December
8, 2011
The New York Times
By RICK GLADSTONE
Seizing
on its capture of a downed C.I.A. stealth drone as an intelligence and
propaganda windfall, Iran displayed the first images of the aircraft on state
television Thursday and lodged an official diplomatic protest over its incursion
into Iranian airspace.
The 2.5-minute video clip of the remote-control surveillance aircraft was the
first visual proof to emerge that Iran had possession of the drone since Sunday,
when Iran claimed that its military downed the aircraft. American officials have
since confirmed that controllers of the aircraft, based in neighboring
Afghanistan, had lost contact with it.
The drone, which appeared to be in good condition, was shown displayed on a
platform, with photos of Iran’s revolutionary ayatollahs on the wall behind it
and a desecrated version of the American flag, with what appeared to be skulls
instead of stars, underneath its left wing.
Broadcast of the footage coincided with Iran’s announcement that it had formally
protested what it called the violation of Iranian airspace by the spy drone.
Because Iran and the United States have no direct diplomatic relations, Iran
made its complaint by summoning the ambassador from Switzerland, which manages
American interests in Iran.
American officials have identified the missing drone as an RQ-170 Sentinel, an
unarmed bat-winged aircraft used by the C.I.A. that can linger undetected for
hours at 50,000 feet, far higher than most aircraft can fly, with cameras and
other sensor equipment to monitor what is on the ground below. An RQ-170 was
used to gather intelligence for the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in a
Pakistan safe house earlier this year.
The loss of an RQ-170 in Iran is a potentially significant intelligence blow for
the United States, which has been stepping up efforts to monitor suspected
nuclear sites there. In early November, a United Nations report said that Iran
may be actively working on a nuclear weapon and a missile delivery system for
it. Iran insists its nuclear program is peacefu; it denounced the U.N. report as
a "fabrication" and a pretext for military intervention by the United States and
its allies.
Iran’s leaders, who have been increasingly isolated diplomatically over the
nuclear issue, point to the aircraft as evidence of American hostile intentions
toward Iran.
On state television, the video clip was narrated by a voice saying that Iran’s
Revolutionary Guard Corps and army had “collaborated to shoot down the plane.”
The unidentified narrator gave the drone’s dimensions as 26 meters (about 85
feet) from wingtip to wingtip, 4.5 meters (15 feet) from nose to tail and about
one meter (3 feet) in thickness. The narrator also said the aircraft had
“electronic surveillance systems and various radars” and was “a very advanced
piece of technology.”
In what appeared to be an attempt to explain the aircraft’s undamaged
appearance, a Revolutionary Guard Corps commander, identified as Amir Ali
Hajizadeh, says in the video that the drone “was detected by Iranian radars as
soon as it entered Iranian airspace and was brought down by Iran’s military
systems with the minimum damage possible.”
Nonetheless, it remains unclear how the American controllers of the aircraft
lost contact with it and how it ended up, seemingly intact, on the ground in
Iran. American officials have not specified where it was lost; Iran’s state-run
press has said that it landed near the town of Kashmar, about 140 miles from the
Afghanistan border.
RQ-170 flights were among the most secret of the C.I.A.'s intelligence gathering
efforts in Iran, according to American experts and officials who have been
briefed about them.
Artin
Afkhami contributed reporting from Boston, and Scott Shane from Washington.
an
Arms Dealer Who Aided U.S. Intelligence, Dies at 82
October
5, 2011
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE
Sarkis G.
Soghanalian, a larger-than-life arms dealer who provided weapons to Saddam
Hussein and many other dictators and rebels, worked closely with American
intelligence and later told his story on television, died early Wednesday in
Hialeah, Fla. He was 82.
The cause was heart failure suffered at Hialeah Hospital, his son, Garo
Soghanalian, said. He lived in Miami.
In a career that might have provided material for a shelf of thrillers, Mr.
Soghanalian (pronounced SAHG-ah-NAY-lee-an) became a major arms supplier to Mr.
Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, operated a fleet of cargo planes
around the world and owned homes in a dozen countries.
In 1981, he pleaded guilty to fraud in the sale of .50-caliber machine guns to
Mauritania. But a judge granted him probation, saying the case “involved
international affairs conducted by the State Department.”
In 1993, he was sentenced to six and a half years in prison for smuggling 103
helicopters to Iraq in violation of United Nations sanctions. But he managed to
have his sentence reduced to two years after informing American officials of a
place in Lebanon where high-quality counterfeit $100 bills were being printed.
Mr. Soghanalian was charged with wire fraud a few years later. But he was
released after being held for 10 months in order to travel to Jordan to assist
in another investigation, of the former Peruvian intelligence chief Vladimiro
Montesinos. In return for his help, a judge sentenced him to the time he had
already served.
He worked with the Central Intelligence Agency off and on for years; after a
falling out with that agency, he cooperated with the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, drawing on a huge stock of information about the dark corners of
the global weapons trade, said Lowell Bergman, professor of investigative
reporting at the University of California, Berkeley, and an acquaintance of his
for more than 30 years.
“He’s one of those characters who emerged out of the cold war and played a
critical role in clandestine activities on behalf of the United States, while
providing deniability,” said Mr. Bergman, a reporter who produced reports about
Mr. Soghanalian for ABC, the PBS program “Frontline” and “60 Minutes” on CBS.
Mr. Bergman recalled sitting in Mr. Soghanalian’s Geneva office for a day in
1985, watching as a parade of American officials, Israelis, Palestinians and
representatives of Lebanon’s Amal militia visited Mr. Soghanalian.
After he settled in Florida in the 1990s, United States Customs officials would
occasionally raid his hangar at Miami International Airport, looking for
contraband, Mr. Bergman said.
“And then the case would go away,” he said, as Mr. Soghanalian called on friends
elsewhere in the government to come to his defense.
“He could be infuriating and totally self-absorbed,” said Mr. Bergman, who has
also reported for The New York Times. “What was always amazing was how much he
knew.”
An American official who worked with Mr. Soghanalian years ago confirmed his
work with both the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. He said he recalled sitting with Mr.
Soghanalian and listening as he called United States senators, members of
Jordan’s royal family and leaders of Hezbollah, the Lebanese-based militant
group that the United States regards as a terrorist organization.
“They’d all take his calls,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of
anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about his former contact.
“You’d find out he was telling you the truth, even if he was kind of gilding it
in his favor.”
Despite his long history of supplying weapons to brutal governments, the
official said, “he was able to do good things for the United States.”
Sarkis Garabet Soghanalian was born in Iskenderun, then part of Syria but now in
Turkey, on Feb. 6, 1929, into an Armenian family. After his father’s death, the
family moved to Beirut, where Sarkis quit school and went to work, his daughter,
Melo Hansen, said. He married Shirley Adams, a teacher at a school in Beirut, in
1958, and they moved to Binghamton, N.Y., where they lived for a decade before
returning to Lebanon. They were divorced in the 1970s.
His son said Mr. Soghanalian was fluent in English, French, Armenian, Turkish
and Arabic and “could make himself understood” in Spanish and Italian. “There’s
been enough said about ‘merchant of death’ and all that,” his son said. “But all
the way back to the ’60s and ’70s, his goal was to help the United States. There
was a deep-seated root of patriotism that often gets overlooked.”
Mr. Soghanalian was a citizen of Lebanon and never took American citizenship,
his son said. “He liked to be independent, and it gave the U.S. an element of
denial: ‘He’s not one of ours.’ ”
In addition to his son, who lives in Miami, and his daughter, who lives in Salt
Lake City, Mr. Soghanalian is survived by his sister, Anahis Hartz; his brother,
Zaven; three grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
Despite the wealth his arms sales produced, the end of the cold war cut off many
of his business contacts, his son said. “The world changed around him,” Mr.
Soghanalian said. By the time of his death, “he was broke.”
WASHINGTON
— Speaking hours after the world learned that a C.I.A. drone strike had killed
Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, President Obama could still not say the words “drone”
or “C.I.A.”
That’s classified.
Instead, in an appearance at a Virginia military base just before midday Friday,
the president said that Mr. Awlaki, the American cleric who had joined Al
Qaeda’s branch in Yemen, “was killed” and that this “significant milestone” was
“a tribute to our intelligence community.”
The president’s careful language was the latest reflection of a growing
phenomenon: information that is public but classified.
