April 2009 Archives

CIA Air Charter Contract Lets Panetta Jet Home in Secure Comfort

By Jeff Stein | April 30, 2009 3:10 PM | | Comments (0)

James Bond didn't fly home commercial, and neither does Leon Panetta.

On April 9, the CIA invited charter airline companies to bid on a contract to ferry its director home to Monterey, Calif., about a half dozen times a year.
 
The value of the contract, according to an airlines consultant familiar with CIA contracting, is about $325,000 a year.
Continue reading CIA Air Charter Contract Lets Panetta Jet Home in Secure Comfort.

Embattled Harman Challenges Columnist to Road Race

By Jeff Stein | April 29, 2009 3:08 PM | | Comments (3)

Embattled California Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., shrugged off woes over a wiretapping controversy Wednesday and claimed "Best Team Name Honors" for this year's Capital Challenge mini-marathon race.

"Tapped Out," an obvious reference to revelations that Harman was overheard by government wiretappers in conversations with a suspected Israeli intelligence agent in 2005, evidently won the judges' hearts as best team moniker.  

Sponsored by the American Council of Life Insurers, the three-mile jog draws a large congressional turnout.  It begins and ends in southeast Washington's Anacostia Park

The eight term-Democrat took the occasion to throw a road-race challenge to SpyTalk, which has taken the lead in exposing the wiretapped conversations and allegations that Bush administration officials effectively blocked FBI agents from questioning her about promises she was said to have made to the target of a FBI foreign counterintelligence operation.
Continue reading Embattled Harman Challenges Columnist to Road Race .

Harman Makes Fun of Her Travails

By Jeff Stein | April 28, 2009 3:08 PM | | Comments (0)

You can't say Jane Harman doesn't have a sense of humor.

The California Democrat, besieged all last week by revelations of a wiretapped conversation with a suspected Israeli agent, has dubbed tomorrow's road race team, "Tapped Out."
Continue reading Harman Makes Fun of Her Travails.

What Did Top Spook Blair Really Say About Harman and the NSA?

By Jeff Stein | April 28, 2009 12:55 AM | | Comments (0)

The Jane Harman wiretap controversy is convoluted enough without key officials changing their stories every day.

First there was Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif. editing her explanations of fundraising flaps, her Israeli friends and her campaign to get the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee. 

Then came Speaker Nancy Pelosi revising and extending her remarks on what she knew about the Harman wiretap. 

Now comes Dennis C. Blair, the erstwhile navy admiral who is Director of National Intelligence, the third official to lead that office since 2005.

More confusion.
Continue reading What Did Top Spook Blair Really Say About Harman and the NSA?.

Repetitive Interrogations Reveal CIA's Lack of Spies, Agency Veterans Say

By Jeff Stein | April 23, 2009 8:45 PM | | Comments (4)

In the continuing cacophony over what torture is and whether it "works," an important point has gone missing, say current and former counterterrorism operatives.

The CIA's reliance on repeated, and brutal, "enhanced" interrogation techniques shows how few spies the spy agency had before and after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

That made the agency's reliance on squeezing new information out of captured terrorist suspects all the more desperate, many say.
Continue reading Repetitive Interrogations Reveal CIA's Lack of Spies, Agency Veterans Say.

Intelligence Officials Tipped Pelosi To Harman Wiretap

By Jeff Stein | April 22, 2009 10:33 PM | | Comments (5)

Intelligence officials, angry that former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had blocked an FBI investigation into Democratic Rep. Jane Harman's interactions with a suspected Israeli agent, tipped off Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, that Harman had been picked up on a court-ordered National Security Agency wiretap targeting the agent.

In doing so, the officials flouted an order by Gonzales not to inform Pelosi, three former national security officials said.
Continue reading Intelligence Officials Tipped Pelosi To Harman Wiretap.

Source: Wiretap Caught Harman Discussing Pelosi Fundraising Flap

By Jeff Stein | April 22, 2009 12:37 PM | | Comments (2)

California Democrat Jane Harman, battling a controversy over her interactions with a suspected Israeli spy, was overheard on a 2005  wiretap discussing a failed fundraising ploy designed to get her named chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, according to a former national security official who has read the transcript.

