WEEKLY INTELLIGENCE REPORT (WIN) 12-01 dtd 26
Mar 01
WINs are intelligence-related commentaries on open
source information, produced and edited by Roy Jonkers.
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Warning
Notice: Perishability of Links: WINs, sent weekly
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four weeks many of these websites [especially newspaper and other
media sites] remove items or shift them into fee-only
archives. This underscores the benefit of receiving the WINs
as they are released.
SECTION I -
CURRENT INTELLIGENCE
NEW OVERHEAD COLLECTION SYSTEM --
"To develop, provide launch integration and operate the
nation's next generation of imagery reconnaissance satellites"
is about all the NRO has said on the record about a project launched
a year ago called Future Imagery Architecture. A recent press item
has fleshed out the outline of the massive endeavor by an aerospace
team headed by the Boeing unit in Seal Beach, California. Estimates
place the total cost of the program to launch a number of smaller
imagery satellites at up to $25 billion over two decades. Equipped
with telescopes and radar, the birds will be farther out in space
and harder to detect than the current reconnaissance satellites.
"...the most expensive program in the history of the
intelligence community" is one think tank's description. The
initial design and development alone will require 5,000 engineers,
technicians and computer programmers over the next five years with
estimates placing the eventual total at 20,000 jobs in California.
The number of satellites
involved in the program is estimated to be between 12 to 24,
compared with the roughly six in orbit now. Each satellite will take
up to 18 months to build and although significantly smaller and
cheaper than current models, will weigh 15 tons and cost about $1
billion. One outside analyst guessed the size to be roughly
one-third the present size. By using a higher orbit, it is expected
a new satellite can linger for about 20 minutes in an area (double
the present birds); as a system, it is hoped the new constellation
can collect eight to 20 times more images that the current system.
The article defines the current system as three optical Keyholes
(imagery and infrared) and three Lacrosses ("radarsats" -
which presumably means synthetic aperture radar).
An NRO spokesman has
stated the plan is to begin launching the satellites around 2005.
The press account said nothing about what is to be done to process
and analyze up to 20 times the current river of imagery, but
Congress was reported to have complained of the lack of planning for
processing when considering the program last year. Considering the
abysmal performance over the years of the intelligence community to
take full advantage of the data made available by the various
collection systems, it can only be hoped that history is not
prologue. (L A Times 18 Mar '01, p.1 / Peter Pae) (Harvey)
MACEDONIA -- The U.S. is said to be
supporting the Government of Macedonia with intelligence, ostensibly
gained from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV's) and helicopters
hovering over the hills and mountains in Macedonia where Albanian
nationalist extremists-cum-terrorists are located. These guerillas,
formerly KLA, appear to operate from the U.S. zone of Kosovo, where
U.S. policy has favored them and U.S. oversight has been benign. The
insurgents have thrown Macedonian Government representatives out of
several villages. Their aim is to take over Western Macedonia where
Albanians make up the majority of the population, according to a
self-described guerilla "general staff" member. He
admitted that most of the current fighters also fought the Yugoslav
forces in Kosovo.
In Kosovo, three years
ago, a similar expulsion of Yugoslav government forces from several
villages and towns by ethnic Albanian KLA extremists evoked a brutal
Yugoslav Government counter-terrorist operation . The U.S. then
embraced the KLA terrorists, who, ironically, at the core
represented criminal clans involved in heroin smuggling and
prostitution trade, and had been assassinating Serbs and moderate
Kosovars for at least a decade. As a further irony, these extremists
obtained only 20% of the vote in elections, both before and after
our intervention. But the U.S. Government, in its own ideological
warp, and to justify a new role for NATO, unleashed a deadly air
campaign against the Yugoslav civil infrastructure, and since then,
we have winked at the Kosovar extremists' ethnic cleansing of Serbs
and continued assassinations of Kosovar moderates. With the
extremists now extending their terrorist campaign to Macedonia, our
chickens are coming home to roost.
The Macedonian government
threatens an all-out offensive against the extremists. The U.S.
Government now proclaims realism and U.S. national interests as
central criteria for policymaking. There are indications that U.S.
policies may be different this time, as shown by the reports of
intelligence support to Macedonia. (WashPost 18Mar01, p.A21/Smith)
(Jonkers)
ENERGY INTELLIGENCE -- Exxon Mobil
has departed from one of the world's largest natural gas fields,
under pressure of violence from local nationalist extremists in Aceh,
northern Sumatra (Indonesia). Open source intelligence indicates
that company vehicles have been hi-jacked some 50 times recently and
that Exxon aircraft have been fired upon as they tried to land. So
Exxon closed their on-shore fields and plants and evacuated their
non-native employees on March 13th. The Indonesian government has
responded to this potential loss of revenue by sending in more
troops and ordering an offensive against the conservative Muslim
insurgents, whose long-standing separatist aspirations used to
bedevil the Dutch during colonial times as much they do the
Indonesian government today. Martial law has been in force against
the insurgents-cum-terrorists in Aceh since 1989, enforced by
Indonesian troops, largely from Java, who frequently behaved
brutally, including reports of rapes, torture and murder.