The older and larger drone program in Pakistan, for instance, is a centerpiece
of American foreign policy, discussed daily in the news media — but it cannot be
mentioned at a public Congressional hearing. The State Department cables
published by WikiLeaks can be found on the Web with a few mouse clicks and have
affected relations with dozens of countries — but American officials cannot
publicly discuss them.
Underlying these paradoxes is a problem that government officials, notably
including Mr. Obama, have acknowledged and complained of for years: the gross
overclassification of information.
The security agencies have become a mammoth secrets factory, staffed today by
4.2 million people who hold security clearances — a total disclosed for the
first time last month, and far higher than even the biggest previous estimates.
Their incentives are so lopsided in favor of secrecy that a new report proposes
a surprising remedy: cash prizes for government workers who challenge improper
classification.
The secrecy compulsion often merely makes the government look silly, as when
obvious facts were excised from recent memoirs by former intelligence officers.
But it can also hinder public debate of some of government’s most hotly
contested actions.
Long before Friday’s drone strike, officials say, lawyers at the Central
Intelligence Agency, the Justice Department and the White House painstakingly
considered the legal justification for what amounted to the execution of an
American citizen without trial. But even since the strike, officials have been
willing to give only a brief summary of the government’s reasoning, refusing to
make public the classified written opinion of the Justice Department’s Office of
Legal Counsel, the authoritative arbiter of the law.
Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, who has tracked
government classification policies for two decades, said such secrecy about a
disputed policy is “a kind of self-inflicted autism that cuts decision makers
off from the input they need, both from inside the government and outside.”
After last week’s strike, he added, “any justification for withholding the
O.L.C. memo went away.”
The same closed-mouth approach has long applied to the drone campaign in
Pakistan, which is old news but remains a top-secret covert action program. In
June, at David H. Petraeus’s Senate confirmation hearing to become C.I.A.
director, Senator Roy D. Blunt, Republican of Missouri, told Mr. Petraeus, the
retiring Army general: “I want to talk a little bit about drones for a minute
and the use of drones.”
There was a murmur of concern; C.I.A drones, though common knowledge, are
unmentionable by government officials in public. Mr. Petraeus deftly dodged the
issue by speaking of the military’s drones in Afghanistan, whose existence is
not classified.
Administration officials said the drones are an especially delicate subject
today because they are entangled with the United States’ complex relations with
the governments of Pakistan and Yemen. But the same cannot be said of the
Justice Department’s decade-old legal opinion justifying the National Security
Agency’s program of wiretapping without warrants.
Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian, asked for that opinion two years ago
under the Freedom of Information Act. In August, he finally got a few sentences
of the 21-page opinion, written by John C. Yoo of the Bush Justice Department.
The rest was blanked out and remains secret.
Nor is the secrecy limited to counterterrorism. Jeffrey Richelson, an author of
books on intelligence, asked the C.I.A. last year for any reports by its Center
on Climate Change and National Security, which had drawn criticism from
Republicans in Congress. The agency said last month that all such material “is
currently and properly classified and must be denied in its entirety.”
In a report on overclassification to be released on Wednesday, the Brennan
Center for Justice at New York University’s law school concludes that
unnecessary classification has jeopardized national security by hindering
information sharing inside the government, and corroded democratic government by
stifling debate.
The report finds that the thousands of officials who classify information err on
the side of secrecy, to play it safe or to avoid public scrutiny of policies.
Among the remedies the report proposes, in addition to $50 or $100 prizes for
successfully challenging a secrecy ruling, is requiring officials to explain in
writing why they are classifying a document and asking agency inspectors general
to perform spot audits and punish improper classification.
The Obama administration’s record on transparency is mixed; it has set a record
for prosecuting leaks of classified information to the news media but has also
moved to reverse the tide of secrets. In December 2009, Mr. Obama ordered
agencies to update their rules to avoid overclassification, and Mr. Aftergood
said there were glimmers of progress.
For instance, he said, the Defense Department has canceled some 82 outdated
“classification guides,” written instructions on what should be secret. That
turns out to be only 4 percent of the department’s classification guides, he
said, but the review is not over.
“It’s movement,” Mr. Aftergood said. “Instead of the perennial growth of the
classification system, it’s shrinkage. It’s a start.”
September
2, 2011
The New York Times
By ROD NORDLAND
TRIPOLI,
Libya — Documents found at the abandoned office of Libya’s former spymaster
appear to provide new details of the close relations the Central Intelligence
Agency shared with the Libyan intelligence service — most notably suggesting
that the Americans sent terrorism suspects at least eight times for questioning
in Libya despite that country’s reputation for torture.
Although it has been known that Western intelligence services began cooperating
with Libya after it abandoned its program to build unconventional weapons in
2004, the files left behind as Tripoli fell to rebels show that the cooperation
was much more extensive than generally known with both the C.I.A. and its
British equivalent, MI-6.
Some documents indicate that the British agency was even willing to trace phone
numbers for the Libyans, and another appears to be a proposed speech written by
the Americans for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi about renouncing unconventional
weapons.
The documents were discovered Friday by journalists and Human Rights Watch.
There were at least three binders of English-language documents, one marked
C.I.A. and the other two marked MI-6, among a larger stash of documents in
Arabic.
It was impossible to verify their authenticity, and none of them were written on
letterhead. But the binders included some documents that made specific reference
to the C.I.A., and their details seem consistent with what is known about the
transfer of terrorism suspects abroad for interrogation and with other agency
practices.
And although the scope of prisoner transfers to Libya has not been made public,
news media reports have sometimes mentioned it as one country that the United
States used as part of its much criticized rendition program for terrorism
suspects.
A C.I.A. spokeswoman, Jennifer Youngblood, declined to comment on Friday on the
documents. But she added: “It can’t come as a surprise that the Central
Intelligence Agency works with foreign governments to help protect our country
from terrorism and other deadly threats.”
The British Foreign Office said, “It is the longstanding policy of the
government not to comment on intelligence matters.”
While most of the renditions referred to in the documents appear to have been
C.I.A. operations, at least one was claimed to have been carried out by MI-6.
“The rendition program was all about handing over these significant figures
related to Al Qaeda so they could torture them and get the information they
wanted,” said Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director of Human Rights Watch, who
studied the documents in the intelligence headquarters in downtown Tripoli.
The documents cover 2002 to 2007, with many of them concentrated in late 2003
and 2004, when Moussa Koussa was head of the External Security Organization.
(Mr. Koussa was most recently Libya’s foreign minister.)
The speech that appears to have been drafted for Colonel Qaddafi was found in
the C.I.A. folder and appears to have been sent just before Christmas in 2003.
The one-page speech seems intended to depict the Libyan dictator in a positive
light. It concluded, using the revolutionary name for the Libyan government: “At
a time when the world is celebrating the birth of Jesus, and as a token of our
contributions towards a world full of peace, security, stability and compassion,
the Great Jamhariya presents its honest call for a W.M.D.-free zone in the
Middle East,” referring to weapons of mass destruction.
The flurry of communications about renditions are dated after Libya’s
renouncement of its weapons program. In several of the cases, the documents
explicitly talked about having a friendly country arrest a suspect, and then
suggested aircraft would be sent to pick the suspect up and deliver him to the
Libyans for questioning. One document included a list of 89 questions for the
Libyans to ask a suspect.
While some of the documents warned Libyan authorities to respect such detainees’
human rights, the C.I.A. nonetheless turned them over for interrogation to a
Libyan service with a well-known history of brutality.
One document in the C.I.A. binder said operatives were “in a position to deliver
Shaykh Musa to your physical custody, similar to what we have done with other
senior L.I.F.G. members in the recent past.” The reference was to the Libyan
Islamic Fighting Group, which was dedicated to the overthrow of Colonel Qaddafi,
and which American officials believed had ties to Al Qaeda.
When Libyans asked to be sent Abu Abdullah al-Sadiq, another member of the
group, a case officer wrote back on March 4, 2004, that “we are committed to
developing this relationship for the benefit of both our services,” and promised
to do their best to locate him, according to a document in the C.I.A. binder.
Two days later, an officer faxed the Libyans to say that Mr. Sadiq and his
pregnant wife were planning to fly into Malaysia, and the authorities there
agreed to put them on a British Airways flight to London that would stop in
Bangkok. “We are planning to take control of the pair in Bangkok and place them
on our aircraft for a flight to your country,” the case officer wrote.