Harman was heard lamenting to the suspected Israeli agent how the tactics of a major Jewish fundraiser to use the threat of withholding political donations to California Democrat Nancy Pelosi to win Harman the gavel of the House Select Committee on Intelligence had badly backfired, the former official said.
Continue reading Source: Wiretap Caught Harman Discussing Pelosi Fundraising Flap.

Obama at CIA: Spooks Swoon Like Tweeners at a Myley Cyrus Concert

By Jeff Stein | April 21, 2009 6:40 PM | | Comments (0)

Sure, President Obama got a warm welcome at the CIA. Everybody saw that.

But according to the New York Daily News' James Gordon Meek, the spooks melted like teen girls at a rock concert. 
Continue reading Obama at CIA: Spooks Swoon Like Tweeners at a Myley Cyrus Concert.

Harman, AIPAC, NSA: What did I Know, and When Did I Know It?

By Jeff Stein | April 21, 2009 2:20 AM | | Comments (2)

The tremendous interest in my story yesterday about a 2005 NSA wiretap picking up California Democratic Rep. Jane Harman conversing with a suspected Israeli agent took me by surprise, frankly.

It's always gratifying to find so many people paying attention to things like this when Carrie Prejean is only a click away. 

The first thing I want to dispel, though, is the apparently widespread notion that the timing of my story Monday was somehow related to: (1) the upcoming trial of former AIPAC lobbyists Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman; (2) the raging debate over the NSA's warrantless wiretaps, (3) the Justice Department/CIA's torture memos; (4) anything else.
Continue reading Harman, AIPAC, NSA: What did I Know, and When Did I Know It?.

The Curious Murder of CIA Targeter William Bennett

By Jeff Stein | April 15, 2009 5:35 PM | | Comments (1)

The case of former CIA contractor William Bennett, slain while out on a walk with his wife in rural Loudoun County, Va., gets interestinger and interestinger.  

Bennett, it turns out, was involved in the disastrously mistaken, May 1999 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by NATO warplanes.

That, and other curious facets of the case, has prompted the attention of influential national security bloggers Laura Rozen, who writes The Cable for Foreign Policy.com, and Pat Lang, the former top Middle East analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Continue reading The Curious Murder of CIA Targeter William Bennett.

The Guantanamo Officers' Club

By Jeff Stein | April 14, 2009 9:58 PM | | Comments (2)

About 20 years ago I had the privilege to interview Gen. George L. Mabry, the second most decorated soldier in the history of the U.S. Army, at his home in Columbia, S.C.

Mabry had been awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroics in World War Two. The young captain had already earned a chestful of ribbons for his "Saving Private Ryan" performance at Utah Beach on June 6, 1944. Only the legendary Audie Murphy earned more medals.

But five months later, in the Huertgen Forest near Schevenhutte, Germany, Mabry, 27, raced past his forward observers to cut through some mine-rigged Concertina wire. 

Clearing a path for his soldiers, and he then captured three enemy bunkers in succession, killing three German soldiers, disabling another with his rifle butt and another with his bayonet. He captured nine other Germans.

You can read the entire citation at the Medal of Honor site, here.

What you will not read in his citation is what he told me in his quiet study, only months before he died in 1990.
Continue reading The Guantanamo Officers' Club.

Arming Crews Against Pirates is Not Going to Do It

By Jeff Stein | April 14, 2009 2:56 PM | | Comments (3)

Boneheads like Bill O'Reilly are, as expected, calling for arming, or putting armed guards on, every cargo ship in the Gulf of Aden.

Which only goes to show that for every difficult problem there's always a simple, and stupid, solution.
Continue reading Arming Crews Against Pirates is Not Going to Do It .

SEALs and Somali Pirates: Special Ops Finally Gets a Happy Ending

By Jeff Stein | April 13, 2009 2:12 PM | | Comments (7)

Finally, reality caught up to the movies.

