CIA « Quotulatiousness

February 25, 2013

What Argo doesn’t show about “The Canadian Caper” of 1979

Filed under: Cancon, History, Middle East, USA — Tags: 1970s, CIA, Diplomacy, Iran, Movies, Revolution — Nicholas @ 13:15

In Maclean’s, one of the American diplomats who took part in the actual hostage drama in Tehran provides a bit of supplementary material to the film Argo:

Ben Affleck’s Argo has stormed box offices, collected awards [. . .] yet Canadians of a certain age may find themselves thinking: This is not quite how I remember those days. I was there when Iranians took over the American Embassy in Tehran, and it is not quite how I remember them either. Argo is terrific entertainment, but it tells only a part of our story, and says nothing at all about many of the real heroes — most Canadian — who helped rescue us. Before Argo came along, our rescue was routinely called the “Canadian Caper.” It still should be. The operation consisted of four distinct phases. Three were almost entirely Canadian, and only one involved significant U.S. assistance.

For those not of a certain age, a brief summary is a good starting point. Nov. 4, 1979 brought cold rain and hinted of trouble of a different sort. Two weeks earlier, then-president Jimmy Carter decided to admit the former shah of Iran to the U.S. for cancer treatment. Iranians were outraged; many suspected it was a plot by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to remove Iran’s new ruler, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and put the shah back in charge. Protests outside Tehran’s U.S. Embassy had become daily occurrences. That November morning, demonstrators climbed the gate and soon controlled the compound.

[. . .]

Phase four always receives the least attention. The U.S. government was desperate to keep the CIA’s role secret, rightly fearing its disclosure might endanger the hostages (who weren’t freed until 1981). This concern was sufficiently real that we were asked to live under false names in Florida until the hostages were set free. I was looking forward to seeing how many speeding tickets my alter ego could accumulate, but La Presse decided to publish Jean Pelletier’s story once the Canadian Embassy in Tehran had closed. We came home to a rousing reception and the Canadians were asked to claim complete credit for our escape. That job understandably fell to ambassador Taylor, who spent the better part of a year on the rubber chicken circuit at receptions to honour the Canadian government and people for helping us. Some have said he did the job too well, or failed to share the credit with other embassy staff. My own experience contradicts this. I heard Taylor speak several times. He always mentioned his staff. I also tried, during press interviews I gave, to mention others, particularly the Sheardowns. My comments were edited out. It seemed the press could handle only one hero at a time. Unfortunately, this meant John Sheardown, who was indispensable in phase one, became invisible in phase four. I truly believe John did not care. He did his duty as he saw it. For those who loved and respected him, it was painful.

[. . .]

As I wrote at the beginning, Argo is a wonderful film. Not because it is historically accurate, but because, aside from its technical brilliance, it reminds us of a time when ordinary people performed great deeds, and two neighbours that feud over many small and not so small things came together and did something magnificent. Maybe it didn’t change history, but for we six house guests it was truly life changing. And it was, and should always remain, the Canadian Caper.

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May 15, 2012

Conducting espionage operations in the age of the internet

Filed under: Britain, Middle East, Politics, USA — Tags: AlQaeda, CIA, Espionage, MI5, MI6, SaudiArabia, Terrorism — Nicholas @ 10:04

Shashank Joshi in the Telegraph on the good and bad news coming out of the recently foiled “underwear bomber” incident:

This week began with news of a remarkable intelligence coup. It has ended in ignominy, and a reminder that the pathological leakiness of the American bureaucracy has consequences for counterterrorism.

According to the Associated Press (AP), the CIA foiled an audacious plot by Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) to attack an aircraft using an upgraded version of the underwear bomb that failed three years ago. The AP had, apparently, shown great responsibility in delaying publication for days at the request of the White House.

Then, the story grew both muddier and more remarkable still. The would-be bomber was in fact a mole. He was a British national of Saudi Arabian origin, recruited by MI5 in Europe and later run, with Saudi Arabia, by MI6. This is a testament to the unimaginable courage of the agent in question, and the ingenuity of British intelligence.