Mr. Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch said he had learned from the documents that
Sadiq was a nom de guerre for Abdel Hakim Belhaj, who is now a military leader
for the rebels.
In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Belhaj gave a detailed description of his
incarceration that matched many of those in the documents. He also said that
when he was held in Bangkok he was tortured by two people from the C.I.A.
On one occasion, the Libyans tried to send their own plane to extradite a member
of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, Abu Munthir, and his wife and children,
who were being held in Hong Kong because of passport irregularities.
The Libyan aircraft, however, was turned back, apparently because Hong Kong
authorities were reluctant to let Libyan planes land. In a document labeled
“Secret/ U.S. Only/ Except Libya,” the Libyans were advised to charter an
aircraft from a third country. “If payment of a charter aircraft is an issue,
our service would be willing to assist financially,” the document said.
While questioning alleged terror group members plainly had value to Western
intelligence, the cooperation went beyond that. In one case, for example, the
Libyans asked operatives to trace a phone number for them, and a document that
was in the MI-6 binder replied that it belonged to the Arab News Network in
London. It is unclear why the Libyans sought who the phone number belonged to.
The document also suggested signs of agency rivalries over Libya. In the MI-6
binder, a document boasted of having turned over someone named Abu Abd Alla to
the Libyans. “This was the least we could do for you to demonstrate the
remarkable relationship we have built over recent years,” an unsigned fax in
2004 said. “Amusingly, we got a request from the Americans to channel requests
for information from Abu Abd through the Americans. I have no intention of doing
any such thing.”
Scott Shane
contributed reporting from Washington.
August 27,
2011
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON
— A drone operated by the Central Intelligence Agency killed Al Qaeda’s
second-ranking figure in the mountains of Pakistan on Monday, American and
Pakistani officials said Saturday, further damaging a terrorism network that
appears significantly weakened since the death of Osama bin Laden in May.
An American official said that the drone strike killed Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, a
Libyan who in the last year had taken over as Al Qaeda’s top operational
planner. Mr. Rahman was in frequent contact with Bin Laden in the months before
the terrorist leader was killed on May 2 by a Navy Seals team, intelligence
officials have said.
American officials described Mr. Rahman’s death as particularly significant as
compared with other high-ranking Qaeda operatives who have been killed, because
he was one of a new generation of leaders that the network hoped would assume
greater control after Bin Laden’s death.
Thousands of electronic files recovered at Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad,
Pakistan, revealed that Bin Laden communicated frequently with Mr. Rahman. They
also showed that Bin Laden relied on Mr. Rahman to get messages to other Qaeda
leaders and to ensure that Bin Laden’s recorded communications were broadcast
widely.
After Bin Laden was killed, Mr. Rahman became Al Qaeda’s No. 2 leader under
Ayman al-Zawahri, who succeeded Bin Laden.
There were few details on Saturday about the strike that killed Mr. Rahman. In
the months since Bin Laden’s death, the C.I.A. has maintained a barrage of drone
missile strikes on mountainous redoubts in Pakistan, a bombing campaign that
continues to strain America’s already turbulent relationship with Pakistan.
The C.I.A almost never consults Pakistani officials in advance of a drone
strike, and a Pakistani government official said Saturday that the United States
had told Pakistan’s government that Mr. Rahman had been the target of the strike
only after the spy agency confirmed that he had been killed.
The drone strikes have been the Obama administration’s preferred means of
hunting and killing operatives from Al Qaeda and its affiliate groups. Over the
past year the United States has expanded the drone war to Yemen and Somalia.
Some top American officials have said publicly that they believe Al Qaeda is in
its death throes, though many intelligence analysts are less certain, saying
that the network built by Bin Laden has repeatedly shown an ability to
regenerate.
Yet even as Qaeda affiliates in places like Yemen and North Africa continue to
plot attacks against the West, most intelligence analysts believe that the
remnants of Al Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan have been weakened considerably.
Mr. Rahman’s death is another significant blow to the group.
“Atiyah was at the top of Al Qaeda’s trusted core,” the American official said.
“His combination of background, experience and abilities are unique in Al Qaeda
— without question, they will not be easily replaced.”
The files captured in Abbottabad revealed, among other things, that Bin Laden
and Mr. Rahman discussed brokering a deal with Pakistan: Al Qaeda would refrain
from mounting attacks in the country in exchange for protection for Qaeda
leaders hiding in Pakistan.
American officials said that they found no evidence that either of the men ever
raised the idea directly with Pakistani officials, or that Pakistan’s government
had any knowledge that Bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad.
Mr. Rahman also served as Bin Laden’s liaison to Qaeda affiliates. Last year,
American officials said, Mr. Rahman notified Bin Laden of a request by the
leader of Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen to install Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical
American-born cleric, as the leader of the group in Yemen.
That group, known as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, apparently thought Mr.
Awlaki’s status as an Internet celebrity, for his popular video sermons, and his
knowledge of the United States might help the group’s fund-raising efforts. But
according to the electronic files in Abbottabad, Bin Laden told Mr. Rahman that
the group’s leadership should remain unchanged.
After Bin Laden’s death, some intelligence officials saw a cadre of Libyan
operatives as poised to assume greater control inside Al Qaeda, which at times
has been fractured by cultural rivalries.
Libyan operatives like Mr. Rahman, they said, had long bristled at the
leadership of an older generation, many of them Egyptian like Mr. Zawahri and
Sheikh Saeed al-Masri.
Mr. Masri was killed last year by a C.I.A. missile, as were several Qaeda
operations chiefs before him. The job has proved to be particularly deadly,
American officials said, because the operations chief has had to transmit the
guidance of Bin Laden and Mr. Zawahri to Qaeda operatives elsewhere, providing a
way for the Americans to track him through electronic intercepts.
Mr. Rahman assumed the role after Mr. Masri’s death. Now that Mr. Rahman has
died, American officials said it was unclear who would take over the job.
C.I.A.
Demands Cuts in Book About 9/11 and Terror Fight
August
25, 2011
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON — In what amounts to a fight over who gets to write the history of
the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath, the Central Intelligence Agency is
demanding extensive cuts from the memoir of a former F.B.I. agent who spent
years near the center of the battle against Al Qaeda.
The agent, Ali H. Soufan, argues in the book that the C.I.A. missed a chance to
derail the 2001 plot by withholding from the F.B.I. information about two future
9/11 hijackers living in San Diego, according to several people who have read
the manuscript. And he gives a detailed, firsthand account of the C.I.A.’s move
toward brutal treatment in its interrogations, saying the harsh methods used on
the agency’s first important captive, Abu Zubaydah, were unnecessary and
counterproductive.
Neither critique of the C.I.A. is new. In fact, some of the information that the
agency argues is classified, according to two people who have seen the
correspondence between the F.B.I. and C.I.A., has previously been disclosed in
open Congressional hearings, the report of the national commission on 9/11 and
even the 2007 memoir of George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director.
Mr. Soufan, an Arabic-speaking counterterrorism agent who played a central role
in most major terrorism investigations between 1997 and 2005, has told
colleagues he believes the cuts are intended not to protect national security
but to prevent him from recounting episodes that in his view reflect badly on
the C.I.A.
Some of the scores of cuts demanded by the C.I.A. from Mr. Soufan’s book, “The
Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al Qaeda,” seem hard
to explain on security grounds.
Among them, according to the people who have seen the correspondence, is a
phrase from Mr. Soufan’s 2009 testimony at a Senate hearing, freely available
both as video and transcript on the Web. Also chopped are references to the word
“station” to describe the C.I.A.’s overseas offices, common parlance for
decades.
The agency removed the pronouns “I” and “me” from a chapter in which Mr. Soufan
describes his widely reported role in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, an
important terrorist facilitator and training camp boss. And agency officials
took out references to the fact that a passport photo of one of the 9/11
hijackers who later lived in San Diego, Khalid al-Midhar, had been sent to the
C.I.A. in January 2000 — an episode described both in the 9/11 commission report
and Mr. Tenet’s book.
In a letter sent Aug. 19 to the F.B.I.’s general counsel, Valerie E. Caproni, a
lawyer for Mr. Soufan, David N. Kelley, wrote that “credible sources have told
Mr. Soufan that the agency has made a decision that this book should not be
published because it will prove embarrassing to the agency.”
In a statement, Mr. Soufan called the C.I.A’s redactions to his book
“ridiculous” but said he thought he would prevail in getting them restored for a
later edition.
