda’s momentum in that country.

The C.I.A. operatives stationed at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost Province, where Wednesday’s suicide bombing occurred, were responsible for collecting information about militant networks in Afghanistan and Pakistan and plotting missions to kill the networks’ top leaders. In recent months, American officials said, C.I.A. officers at the base had begun an aggressive campaign against a radical group run by Sirajuddin Haqqani, which has claimed responsibility for the deaths of dozens of American troops.

Over the past year, the C.I.A. has built up an archipelago of firebases in southern and eastern Afghanistan, moving agency operatives out of the embassy in Kabul and closer to their targets.

But the push to the front lines carries great risk.

In 1983 in Beirut, it took a car bomb loaded with 2,000 pounds of explosives to kill eight C.I.A. officers stationed at the heavily fortified American Embassy in the city. In Khost on Wednesday, all it took was one man bent on martyrdom to slip into a remote base and inflict a similar toll on the spy agency’s relatively small work force.

Among those killed, officials said, was the chief of the Khost base, who was a mother of three and a veteran of the agency’s clandestine branch. Besides the seven C.I.A. operatives who died, the blast also wounded six agency employees, according to a C.I.A. statement.

Current and former intelligence officials said Thursday that early evidence indicated that the bomber, in Afghan military fatigues, might have been taken onto the base as a possible informant and might not have been subjected to rigorous screening. But details about the episode remained murky, and a NATO official said the bomber had managed to elude security and reach an area near the base’s gym.

C.I.A. personnel regularly take foreign agents onto the base before sending them on intelligence collection missions in eastern Afghanistan and across the border into Pakistan, said one Pentagon consultant who works closely with the C.I.A. in Afghanistan.

“You must to some degree make yourself known to people you don’t trust,” said one American intelligence official who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke anonymously to discuss classified information.

The bomber appears to have worn an explosives-laden suicide vest under an Afghan National Army uniform, two NATO officials said Thursday. The attack happened close to dusk, when some people at the base were relaxing before dinner.

In a statement to the C.I.A.’s work force, President Obama said that the spy agency had been “tested as never before,” and that C.I.A. operatives had “served on the front lines in directly confronting the dangers of the 21st century.”

Forward Operating Base Chapman sits in an isolated spot several miles from the town of Khost, but not far from Camp Salerno, a larger base used by Special Operations troops.

American officials said that the C.I.A. base had been a focal point for counterterrorism operations against the Haqqani network, a particularly lethal militant group that operates on both sides of the Afghan border.

“Those guys have recently been on a big Haqqani binge,” said the Pentagon consultant. “I would be really shocked if the bombing on Wednesday wasn’t some kind of retaliation.”

There was an air of defiance among intelligence officials on the day after the attack, and some spoke of their fallen comrades using military language.

“There is no pullout,” the American intelligence official said. “There is no withdrawal or anything like that planned.”

The C.I.A. has always had a paramilitary branch known as the Special Activities Division, which secretly engaged in the kinds of operations more routinely carried out by Special Operations troops. But the branch was a small — and seldom used — part of its operations.

That changed after Sept. 11, 2001, when President George W. Bush gave the agency expanded authority to capture or kill Qaeda operatives around the world. Since then, Washington has relied much more on the Special Activities Division because battling suspected terrorists does not involve fighting other armies. Rather, it involves secretly moving in and out of countries like Pakistan and Somalia where the American military is not legally allowed to operate.

The fact that the agency is in effect running a war in Pakistan is the culmination of one of the most significant shifts in the C.I.A.’s history. But the agency has at times struggled with this new role. It established a network of secret overseas jails where terrorist suspects were subjected to brutal interrogation techniques, and it set up an assassination program that at one point was outsourced to employees of a private security company, then known as Blackwater USA.

Some longtime agency officers bristled at what they saw as the militarization of the C.I.A., worrying that it was straying too far from its historical missions of espionage and intelligence analysis.

When he took office in January, President Obama scaled back the C.I.A.’s counterterrorism mission, but only to a point. He ordered that C.I.A. prisons be shut and that C.I.A officers no longer play a role in interrogating suspects accused of terrorist acts.

At the same time, the administration has accelerated the C.I.A.’s drone campaign, using Predator and Reaper aircraft to launch missiles and rockets against militants in Pakistan.

In early 2009, the White House approved a C.I.A. plan to expand the drone operations in Pakistan into Baluchistan, where top leaders of Afghanistan’s Taliban militia are thought to be hiding. The agency has also recently begun sending more operatives into Pakistan to, among other things, gather target intelligence for the drone program.

 

Alissa J. Rubin contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.

    C.I.A. Takes On Bigger and Riskier Role on Front Lines, NYT, 1.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/world/asia/01khost.html