But the emergence of this story, with a blow-by-blow account of operational detail, is the result of reckless, impetuous leaking that could cost lives and compromise operations in the future.

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March 30, 2012

The mystery of Le Pain Maudit (Cursed Bread) finally solved

Filed under: Europe, France, History, USA — Tags: CIA, ColdWar, ConspiracyTheories, Drugs — Nicholas @ 10:01

In a twist that will delight conspiracy theorists everywhere, it really was a CIA plot:

In 1951, a quiet, picturesque village in southern France was suddenly and mysteriously struck down with mass insanity and hallucinations. At least five people died, dozens were interned in asylums and hundreds afflicted.

For decades it was assumed that the local bread had been unwittingly poisoned with a psychedelic mould. Now, however, an American investigative journalist has uncovered evidence suggesting the CIA peppered local food with the hallucinogenic drug LSD as part of a mind control experiment at the height of the Cold War.

The mystery of Le Pain Maudit (Cursed Bread) still haunts the inhabitants of Pont-Saint-Esprit, in the Gard, southeast France.

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March 20, 2012

Australian billionaire claims Greenpeace accepts CIA funding to fight coal exports

Filed under: Australia, Economics, Environment, Pacific, USA — Tags: AlternativeEnergy, CIA, ConspiracyTheories — Nicholas @ 08:41

Australian bush hats can apparently be made of tinfoil:

Australian Mining Magnate Clive Palmer has declared the CIA is behind a Greenpeace campaign that aims to slow the growth of Australia’s export coal industry.

[. . .]

The Greenpeace campaign centres on a document titled Stopping the Australian Coal Export Boom (PDF) which explicitly states that “Our strategy is to ‘disrupt and delay’ key projects and infrastructure while gradually eroding public and political support for the industry and continually building the power of the movement to win more.” Greenpeace hopes to do so in order to build support for fuels other than coal, in order to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions.

The Greenpeace document says it is “… based on extensive research into the Australian coal industry, made possible by the generous support of the Rockefeller Family Fund.”

That statement is Palmer’s smoking gun, as he said at an event today, as reported by the Australian Broadcasting Commission and other outlets, that “You only have to go back and read the Church Report in the 1970s and to read the reports to the US Congress which sets up the Rockefeller Foundation as a conduit of CIA funding.”

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February 28, 2012

January 31, 2012

Washington Post and the “Top Secret America” Project

Filed under: Government, Military, USA — Tags: Borders, CIA, Espionage, FBI, PatriotAct, TSA — Nicholas @ 00:03

Want to know how deep the rabbit hole goes? The Washington Post can at least get you started:

From the editors:

“Top Secret America” is a project nearly two years in the making that describes the huge national security buildup in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

When it comes to national security, all too often no expense is spared and few questions are asked — with the result an enterprise so massive that nobody in government has a full understanding of it. It is, as Dana Priest and William M. Arkin have found, ubiquitous, often inefficient and mostly invisible to the people it is meant to protect and who fund it.

The articles in this series and an online database at topsecretamerica.com depict the scope and complexity of the government’s national security program through interactive maps and other graphics. Every data point on the Web site is substantiated by at least two public records.

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December 9, 2011

Praise for Britain’s MI6

Filed under: Britain, Military — Tags: CIA, Diplomacy, Espionage, Libya, MI6, Terrorism — Nicholas @ 08:55

It’s the rough equivalent to the US Central Intelligence Agency, but it rarely gets public attention. Strategy Page has a thumbnail sketch of the organization as it gets a brief mention in the British press for its operations against Libya:

MI6 is less than one tenth the size of the CIA (in manpower) and has a budget that’s even smaller. But the CIA is by no means ten times as effective as MI6. For all its size and resources, the CIA cannot, or often will not, do things that MI6 will. Part of this has to do with MI6s greater experience and need to make do with less. But a lot of it has to do with different styles of operation. Both organizations are in the overseas espionage business, but both go about their business in quite different ways, and with often quite different results.