He said he believed that counterterrorism officers have an obligation to face
squarely “where we made mistakes and let the American people down.” He added:
“It saddens me that some are refusing to address past mistakes.”
A spokeswoman for the C.I.A., Jennifer Youngblood, said, “The suggestion that
the Central Intelligence Agency has requested redactions on this publication
because it doesn’t like the content is ridiculous. The C.I.A.’s pre-publication
review process looks solely at the issue of whether information is classified.”
She noted that under the law, “Just because something is in the public domain
doesn’t mean it’s been officially released or declassified by the U.S.
government.”
A spokesman for the F.B.I., Michael P. Kortan, declined to comment.
The book, written with the assistance of Daniel Freedman, a colleague at Mr.
Soufan’s New York security company, is scheduled to go on sale Sept. 12. Facing
a deadline this week, the publisher, W. W. Norton and Company, decided to
proceed with a first printing incorporating all the C.I.A.’s cuts.
If Mr. Soufan ultimately prevails in negotiations or a legal fight to get the
excised material restored, Norton will print the unredacted version, said Drake
McFeely, Norton’s president. “The C.I.A.’s redactions seem outrageous to me,”
Mr. McFeely said. But he noted that they are concentrated in certain chapters
and said “the book’s argument comes across clearly despite them.”
The regular appearance of memoirs by Bush administration officials has continued
a debate over the facts surrounding the failure to prevent 9/11 and the tactics
against terrorism that followed. In former Vice President Dick Cheney’s memoir,
set for publication next week, he writes of the harsh interrogations that “the
techniques worked.”
A book scheduled for publication next May by José A. Rodriguez Jr., a former
senior C.I.A. official, is expected to give a far more laudatory account of the
agency’s harsh interrogations than that of Mr. Soufan, as is evident from its
tentative title: “Hard Measures: How Aggressive C.I.A. Actions After 9/11 Saved
American Lives.”
Government employees who hold security clearances are required to have their
books vetted for classified information before publication. But because
decisions on what should be classified can be highly subjective, the
prepublication review process often becomes a battle. Several former spies have
gone to court to fight redactions to their books, and the Defense Department
spent nearly $50,000 last year to buy and destroy the entire first printing of
an intelligence officer’s book, which it said contained secrets.
The C.I.A. interrogation program sharply divided the C.I.A. and the F.B.I.,
whose director, Robert S. Mueller III, ordered agents to stop participating in
the program after Mr. Soufan and other agents objected to the use of physical
coercion. But some C.I.A. officers, too, opposed the brutal methods, including
waterboarding, and it was their complaint to the C.I.A.’s inspector general that
eventually led to the suspension of the program.
“The Black Banners” traces the origins and growth of Al Qaeda and describes the
role of Mr. Soufan, 40, a Lebanese-American, in the investigations of the East
African embassy bombings of 1998, the attack on the American destroyer Cole in
2000, 9/11 and the continuing campaign against terrorism.
Starting in May, F.B.I. officials reviewed Mr. Soufan’s 600-page manuscript,
asking the author for evidence that dozens of names and facts were not
classified. Mr. Soufan and Mr. Freedman agreed to change wording or substitute
aliases for some names, and on July 12 the bureau told Mr. Soufan its review was
complete.
In the meantime, however, the bureau had given the book to the C.I.A. Its
reviewers responded this month with 78-page and 103-page faxes listing their
cuts.
Clair George, Spy and Iran-Contra Figure, Dies at 81
August 20, 2011
The New York Times
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Clair E. George, a consummate spymaster who moved the chess
pieces in the Central Intelligence Agency’s clandestine games of intrigue before
being convicted of lying to Congress about the Iran-contra affair, died Aug. 11
in Bethesda, Md. He was 81.
The cause was cardiac arrest, said his sister, Gail Marshall. Before Mr. George
was sentenced, the first President George Bush granted a full and unconditional
pardon to him and five other Iran-contra defendants.
As the C.I.A.’s deputy director of operations for three years of the Reagan
administration, the third-highest post in the spy agency, Mr. George was
responsible for cloak-and-dagger activities worldwide. He reached this pinnacle
after three decades of working as a spy around the world, specializing in
recruiting foreign agents to spy on their own countries for the United States.
The Washington Post Magazine in 1992 quoted a colleague as calling Mr. George “a
top-notch street man” who operated in what spies call the “night soil circuit” —
the less desirable posts of the world. He worked in Africa, Asia, Europe and the
Middle East. He was the C.I.A.’s station chief in Beirut when civil war erupted
there in 1975. He then volunteered to replace the Athens station chief, who had
just been assassinated by terrorists.
Bob Woodward, in his 1987 book, “Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987,”
said veteran spies regarded Mr. George as “an old warhorse symbol of the C.I.A.
at its best and proudest.”
In The Post, Richard Viets, a Foreign Service officer who was in India at the
same time as Mr. George and who went on to become an ambassador, said Mr. George
had the perfect personality for the agency. “He exudes trust and friendliness,”
he said, “but in fact is duplicitous as hell.”
Mr. George’s loyalty to the C.I.A., however, was unshakable — and ultimately
wrecked his career. He was convicted in 1992 of lying to Congressional
committees and a grand jury to keep from disclosing what he knew about the
agency’s participation in the Reagan administration’s illegal scheme to sell
arms to Iran and divert profits from the sales to help the contra rebels in
Nicaragua.
Mr. George was the highest-ranking C.I.A. officer prosecuted by the independent
counsel Lawrence E. Walsh in what came to be known as the Iran-contra affair.
After a mistrial caused by a hung jury, Mr. George was convicted of two charges
of false statements and perjury before Congress. He faced a maximum penalty of
five years in prison and $250,000 in fines on each count.
Mr. George said that his conscience was clear and that he felt like “a pawn in a
continuous drama of political exploitation.” Earlier, he had explained that he
had been “almost megalomaniacal” in striving to use his testimony to Congress to
“protect the agency.”
Mr. Walsh wrote that the verdict refuted the view that the illegal operation had
been confined to the White House and showed that it in fact extended to various
agencies, like the Defense and State Departments, as well as the C.I.A. He said
that if Mr. George had told the truth to Congress, the wrongdoing could have
been stopped years sooner. Suspicions had been raised in October 1986, when an
American cargo plane ferrying arms to Nicaraguan rebels was shot down.
“George chose to evade, mislead and lie,” Mr. Walsh said.
Mr. George had been indicted in September 1991, partly on the strength of the
testimony of an aide who told prosecutors that Mr. George had told him to
withhold information from Congress.
However, his devotion to the C.I.A. was appreciated by agency employees and
retirees, who raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for his defense and came
to his trial to show support. Some volunteered to pore through mountains of
classified material assembled for the trial in search of useful evidence. Some
suggested that President Ronald Reagan should have been the one on trial, saying
that in professing ignorance of Iran-contra, the president was either lying or
admitting that he had been asleep at the switch. But investigations by Mr.
Walsh, Congress and an independent commission could not pin responsibility on
the president.
Clair Elroy George was born in Pittsburgh on Aug. 3, 1930. His family moved
several times, ending up in Beaver Falls, Pa., when he was 9. His father was a
dairy chemist who worked for the federal Department of Agriculture. As a youth,
Mr. George was a drummer in local dance bands and president of the high school
student council and worked in a steel mill.
He majored in political science and debated at Pennsylvania State University,
graduating in 1952. He enrolled in Columbia Law School, but joined the Army
instead. He learned Chinese and worked in counterintelligence in the Army in
Japan. He joined the C.I.A. after being impressed by agency officers he met in
the Far East.
After numerous assignments, in Washington and abroad, he returned to Washington
for good in 1979. He placed first out of 100 candidates in a promotions ranking
and was put in charge of the agency’s African division. William J. Casey, whom
Reagan had named director of central intelligence, appointed Mr. George to
successively higher positions. He served as deputy director from 1984 until his
retirement in 1987. He then worked as a consultant.
Mr. George’s wife, the former Mary Atkinson, died in 2008. In addition to his
sister, he is survived by his daughters, Leslie George and Ann Davies, and three
grandchildren.
During Mr. George’s trial, the defense repeatedly tried to inform the jury of
his espionage achievements, which prosecutors tried to quash because they might
impress jurors. Finally, Judge Royce C. Lamberth told prosecutors they could
admit “something equivalent to war-hero status” and leave it at that.