Insurgencies, sometimes
supported by the U.S., or sometimes designated as terrorism,
frequently involve brutal behavior by Government forces, whether by
Javanese in Aceh, Serbs in Kosovo, Israelis in Palestine, Russians
in Chechnya, Turks against Kurds, Shri-Lankans against Tamils, or
Indian troops in Kashmir, etc. etc. One trusts that the current
climate of political realism in Washington will not lead to another
ideological crusade and U.S. bombing campaign. One assumes that with
the President's declared concern about energy and with Exxon's
departure, Aceh has now made the intelligence watch list. (NYT/24Mar01,
p.B14/Arnold; see also an essay on the Nature of Human Rights by
Robin Fox in Harpers Magazine, April 2001, p.19) (Jonkers)
CHINESE SPY FOR U.S. DEFECTS -- PLA
Colonel Xu Jumping defected while visiting the U.S. in December.
SecState Powell acknowledged the case on 24 March, referring to a
Chinese Foreign Ministry request to locate the officer last
December. "We located that individual, made sure that the
person was in good health, made the Chinese aware of his presence,
and that's as far as I'd like to go on it." Colonel Xu may have
useful information on how China is responding to American policies
in the region.
Business for CIA's
defector resettlement operations appears to be booming, a further
reminder of the need to avoid fomenting excessive and
disproportionate public media anger or bureaucratic or political
overkill about foreign espionage in the U.S. -- we need the best
possible reasonable security measures and standards, we should
despise the vermin that betray us, but it is also our job to run
foreign agents in other countries -- including Russia and China, as
the current flock of defectors indicates. We're all in this
together. (NYT 24Mar01, p. A6/Risen) (Jonkers)
MISSILE DEFENSE - RUSSIAN STYLE.
In the ongoing political chess game on ballistic missile defenses,
President Putin has informally proposed a plan to share the Russian
S-300 defense system with European NATO members, providing a defense
against attack from "rogue" states. The S-300 is reported
in the media to be capable of intercepting up to six missiles or
aircraft at one time. In another move, Russia has also disclosed
that Iran was interested in buying the S-300 system, even though,
ironically, Iran was said to have been listed in Putin's proposal to
the Europeans as one of the potential "rogue" state
threats (North Korea, Pakistan and Iraq were the others mentioned).
The Russians are expected to unveil their plan officially at the
NATO Permanent Joint Commission meeting this Spring. Move,
countermove? (WPost 18Mar01, p.B7/ Hoagland) (Jonkers)
SECTION II -
CONTEXT AND PRECEDENT
CIA PROPAGANDA PLAN OF THE 1960s --
On the 40th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs a conference is being
held in Havana. Among the attendees are veterans of the operation
from all sides, including some AFIO members. One document made
public on the occasion (declassified and released under FOIA) was a
CIA "Propaganda Plan" issued in April 1961 just before the
invasion, indicating the CIA had "the capability of placing
items directly on the wire service tickers" as part of its
"regular propaganda apparatus." It has been known since
the 1970s (from the notoriously destructive Church committee
activities) that the CIA had "assets" in place at some
news organizations like the Associated Press and United Press
International. The document indicates that the Agency could
essentially dictate articles and have them sent around the world.
Thus the Agency could "place specific messages and propaganda
lines" on the wire services during and after the invasion.
"This will be enormously important in influencing the actions
of the Cuban government leaders and stimulating sympathetic support
of the patriotic rebellion from other countries." The CIA
indicated after the disclosures that it would not manipulate the
American news media except in the most dire national emergency, a
policy reaffirmed in the 1990s. (NYT 24Mar01, p.A7/Weiner) (See also
"Psywar on Cuba: The Declassified History of U.S. Anti-Castro
Propaganda, by Jon Elliston, 1999) (Jonkers)
WW II LIVES - THE ANTI-NAZI WAR CAMPAIGN
ENDURES. In postwar Germany the Nazi's were held to the
victor's justice at the War Crimes Trials in Nuremberg. This editor
was part of this effort in Nuremberg with regard to the Waffen SS, a
US Army Intelligence priority in the post-WWII "war of
retribution." But then relations with Stalin soured and
Czechoslovakia fell to the Soviets, and Communism crept closer. As
of January 1948 the US Army in Europe closed the books on WWII and
re-oriented itself towards the new threat. I became part of HUMINT
operations against the Soviets in East Germany. On the ground the
Soviet Army seemed poised to blow us away. The US Army had been
demobilized and was in a state of disrepair. Large communist
parties, sharpened in resistance struggles against the Nazis, were
ready to rise in Western Europe. As it developed, the Soviets did
not march - instead we got the Berlin blockade and airlift, and over
time, recovery, rearmament and the Cold War. But none of this was
fore-ordained.