A large part of the difference can be traced to the fact that MI6 has always had a healthier relationship with its diplomats. CIA agents operating overseas often operate out of the local US embassy. Their cover is a diplomatic passport indicating they work for the State Department. But from the beginning, the diplomats were hostile to this sort of thing (British diplomats were not.) So CIA people were forced to use diplomatic passports indicating they were part of the Foreign Service Reserve instead of just Foreign Service. For those in the know, and that means just about everyone, it was easy to find out who the CIA guys were.

MI6 has a degree of legal cover for its operations that the CIA could only envy. Under the Intelligence Services Act of 1994, MI6 officers have immunity from prosecution for crimes committed outside Great Britain. The Criminal Justice Bill of 1998 makes it illegal for any organization in Great Britain to conspire to commit offenses abroad, but Crown agents have immunity. Which means, in effect, that yes, Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service really is licensed to kill.

[. . .]

Another advantage of MI6 is that they have a number of SAS commandos trained to work with MI6 and are always available for any MI6 needs. This commando organization is called Increment and is used for assassinations, sabotage or other dangerous jobs (like arresting war criminals in the Balkans.) In addition, every station chief has a direct line to SAS headquarters and a good working relationship with the commandos.

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October 26, 2011

Giving the government even more weasel-room on FOIA requests

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: CIA, FBI, Secrecy — Nicholas @ 10:02

A proposed rule change would allow the US government and its agencies to lie about the very existence of requested records in Freedom of Information Act requests:

A proposed rule to the Freedom of Information Act would allow federal agencies to tell people requesting certain law-enforcement or national security documents that records don’t exist — even when they do.

Under current FOIA practice, the government may withhold information and issue what’s known as a Glomar denial that says it can neither confirm nor deny the existence of records.

The new proposal — part of a lengthy rule revision by the Department of Justice — would direct government agencies to “respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist.”

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October 23, 2011

The CIA’s new boss and the new rules

Filed under: Asia, Military, USA — Tags: Afghanistan, CIA, Taliban — Nicholas @ 11:53

Strategy Page discusses the new rules for the CIA under the new boss, David Petraeus:

The CIA has a new boss, David Petraeus, who formerly commanded American military forces in Afghanistan. With the arrival of Petraeus, the CIA is changing how it goes about determining the situation in Afghanistan. From now on, CIA analysts will discuss the situation with military commanders before they submit their monthly reports, rather than argue with the military leaders after the fact when people note that the military and CIA analysis comes to different conclusions. The CIA may still disagree with the military, but now they have to answer military assertions that contradict what the CIA believes.

Although this new policy was announced after Petraeus took over at the CIA recently, it was actually in the works for months. It was held up when it became clear that Petraeus was going to be the new CIA chief. Petraeus approved the new policy, which he had long been asking for.

All this came about because CIA analysts eventually noted that the military commanders were using different criteria for “success” and that often had uncovered aspects of the situation that the CIA analysts were missing. So, even before Petraeus showed up at CIA headquarters, the intelligence analysts had decided to work more cooperatively with their military counterparts, if only to ensure that all the bases were covered.

The CIA analysts always were at a disadvantage in Afghanistan, and Iraq, because the military was getting their information first hand, while the CIA often was getting it second or third hand. Moreover, the military was more aware of the fact that “success” in Afghanistan depended a lot on what you believed was possible, and what you knew was actually going on. In some cases, the CIA analysts did not appreciate what impact American field operations were having. Afghanistan, to outsiders has always been a murky place, and difficult to read.

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June 27, 2011

“A substantial expansion of the FBI’s power to monitor innocent Americans”

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: CIA, Database, FBI — Nicholas @ 12:06

Julian Sanchez on the changes to the FBI’s domestic rulebook:

The change in the rules will remove a crucial deterrent for any of the 14,000 FBI employees who might be tempted to use their government access to all kinds of databases for improper personal ends, or to flout rules prohibiting religious, racial and political profiling. This is no hypothetical concern: Shortly after the new guidelines were announced, a former CIA official alleged that the Bush administration had asked the spy agency to dig up dirt on academic and blogger Juan Cole, whose fierce criticism of the war in Iraq earned the ire of the White House.