LANGLEY,
Virginia | Fri May 20, 2011
8:53pm EDT
Reuters
By Patricia Zengerle
LANGLEY,
Virginia (Reuters) - President Barack Obama thanked the U.S. intelligence
community on Friday for helping track down and kill Osama bin Laden and warned
remaining members of his al Qaeda network to watch their backs.
"Make no mistake. This is not over ..." Obama told members of the intelligence
community gathered at Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley,
Virginia. "We walked off with his files -- the largest treasure trove of
intelligence ever seized from a terrorist leader."
Standing before a memorial wall covered in stars to honor members of the CIA
killed in the line of duty, Obama said every member of al Qaeda should be
"watching his back."
The CIA shared a significant part of the blame for the intelligence failures
that allowed bin Laden to plot and carry out the September 11 attacks against
the United States, which dealt the agency's reputation and morale a severe blow.
Obama was greeted with thunderous applause, whistles and cheers by the crowd of
about 1,000 workers from a range of intelligence agencies and his comments were
interrupted repeatedly by more cheers, applause and laughter.
"You made it possible for us to achieve the most significant victory yet in our
war to defeat al Qaeda," he said.
"I put my bet on you," Obama said. "Now the whole world knows that faith in you
was justified."
CIA director Leon Panetta thanked Obama for making the "gutsy decision" to bring
bin Laden to justice although he had only circumstantial evidence that the
world's most wanted man was in the compound where he was killed.
"We are grateful to have a commander-in-chief who was willing to put great trust
in our work," said Panetta, Obama's nominee to be the next Secretary of Defense.
Obama said the CIA's efforts to track down bin Laden had made a critical
difference to the success of the May 2 mission of U.S. Navy SEAL commandos to
kill him in Pakistan. He said the agency's secret and generally thankless
contribution had been recognized.
"You're often the first ones to get the blame when things go wrong and you're
always the last ones to get the credit when things go right," Obama said.
In the days since the raid, Obama has visited with members of the Navy SEAL unit
who killed bin Laden and traveled to the site of the World Trade Center in New
York to lay a wreath and meet with relatives of those who were killed in the
2001 attacks.
On Friday, Obama met behind closed doors at the CIA with about 60 intelligence
officers from different agencies who had been closely involved in the effort to
track down bin Laden.
"Most of you will never get headlines for what you do; you won't get ticker tape
parades," Obama said in his public remarks in the main lobby at CIA
headquarters. "You have the thanks of a grateful nation."
(Reporting
by Patricia Zengerle; Writing by Alister Bull; Editing by Eric Walsh)
April 28,
2011
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTIand ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON — President Obama’s decision to send an intelligence chief to the
Pentagon and a four-star general to the Central Intelligence Agency is the
latest evidence of a significant shift over the past decade in how the United
States fights its battles — the blurring of lines between soldiers and spies in
secret American missions abroad.
On Thursday, Mr. Obama is expected to announce that Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A.
director, will become secretary of defense, replacing Robert M. Gates, and that
Gen. David H. Petraeus will return from Afghanistan to take Mr. Panetta’s job at
the C.I.A., a move that is likely to continue this trend.
As C.I.A. director, Mr. Panetta hastened the transformation of the spy agency
into a paramilitary organization, overseeing a sharp escalation of the C.I.A.’s
bombing campaign in Pakistan using armed drone aircraft, and an increase in the
number of secret bases and covert operatives in remote parts of Afghanistan.
General Petraeus, meanwhile, has aggressively pushed the military deeper into
the C.I.A.’s turf, using Special Operations troops and private security
contractors to conduct secret intelligence missions. As commander of the United
States Central Command in September 2009, he also signed a classified order
authorizing American Special Operations troops to collect intelligence in Saudi
Arabia, Jordan, Iran and other places outside of traditional war zones.
The result is that American military and intelligence operatives are at times
virtually indistinguishable from each other as they carry out classified
operations in the Middle East and Central Asia. Some members of Congress have
complained that this new way of war allows for scant debate about the scope and
scale of military operations. In fact, the American spy and military agencies
operate in such secrecy now that it is often hard to come by specific
information about the American role in major missions in Iraq, Afghanistan,
Pakistan and now Libya and Yemen.
The operations have also created tension with important allies like Pakistan,
while raising fresh questions about whether spies and soldiers deserve the same
legal protections.
Officials acknowledge that the lines between soldiering and spying have blurred.
“It’s really irrelevant whether you call it a covert action or a military
special operation,” said Dennis C. Blair, a retired four-star admiral and a
former director of national intelligence. “I don’t really think there is any
distinction.”
The phenomenon of the C.I.A. becoming more like the Pentagon, and vice versa,
has critics inside both organizations. Some inside the C.I.A.’s clandestine
service believe that its bombing campaign in Pakistan, which has become a
cornerstone of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism strategy, has
distorted the agency’s historic mission as a civilian espionage agency and
turned it into an arm of the Defense Department.
Henry A. Crumpton, a career C.I.A. officer and formerly the State Department’s
top counterterrorism official, praised General Petraeus as “one of the most
sophisticated consumers of intelligence.” But Mr. Crumpton warned more broadly
of the “militarization of intelligence” as current or former uniformed officers
assume senior jobs in the sprawling American intelligence apparatus.
For example, James R. Clapper Jr., a retired Air Force general, is director of
national intelligence, Mr. Obama’s top intelligence adviser. Maj. Gen. Michael
Flynn, formerly the senior intelligence officer in Afghanistan, is soon expected
to become one of Mr. Clapper’s top deputies.
“If the intelligence community is populated by military officers, they
understandably are going to reflect their experiences,” Mr. Crumpton said.
At the Pentagon, the new roles raise legal concerns. The more that soldiers are
used for espionage operations overseas, the more they are at risk of being
thrown in jail and denied Geneva Convention protections if they are captured by
hostile governments.
And yet few believe that the trend is likely to be reversed. A succession of
wars has strained the ranks of both the Pentagon and the C.I.A., and the United
States has come to believe that many of its current enemies are best fought with
timely intelligence rather than overwhelming military firepower.
These factors have pushed military and intelligence operatives more closely
together in the years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
“In the field, there is a blurring of the mission,” said Senator Jack Reed, a
senior Rhode Island Democrat on the Armed Services Committee who served as an
officer in the 82nd Airborne Division. “Military operations can buy time to
build up local security forces, but intelligence is the key to operations and
for anticipating your adversary.”
American officials said that, for the most part, the tensions and resentments
were greatly reduced from the days when Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld
expanded Pentagon intelligence-gathering operations to become less dependent on
the C.I.A.
The secret “Execute Order” signed by General Petraeus in September 2009
authorized American Special Operations troops to carry out reconnaissance
missions and build up intelligence networks throughout the Middle East and
Central Asia in order to “penetrate, disrupt, defeat and destroy” militant
groups and “prepare the environment” for future American military attacks. But
that order greatly expanding the role of the military in spying was drafted in
consultation with the C.I.A., administration officials said.
General Petraeus has worked closely with the C.I.A. since the Bosnia mission in
the 1990s, a relationship that grew during his command tours in Iraq and
Afghanistan. In fact, some of the missions he has overseen seem to have been
more like clandestine operations than traditional military missions.
Even before General Petraeus took over as the leader of the military’s Central
Command overseeing Middle East operations nearly three years ago, he ordered a
study of the threat posed by militants in a country few American policy makers
had focused on — Yemen. Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen is now considered the most
immediate threat to the United States.
The general’s relationship with Yemen’s mercurial president, Ali Abdullah Saleh,
was well documented in the diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks last year.
And the military’s operations there, beginning with airstrikes in December 2009,
are shrouded in even more secrecy than the C.I.A.’s drone attacks in Pakistan.
Mr. Saleh, however, drew the line at General Petraeus’s request to send American
advisers to accompany Yemeni troops on counterterrorism operations.
Now, with Mr. Saleh’s government teetering on the verge of collapse, General
Petraeus is taking over at the C.I.A. — and will once again be part of America’s
secret war in Yemen.
Pakistan
Tells U.S. It Must Sharply Cut C.I.A. Activities
April 11,
2011
The New York Times
By JANE PERLEZ and ISMAIL KHAN
ISLAMABAD,
Pakistan — Pakistan has demanded that the United States steeply reduce the
number of Central Intelligence Agency operatives and Special Operations forces
working in Pakistan, and that it halt C.I.A. drone strikes aimed at militants in
northwest Pakistan. The request was a sign of the near collapse of cooperation
between the two testy allies.