Today the Cold War is
over too -- and we are back to the war against the Nazis, now as
part of an almost religious campaign to reinterpret history against
a single criterion, reflected in reputable publications such as the NY
Review of Books as holocaust exploitation. The U.S. Congress
passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act in 1998. Now CIA has
stated it will declassify its dealings with former German Reich
intelligence officers (now all dubbed Nazi spies in the media)
useful to U.S. intelligence in the early days of the Cold War when
disaster threatened. Some 250,000 pages are being declassified, with
an expected completion date in 2002.
One of those said to be
of interest is German Army General Reinhard Gehlen, formerly chief
of intelligence of the eastern front. After the war when the Soviets
threatened Western Europe, U.S. forces set up the "Gehlen
organization," a network that supplied the Pentagon and the
early CIA with intelligence on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
The Gehlen organization was formally recognized in 1956 and became
the West German Intelligence Service, the BND. Gehlen headed it
until he retired in 1968. Now intrepid researchers are focusing on
Gehlen and American Intelligence urgent needs for information on the
Soviets as having compromised the hunt for former Nazis.
To informed observers,
the suspicions have been exaggerated into conspiratorial nonsense.
Gehlen and his top aides came out of the German general staff that
tried, several times, to overthrow and assassinate Hitler. Gehlen's
top command consisted of 30 to 40 young staff officers trained under
General Beck, executed in 1944 for conspiring to assassinate Hitler,
and General Halder, imprisoned until the end of the war.
Nevertheless, James Critchfield, a CIA officer assigned to the
Gehlen organization from 1949 - 1956, said that the records may
reveal the names of 5 to 10 veterans of Gestapo Chief Heinrich
Himmler's despicable Nazi secret police as part of Gehlen's
organization. Gehlen reportedly took them on reluctantly under
pressure from Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to deal with the
"avalanche of subversion hitting them from East Germany."
But we can expect that the media, separated from real events by some
sixty years, and the Soviet threat of 1948 at the beginning of the
Cold War forgotten, will probably have another field day at the
expense of US intelligence, with another single-perspective
re-interpretation of events. (WashPost 18Mar2001, p. A4/Lardner)
(Jonkers)
SECTION III -
CYBER INTELLIGENCE
U.S. CYBER TERRORISM -- The
government must work more closely with private companies to prevent
cyber-terrorist attacks that threaten to disrupt the nation's
economy, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said.
"Today, the cyber-economy is the economy," she said
Thursday, referring to the nation's dependence on computers for
virtually every vital service, including electricity,
transportation, banking and communications." Corrupt those
networks, and you disrupt this nation," she said during a forum
on Internet security. "It is a paradox of our times that the
very technology that makes our economy so dynamic and our military
forces so dominating also makes us more vulnerable." (http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/internet/03/23/internet.terrorism.ap/index.html
Levine's Newsbits)
SECTION IV -
SOURCES
AFIO SYMPOSIUM - Protecting
America's Business Secrets - at the Ronald Reagan Center,
Washington DC, 4 May 2001. Outstanding speakers including CIA Legal
Counsel and other notables. Worth your time! Go to www.afio.com
for full details and application forms. HELP AFIO --- SPREAD THE
WORD!
SECTION V -
OTHER
IN MEMORIAM - MARJORIE WILSON CLINE passed
away on Tuesday March 20, 2001 in Arlington, VA., at age 87 years.
During World War II she worked in cryptology helping to break the
Japanese code. She was married to Ray Cline for 54 years until his
death 5 years ago, and lived overseas in England, Taiwan and
Germany, traveling extensively. On return to the U.S. she was an
editor for the National Geographic Book Division. She maintained a
small publishing office until her death. She will be sorely missed.
Graveside services at Columbia Gardens in Arlington, Wednesday,
March 28 at 3 P.M. (Arlington Funeral Home).
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Associate editors Don Harvey and John Macartney
contribute articles to the WINs.
WINs are covered by copyright laws and may not be
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