The new manual will also give agents who have opened assessments greater authority to employ physical surveillance teams. If the FBI thinks you might make a useful informant, agents will be free to dig through your garbage in hopes of finding embarrassing trash that might encourage you to cooperate. And they will be able to do this without first having to show any evidence that you are engaged in wrongdoing.

The FBI, predictably, is downplaying the changes in its rulebook, characterizing them as “clarifications” and “tweaks.” But all these tweaks add up to a substantial expansion of the FBI’s power to monitor innocent Americans — power Congress wisely curtailed in the 1970s in light of the bureau’s ugly history of spying on political dissidents. The law set broad limits on the most intrusive investigative techniques, such as wiretaps, but the details of who could be investigated and how were largely left to executive branch regulation. As statutory restraints on surveillance have been peeled back over the last decade, Americans have been asked to rely more than ever on those internal rules to check abuses.

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June 22, 2011

Carr: LulzSec versus the CIA

Filed under: Government, Technology, USA — Tags: CIA, Hack, Internet, Security, Twitter — Nicholas @ 07:50

Paul Carr is somewhat dismissive of the hacking exploits of the LulzSec group:

For the past few weeks, a hacker collective called LulzSec has been leading American and British authorities a merry dance. The group’s targets are seemingly random – Sony, the CIA, contestants of a reality TV show, the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) – but their stated motive has remained constant: “we’re doing it for laughs”, or, to put it in internet parlance, “lulz”.

If one is to believe the media coverage – particularly here in the US‚ no one is safe from the ingenious hackers and their devilishly complex attacks. The truth is, there’s almost nothing ingenious about what LulzSec is doing: CIA and Soca were not “hacked” in any meaningful sense, rather their public websites were brought down by an avalanche of traffic — a so-called “distributed denial-of-service” (DDoS) attack. Given enough internet-enabled typewriters, a mentally subnormal monkey could launch a DDoS attack — except that mentally subnormal monkeys have better things to do with their time.

Even the genuine hacks are barely worthy of the word. Many large organisations use databases with known security holes that can easily be exploited by anyone who has recently completed the first year of a computer science degree: it’s no coincidence that so many of these hacker collectives appear towards the end of the academic year.

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March 17, 2011

Industrial espionage, Chinese style

Filed under: China, Military, Technology, USA — Tags: CIA, Espionage, FBI — Nicholas @ 09:38

Another good post at Strategy Page on the recent uptick in detection of Chinese industrial spies in the United States, and how this may not be a result of more successful anti-espionage efforts by the FBI or CIA — it may just be a by-product of stepped up efforts by China’s intelligence services:

For over two decades, China has been attempting to do what the Soviet Union never accomplished; steal Western technology, then use it to move ahead of the West. The Soviets lacked the many essential supporting industries found in the West (most founded and run by entrepreneurs), and was never able to get all the many pieces needed to match Western technical accomplishments. Soviet copies of American computers, for example, were crude, less reliable and less powerful. Same with their jet fighters, tanks and warships.

China gets around this by making it profitable for Western firms to set up factories in China, where Chinese managers and workers can be taught how to make things right. At the same time. China allows thousands of their best students to go to the United States to study. While most of these students will stay in America, where there are better jobs and more opportunities, some will come back to China, and bring American business and technical skills with them. Finally, China energetically uses the “thousand grains of sand” approach to espionage. This involves China trying to get all Chinese going overseas, and those of Chinese ancestry living outside the motherland, to spy for China, if only a tiny bit.