Pakistani and American officials said in interviews that the demand that the
United States scale back its presence was the immediate fallout from the arrest
in Pakistan of Raymond A. Davis, a C.I.A. security officer who killed two men in
January during what he said was an attempt to rob him.
In all, about 335 American personnel — C.I.A. officers and contractors and
Special Operations forces — were being asked to leave the country, said a
Pakistani official closely involved in the decision.
It was not clear how many C.I.A. personnel that would leave behind; the total
number in Pakistan has not been disclosed. But the cuts demanded by the
Pakistanis amounted to 25 to 40 percent of United States Special Operations
forces in the country, the officials said. The number also included the removal
of all the American contractors used by the C.I.A. in Pakistan.
The demands appeared severe enough to badly hamper American efforts — either
through drone strikes or Pakistani military training — to combat militants who
use Pakistan as a base to fight American forces in Afghanistan and plot
terrorist attacks abroad.
The reductions were personally demanded by the chief of the Pakistani Army, Gen.
Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, said Pakistani and American officials, who requested
anonymity while discussing the delicate issue.
The scale of the Pakistani demands emerged as Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the
head of Pakistan’s chief spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence
Directorate, or the ISI, arrived in Washington on Monday for nearly four hours
of meetings with the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, and Adm. Mike Mullen, the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Two senior American officials said afterward that General Pasha did not make any
specific requests for reductions of C.I.A. officers, contractors or American
military personnel in Pakistan at the meetings.
“There were no ultimatums, no demands to withdraw tens or hundreds of Americans
from Pakistan,” said one of the officials, who spoke on the condition of
anonymity because of the tensions between the two spy services.
A C.I.A. spokesman, George Little, called the meetings “productive” and said the
relationship between the two services “remains on solid footing.”
The meetings were part of an effort to repair the already tentative and
distrustful relations between the spy agencies. Those ties plunged to a new low
as a result of the Davis episode, which has further exposed the divergence in
Pakistani and American interests as the endgame in Afghanistan draws closer.
The Pakistani Army firmly believes that Washington’s real aim in Pakistan is to
strip the nation of its prized nuclear arsenal, which is now on a path to
becoming the world’s fifth largest, said the Pakistani official closely involved
in the decision on reducing the American presence.
On the American side, frustration has built over the Pakistani Army’s seeming
inability to defeat a host of militant groups, including the Taliban and Al
Qaeda, which have thrived in Pakistan’s tribal areas despite more than $1
billion in American assistance a year to the Pakistani military.
In a rare public rebuke, a White House report to Congress last week described
the Pakistani efforts against the militants as disappointing.
At the time of his arrest, Mr. Davis was involved in a covert C.I.A. effort to
penetrate one militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, which has ties to Pakistan’s
military and intelligence establishment, has made deepening inroads in
Afghanistan, and is perceived as a global threat.
The C.I.A. had demanded that Mr. Davis be freed immediately, on the grounds that
he had diplomatic immunity. Instead, he was held for 47 days of detention and,
the officials said, questioned for 14 days by ISI agents during his imprisonment
in Lahore, infuriating American officials. He was finally freed after his
victims’ families agreed to take some $2.3 million in compensation.
Another price, however, apparently is the list of reductions in American
personnel demanded by General Kayani, according to the Pakistani and American
officials. American officials said last year that the Pakistanis had allowed a
maximum of 120 Special Operations troops in the country, most of them involved
in training the paramilitary Frontier Corps in northwest Pakistan. The Americans
had reached that quota, the Pakistani official said.
In addition to the withdrawal of all C.I.A. contractors, Pakistan is demanding
the removal of C.I.A. operatives involved in “unilateral” assignments like Mr.
Davis’s that the Pakistani intelligence agency did not know about, the Pakistani
official said.
An American official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said without
elaborating that the Pakistanis had asked “for more visibility into some things”
— presumably the nature of C.I.A. covert operations in the country — “and that
request is being talked about.”
General Kayani has also told the Obama administration that its expanded drone
campaign has gotten out of control, a Pakistani official said. Given the
reluctance or inability of the Pakistani military to root out Qaeda and Taliban
militants from the tribal areas, American officials have turned more and more to
drone strikes, drastically increasing the number of attacks last year.
The drone campaign, which is immensely unpopular among the Pakistani public, had
become the sole preserve of the United States, the Pakistani official said,
since the Americans were no longer sharing intelligence on how they were
choosing targets. The Americans have also extended the strikes to new parts of
the tribal region, like the Khyber area near the city of Peshawar.
“Kayani would like the drones stopped,” said another Pakistani official who met
with the military chief recently. “He believes they are used too frequently as a
weapon of choice, rather than as a strategic weapon.” Short of that, General
Kayani was demanding that the campaign return to its original, more limited,
scope and remain focused narrowly on North Waziristan, the prime militant
stronghold.
A drone attack last month, one day after Mr. Davis was released, hit Taliban
fighters in North Waziristan, but also killed tribal leaders allied with the
Pakistani military, infuriating General Kayani, who issued an unusually strong
statement of condemnation afterward.
American officials defended the drone attack, saying it had achieved its goal of
killing militants. But there have been no drone attacks since then.
General Kayani’s request to reduce the number of Special Operations troops by up
to 40 percent would result in the closing of the training program begun last
year at Warsak, close to Peshawar, an American official said.
Informed by American officials that the Special Operations training would end
even with the partial reduction of 40 percent, General Kayani remained unmoved,
the American official said.
American officials believed the training program was essential to improve the
capacity of the nearly 150,000 Pakistani soldiers deployed to fight the Taliban
in the tribal region.
The C.I.A. quietly withdrew all contractors after Mr. Davis’s arrest, the
Pakistani official said.
Another category of American intelligence agents, declared operatives whose
purpose was not clear, were also being asked to leave, the Pakistani official
said.
In a sign of the severity of the breach between the C.I.A. and the ISI, the
official said: “We’re telling the Americans: ‘You have to trust the ISI or you
don’t. There is nothing in between.’ ”
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.
February 25, 2011
The New York Times
By JANE PERLEZ
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan’s chief spy agency has demanded
an accounting by the Central Intelligence Agency of all its contractors working
in Pakistan, a fallout from the arrest last month of an American involved in
surveillance of militant groups, a senior Pakistani intelligence official said
Friday.
Angered that the American, Raymond A. Davis, worked as a contractor in Pakistan
on covert C.I.A. operations without the knowledge of the Pakistanis, the spy
agency estimated that there were “scores” more such contractors “working behind
our backs,” said the official, who requested anonymity in order to speak
candidly about a delicate matter between the two countries.
In a slight softening of the Pakistani stance since Mr. Davis’s arrest, the
official said that the American and Pakistani intelligence agencies needed to
continue cooperation, and that Pakistan was prepared to put the episode in the
past if the C.I.A. stopped treating its Pakistani counterparts as inferior.
“Treat us as allies, not as satellites,” said the official of the Directorate
for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. “Respect, equality and trust are
needed.”
George Little, a C.I.A. spokesman, said the American spy agency’s ties to the
ISI “have been strong over the years, and when there are issues to sort out, we
work through them.”
“That’s the sign of a healthy partnership,” Mr. Little said.
The arrest and detention of Mr. Davis, 36, after he shot and killed two
motorcyclists in Lahore soured already testy relations between two governments
that are supposed to have a common front in the fight against terrorism.
The top American and Pakistani military leaders, including the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, and the leader of the Pakistani Army,
Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, met this week in Oman, where the Davis case was
discussed.
According to a report by a former head of the Pakistani Army, Gen. Jehangir
Karamat, who runs a research and analysis center based in Lahore, both sides
agreed to try to “arrest the downhill descent.”
Even so, the Pakistani intelligence community was divided over how quickly to
settle the Davis case and how much to extract from the C.I.A., said a Pakistani
official with intimate knowledge of the situation, who declined to be named
because of the delicacy of the issue.
At a minimum, the ISI wants an accounting of all the contractors who work for
the C.I.A. in roles that have not been defined to Pakistan and a general
rewriting of the rules of engagement by the C.I.A. in Pakistan, the official
said.
In another sign that the two spy services were trying to patch up their
differences, Leon E. Panetta, the director of the C.I.A., spoke on Wednesday
with Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the ISI director, about resolving Mr. Davis’s
case, American and Pakistani officials said on Friday. Mr. Davis, who appeared
in handcuffs on Friday for a hearing in a closed courtroom at the jail where he
is being held in Lahore, faces possible murder charges.
The Obama administration insists that Mr. Davis has diplomatic immunity and
should be released. The Pakistani government has left the determination on
diplomatic immunity to the Foreign Office and a hearing before the Lahore High
Court on March 14.
Some senior Pakistani intelligence officers were unwilling to have Mr. Davis
released under almost any circumstances, said the official with knowledge of the
split in the intelligence community.
He said others wanted to use the Davis case as a bargaining chip to get the
withdrawal of a civil lawsuit filed in Brooklyn last year that implicates the
ISI chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, in the November 2008 terrorist attacks in
Mumbai, India.
The demand for the C.I.A. to acknowledge the number of contractors in Pakistan
was driven by the suspicion that the American spy service had slipped many such
secret operatives into Pakistan in the past six months, the senior ISI official
said.
The increase occurred after a directive last July by the Pakistani civilian
government, which is often at odds with the ISI, to its Washington embassy to
expedite visas without supervision from the ISI or the Ministry of Interior, the
senior ISI official said.
The behavior of people like Mr. Davis is deeply embarrassing to the ISI because
it makes the agency “look like fools” in the eyes of the anti-American Pakistani
public, the ISI official said.
The Davis case made it hard to explain to Pakistanis why the ISI was cooperating
with Washington, he said.
The clampdown on American contractors by the Pakistani authorities appeared to
be under way Friday with the arrest of an American citizen, Aaron Mark DeHaven,
in the northwestern city of Peshawar.
The Peshawar police said Mr. DeHaven was detained because he had overstayed his
business visa after his request for an extension last October was turned down.
There was no immediate accusation that Mr. DeHaven worked for the American
government, a security official in Peshawar said. But the arrest of Mr. DeHaven,
who is married to a Pakistani woman, appears to be a signal that the Pakistani
authorities have decided to expel Americans they have doubts about.
The security official said Mr. DeHaven owned a firm, Catalyst Services in
Peshawar, that rented houses for Americans in the city.
The American Embassy in Islamabad said in a statement that it did not have
details about Mr. DeHaven but that it was arranging consular access for him
through the Pakistani government.
During his first months in Pakistan in early 2010, Mr. Davis, the contractor for
the C.I.A., was attached to the American Consulate in Peshawar and lived in a
house with other Americans in an upscale neighborhood, according to Pakistani
officials.
At the 20-minute court hearing on Friday, Mr. Davis told the judge he would not
take part in the proceedings because he had diplomatic immunity, Pakistani
officials told reporters later.
He refused to sign the charge sheet presented to him, the officials said. The
Obama administration insists that Mr. Davis acted in self-defense when the two
motorcyclists tried to rob him.
In the charge sheet, the Pakistani police said Mr. Davis shot the motorcyclists
multiple times from inside his car, and then stepped from the car and continued
shooting with his Glock pistol. Mr. Davis then drove from the scene and was
arrested several miles away, the police said.
At Friday Prayers in Lahore and in Islamabad, the capital, anti-American
sermons, in some cases laced with references to Mr. Davis, were common.
Hafiz Saeed, the founder of the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which Mr. Davis
is believed to have been conducting surveillance on, said the American was “a
spy, committing terrorism, helping in drone attacks.”
Banners reading “Hang Davis” and “No immunity to Davis” were strung across the
road adjacent to Mr. Saeed’s headquarters.
Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan, and
Waqar Gillani from Lahore, Pakistan.
American Held in Pakistan Shootings Worked With the C.I.A.
February 21, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI, ASHLEY PARKER, JANE PERLEZ and ERIC SCHMITT
This article was written by Mark Mazzetti, Ashley Parker, Jane Perlez and
Eric Schmitt.
WASHINGTON — The American arrested in Pakistan after shooting two men at a
crowded traffic stop was part of a covert, C.I.A.-led team of operatives
conducting surveillance on militant groups deep inside the country, according to
American government officials.
Working from a safe house in the eastern city of Lahore, the detained American
contractor, Raymond A. Davis, a retired Special Forces soldier, carried out
scouting and other reconnaissance missions for a Central Intelligence Agency
task force of case officers and technical surveillance experts, the officials
said.
Mr. Davis’s arrest and detention, which came after what American officials have
described as a botched robbery attempt, has inadvertently pulled back the
curtain on a web of covert American operations inside Pakistan, part of a secret
war run by the C.I.A. It has exacerbated already frayed relations between the
American intelligence agency and its Pakistani counterpart, created a political
dilemma for the weak, pro-American Pakistani government, and further threatened
the stability of the country, which has the world’s fastest growing nuclear
arsenal.
Without describing Mr. Davis’s mission or intelligence affiliation, President
Obama last week made a public plea for his release. Meanwhile, there have been a
flurry of private phone calls to Pakistan from Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A.
director, and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all
intended to persuade the Pakistanis to release the secret operative. Mr. Davis
has worked for years as a C.I.A. contractor, including time at Blackwater
Worldwide, the controversial private security firm (now called Xe) that
Pakistanis have long viewed as symbolizing a culture of American gun slinging
overseas.
George Little, a C.I.A. spokesman, declined to comment.
The New York Times had agreed to temporarily withhold information about Mr.
Davis’s ties to the agency at the request of the Obama administration, which
argued that disclosure of his specific job would put his life at risk. Several
foreign news organizations have disclosed some aspects of Mr. Davis’s work with
the C.I.A., and on Monday, American officials lifted their request to withhold
publication.
Since the United States is not at war in Pakistan, the American military is
largely restricted from operating in the country. So the Central Intelligence
Agency has taken on an expanded role, operating armed drones that kill militants
inside the country and running covert operations, sometimes without the
knowledge of the Pakistanis.
Several American and Pakistani officials said that the C.I.A. team in Lahore
with which Mr. Davis worked was tasked with tracking the movements of various
Pakistani militant groups, including Lashkar-e-Taiba, a particularly violent
group that Pakistan uses as a proxy force against India but that the United
States considers a threat to allied troops in Afghanistan. For the Pakistanis,
such spying inside their country is an extremely delicate issue, particularly
since Lashkar has longstanding ties to Pakistan’s intelligence service, the
Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI.
Still, American and Pakistani officials use Lahore as a base of operations to
investigate the militant groups and their madrasas in the surrounding area.
The officials gave various accounts of the makeup of the covert task force and
of Mr. Davis, who at the time of his arrest was carrying a Glock pistol, a
long-range wireless set, a small telescope and a headlamp. An American and a
Pakistani official said in interviews that operatives from the Pentagon’s Joint
Special Operations Command had been assigned to the group to help with the
surveillance missions. Other American officials, however, said that no military
personnel were involved with the task force.
Special operations troops routinely work with the C.I.A. in Pakistan. Among
other things, they helped the agency pinpoint the location of Mullah Abdul Ghani
Baradar, the deputy Taliban commander who was arrested in January 2010 in
Karachi.
Even before his arrest, Mr. Davis’s C.I.A. affiliation was known to Pakistani
authorities, who keep close tabs on the movements of Americans. His visa,
presented to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in late 2009, describes his job as
a “regional affairs officer,” a common job description for officials working
with the agency.
According to that application, Mr. Davis carried an American diplomatic passport
and was listed as “administrative and technical staff,” a category that
typically grants diplomatic immunity to its holder.
American officials said that with Pakistan’s government trying to clamp down on
the increasing flow of Central Intelligence Agency officers and contractors
trying to gain entry to Pakistan, more of these operatives have been granted
“cover” as embassy employees and given diplomatic passports.
As Mr. Davis languishes in a jail cell in Lahore — the subject of an
international dispute at the highest levels — new details are emerging of what
happened in a dramatic daytime scene on the streets of central Lahore, a
sprawling city, on Jan. 27.
By the American account, Mr. Davis was driving alone in an impoverished area
rarely visited by foreigners, and stopped his car at a crowded intersection. Two
Pakistani men brandishing weapons hopped off motorcycles and approached. Mr.
Davis killed them with the Glock, an act American officials insisted was in
self-defense against armed robbers.