This approach to espionage is nothing new. Other nations have used similar systems for centuries. What is unusual is the scale of the Chinese effort. Backing it all up is a Chinese intelligence bureaucracy back home that is huge, with nearly 100,000 people working just to keep track of the many Chinese overseas, and what they could, or should, be to trying to grab for the motherland. It begins when Chinese intelligence officials examining who is going overseas, and for what purpose. Chinese citizens cannot leave the country, legally, without the state security organizations being notified. The intel people are not being asked to give permission. They are being alerted in case they want to have a talk with students, tourists or business people before they leave the country. Interviews are often held when these people come back as well.

Those who might be coming in contact with useful information are asked to remember what they saw, or bring back souvenirs. Over 100,000 Chinese students go off to foreign universities each year. Even more go abroad as tourists or on business. Most of these people were not asked to actually act as spies, but simply to share, with Chinese government officials (who are not always identified as intelligence personnel) whatever information was obtained. The more ambitious of these people are getting caught and prosecuted. But the majority, who are quite casual, and, individually, bring back relatively little, are almost impossible to catch.

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November 6, 2009

Those wild and crazy guys . . . in the CIA

Filed under: Bureaucracy, USA — Tags: 1960s, CIA, ConspiracyTheories, Drugs, Thought-control, Unlikely — Nicholas @ 13:03

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has many purposes, but perhaps its most popular function is to provide some underpinning to the imaginings of conspiracy theorists worldwide. But, according to History House, the CIA was also a pretty weird operation in non-conspiracy terms, too:

[Project MK-ULTRA was] conceived by Richard Helms of the Clandestine Services Department (yes, the CIA actually gives its departments silly names like that), it went beyond the construction of mere truth serums and ventured into disinformation, induction of temporary insanity, and other chemically-aided states. The director of MK-ULTRA, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, figured LSD’s potential as an interrogative agent paled in comparison to its capacity to publicly humiliate. Lee and Shlain note the CIA imagined a tripping public figure might be amusing, producing a memo that says giving acid “to high officials would be a relatively simple matter and could have a significant effect at key meetings, speeches, etc.” But Gottlieb knew that giving LSD to people in the lab was a lot different than just passing it out, and felt the department did not have an adequate grasp on its effects. So the entire operation tripped to learn what it was like, and, according to Lee and Shlain,

agreed among themselves to slip LSD into each other’s drinks. The target never knew when his turn would come, but as soon as the drug was ingested a … colleague would tell him so he could make the necessary preparations (which usually meant taking the rest of the day off). Initially the leaders of MK-ULTRA restricted the surprise acid tests to [their own] members, but when this phase had run its course they started dosing other Agency personnel who had never tripped before. Nearly everyone was fair game, and surprise acid trips became something of an occupational hazard among CIA operatives . . . The Office of Security felt that [MK-ULTRA] should have exercised better judgment in dealing with such a powerful and dangerous chemical. The straw that broke the camel’s back came when a Security informant got wind of a plan by a few [MK-ULTRA] jokers to put LSD in the punch served at the annual CIA Christmas office party … a Security memo writer… concluded indignantly and unequivocally that he did ‘not recommend testing in the Christmas punch bowls usually present at the Christmas office parties.’

The in-house testing phase now over, MK-ULTRA decided to use the drug surreptitiously in the street to gauge its effects. They contract-hired George Hunter White, a narcotics officer, to set up Operation Midnight Climax, according to Lee and Shlain, “in which drug-addicted prostitutes were hired to pick up men from local bars and bring them back to a CIA-financed bordello. Unknowing customers were treated to drinks laced with LSD while White sat on a portable toilet behind two-way mirrors, sipping martinis and watching every stoned and kinky moment.” Lee and Shlain go on to comment, “when [White] wasn’t operating a national security whorehouse,” White threw wild parties for his “narc buddies” with his ready supply of prostitutes and drugs. He sent vouchers for “unorthodox expenses” to Gottlieb, and later said, “I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?” In case one needs reminding, these claims are backed by recently unclassified information. Yes, Virginia, truth is stranger than fiction.

Emphasis in the original.

I have no idea what relationship this account has to the actual facts, but if the mainstream media can get away with running stories without fact-checking, then I certainly don’t feel guilty about this one.

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