But on Sunday, the text of the Lahore Police Department’s crime report was
published in English by a prominent daily newspaper, The Daily Times, and it
offered a somewhat different account.
It is based in part on the version of events Mr. Davis told Pakistani
authorities, and it seems to raise doubts about his claim that the shootings
were in self-defense.
According to that report, Mr. Davis told the police that after shooting the two
men, he stepped out of the car to take photographs of one of them, then called
the United States Consulate in Lahore for help.
But the report also said that the victims were shot several times in the back, a
detail that some Pakistani officials say proves the killings were murder. By
this account, after firing at the men through his windshield, Mr. Davis stepped
out of the car and continued firing. The report said that Mr. Davis then got
back in his car and “managed to escape,” but that the police gave chase and
“overpowered” him at a traffic circle a short distance away.
In a bizarre twist that has further infuriated the Pakistanis, a third man was
killed when an unmarked Toyota Land Cruiser racing to Mr. Davis’s rescue, drove
the wrong way down a one-way street and ran over a motorcyclist, killing him. As
the Land Cruiser drove “recklessly” back to the consulate, the report said,
items fell out of the vehicle, including 100 bullets, a black mask and a piece
of cloth with the American flag.
Pakistani officials have demanded that the Americans in the S.U.V. be turned
over to local authorities, but American officials say they have already left the
country.
Mr. Davis and the other Americans were heavily armed and carried sophisticated
equipment, the report said.
The Pakistani Foreign Office, generally considered to work under the guidance of
the ISI, has declined to grant Mr. Davis what it calls the “blanket immunity”
from prosecution that diplomats enjoy. In a setback for Washington, the Lahore
High Court last week gave the Pakistani government until March 14 to decide on
the issue of Mr. Davis’s immunity.
The pro-American government led by President Asif Ali Zardari, fearful for its
survival in the face of a surge of anti-American sentiment, has resisted
strenuous pressure from the Obama administration to release Mr. Davis to the
United States. Some militant and religious groups have demanded that Mr. Davis
be tried in the Pakistani courts and hanged.
Relations between the two spy agencies were tense even before the episode on the
streets of Lahore. In December, the C.I.A.’s top clandestine officer in Pakistan
hurriedly left the country after his identity was revealed. Some inside the
agency believe that ISI operatives were behind the disclosure — retribution for
the head of the ISI, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, being named in a New York City
lawsuit filed in connection with the 2008 terror attack in Mumbai, in which
members of his agency are believed to have played a role. General Pasha denied
that was the case.
One senior Pakistani official close to the ISI said Pakistani spies are
particularly infuriated over the Davis episode because it was such a public
spectacle. Besides the three Pakistanis who died at the scene, the widow of one
of the victims committed suicide by swallowing rat poison.
Moreover, the official said, the case was embarrassing for the ISI for its
flagrancy, revealing how much freedom American spies have to roam around the
country.
“We all know the spy-versus-spy games, we all know it works in the shadows,” the
official said, “but you don’t get caught, and you don’t get caught committing
murders.”
Mr. Davis, bearded and burly at 36, appears to have arrived in Pakistan in late
2009 or early 2010. American officials said he operated as part of the Central
Intelligence Agency’s Global Response Service in various parts of the country,
including Lahore and Peshawar.
Documents released by Pakistan’s foreign office show that Mr. Davis was paid
$200,000 a year, including travel expenses and insurance.
He is a native of rural, southwest Virginia, described by those who know him as
an unlikely figure to be at the center of international intrigue.
He grew up in Big Stone Gap, a small town named after the gap in the mountains
where the Powell River emerges.
The youngest of three children, Mr. Davis enlisted in the military after
graduating from Powell Valley High School in 1993.
“I guess about any man’s dream is to serve his country,” said his sister
Michelle Wade.
Shrugging off the portrait of him as an international spy comfortable with a
Glock, Ms. Wade said: “He would always walk away from a fight. That’s just who
he is.”
His high school friends remember him as good-natured, athletic, respectful. He
was also a protector, they said, the type who stood up for the underdog.
“Friends with everyone, just a salt of the earth person,” said Jennifer Boring,
who graduated from high school with Mr. Davis.
Mr. Davis served in the infantry in Europe — including a short tour as a
peacekeeper in Macedonia — before joining the Third Special Forces Group in
1998, where he remained until he left the Army in 2003. The Army Special Forces
—known as the Green Berets — are an elite group trained in foreign languages and
cultures and weapons.
It is unclear when Mr. Davis began working for the C.I.A., but American
officials said that in recent years he worked for the spy agency as a Blackwater
contractor and later founded his own small company, Hyperion Protective
Services.
Mr. Davis and his wife have moved frequently, living in Las Vegas, Arizona and
Colorado.
One neighbor in Colorado, Gary Sollee, said that Mr. Davis described himself as
“former military,” adding that “he’d have to leave the country for work pretty
often, and when he’s gone, he’s gone for an extended period of time.”
Mr. Davis’s sister, Ms. Wade, said she has been praying for her brother’s safe
return.
“The only thing I’m going to say is I love my brother,” she said. “I love my
brother, God knows, I love him. I’m just praying for him.”
Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti reported from Washington, Jane Perlez from
Pakistan and Ashley Parker from Big Stone Gap, Va. Ismail Khan contributed
reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan, and Waqar Gillani from Lahore, Pakistan.
Obama Said to Fault Spy Agencies’ Mideast Forecasting
February 4, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON — President Obama has criticized American spy
agencies over their performance in predicting and analyzing the spreading unrest
in the Middle East, according to current and former American officials.
The president was specifically critical of intelligence agencies for misjudging
how quickly the unrest in Tunisia would lead to the downfall of the country’s
authoritarian government, the officials said.
The officials offered few details about the president’s concerns, but said that
Mr. Obama had not ordered any major changes inside the intelligence community,
which has a budget of more than $80 billion a year. On Friday, a White House
spokesman said spy agencies had given Mr. Obama “relevant, timely and accurate
analysis” throughout the crisis in the Middle East.
But questions about the recent performance of spy agencies expose a tension that
has played out since the C.I.A.’s founding in 1947: how to balance the task of
analyzing events overseas to warn officials in Washington about looming crises
with the mission of carrying out covert operations around the globe.
Some officials have focused their criticism on intelligence assessments last
month that concluded, despite demonstrations in Tunisia, that the security
forces of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali would defend his government.
Instead, the military and the police did not, and Mr. Ben Ali and his family
fled to Saudi Arabia.
One American official familiar with classified intelligence assessments defended
the spy agencies’ Tunisia analysis.
“Everyone recognized the demonstrations in Tunisia as serious,” said the
official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing
classified intelligence reports. “What wasn’t clear even to President Ben Ali
was that his security forces would quickly choose not to support him.”
One former American official said that in recent weeks Mr. Obama urged
intelligence officials to ensure that spy agencies were devoting as much effort
to “long-term analysis” as they were to carrying out operations against Al
Qaeda, including the C.I.A.’s bombing campaign using armed drone aircraft.
On Thursday, senior lawmakers pressed a top C.I.A. official on Capitol Hill
about whether Mr. Obama had been given enough warning about the perils of the
growing demonstrations in Cairo, and whether spy agencies had monitored social
networking sites to gauge the extent of the uprising.
The same day, America’s senior military officer said in a television interview
that officials in Washington had been surprised by how rapidly unrest had spread
from Tunisia to Egypt.
“It has taken not just us, but many people, by surprise,” said Adm. Mike Mullen,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during an appearance on “The Daily Show.”
Several American officials said that after Tunisia’s government collapsed,
intelligence analysts renewed their focus on gauging the impact that the chaos
could have on Egypt, America’s most important ally in the Arab world.
Some C.I.A. veterans said it was wrong to conclude that because the spy agency
had stepped up paramilitary operations in recent years, it had lost focus on the
job of analyzing global events for the White House and Congress.
“The Egypt analysts in the C.I.A. aren’t picking targets in Pakistan; that’s
just not the way the agency operates,” said Mark M. Lowenthal, a former C.I.A.
assistant director for analysis.
Still, Mr. Lowenthal said that intelligence officials for decades had to endure
the wrath of American presidents who blamed them for misjudging the events of
the day — and that it was their obligation to accept the criticism.
“If you are an intelligence officer, you say, ‘Yes sir, thank you very much,
sir,’ ” he said.