Americans have been waiting a long time for a U.S. Special Ops team to win one outside the movie theater.
Continue reading SEALs and Somali Pirates: Special Ops Finally Gets a Happy Ending .

A Weird Kind of Justice in the Indictment of an Anti-Castro Terrorist

By Jeff Stein | April 9, 2009 8:47 PM | | Comments (2)

The feds finally got their hombre.

This week's indictment of the famously elusive anti-Castro terrorist Luis Carriles Posada, a onetime CIA agent and professional counterrevolutionary, is the legal equivalent of driving a wooden stake into his heart.

But maybe it's wrong.
Continue reading A Weird Kind of Justice in the Indictment of an Anti-Castro Terrorist.

The Mysterious Case of CIA Interrogator Mark Swanner

By Jeff Stein | April 8, 2009 11:09 PM | | Comments (0)

There are 14 names in the confidential Red Cross report that surfaced last week on the CIA's "ill treatment" of detainees.

But you will not find in it the name of Manadel al-Jamadi, an Iraqi who was picked up by U.S. Navy SEALS in Baghdad and interrogated by the CIA.

That's because Jamadi died in the care of Mark Swanner, a 44-year-old CIA interrogator who battered the prisoner at the ghastly Abu Ghraib in 2003. 
Continue reading The Mysterious Case of CIA Interrogator Mark Swanner.

Wanted: DoD Counterintelligence Instructor, No Education Required

By Jeff Stein | April 7, 2009 3:45 PM | | Comments (2)

A job ad for an advanced counterintelligence instructor at a Defense Department school has professionals in the field hopping mad.

Why? The ad, placed by a military subcontractor, says "No Education Required."

It "left me speechless," said John Lenczowski, founder and president of the Institute for World Politics (IWP), in a widely circulated e-mail to friends deploring the minimal requirement for an instructor at the Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy, in Elkridge, Md.

"Toward the end (of the ad), I read three words that left me speechless," said Lenczowski, who was a Soviet expert in the White House National Security Council in the Reagan administration. "Incredulous, I read them again Yes, unfortunately, they were still there."

"No education required."
Continue reading Wanted: DoD Counterintelligence Instructor, No Education Required.

Pity the Poor North Korean Rocket Scientist Who Got It Wrong

By Jeff Stein | April 6, 2009 2:57 PM | | Comments (2)

Amid the weekend's scare stories about the nuclear Hermit Kingdom's missile test, few seemed to notice that it fizzled out.

And the sight of the rocket's third stage plopping into the North Pacific could present the missile bureaucrats who toil under North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il with an "uncomfortable" review, notes Joseph Bermudez, Jane Defense Weekly's expert on the secretive communist country.
Continue reading Pity the Poor North Korean Rocket Scientist Who Got It Wrong.

What's the Big Deal About Hersh's 'Assassinations' Claim?

By Jeff Stein | April 2, 2009 3:06 PM | | Comments (6)

Ever since the CIA's counterterrorism chief in 2001 was famously quoted by a CIA agent as saying, "Capture Bin Laden, kill him and bring his head back in a box on dry ice,"  no one from President Bush on down has denied that U.S. agencies have full latitude to kill suspected terrorists. 
 
President George W. Bush himself said he wanted Osama Bin Laden and his cronies "dead or alive." Vice President Dick Cheney talked about going over to "the dark side" to get al Qaeda operatives. And during his campaign for the White House, Barack Obama declared, "We must take out Osama Bin Laden and his lieutenants."
 
But when famed investigative reporter Seymour Hersh talked a few weeks ago about "targeted assassinations" ordered up by an "executive assassination wing" centered in Cheney's office and carried out by the Joint Special Operations Command, much of the news media went into a tizzy.
Continue reading What's the Big Deal About Hersh's 'Assassinations' Claim?.

Chinese Dissident Here Describes Attacks by Beijing's Secret Agents

By Jeff Stein | April 2, 2009 12:09 AM | | Comments (0)

A leading Chinese dissident in the Washington, D.C., area says in a forthcoming book that Beijing's secret agents in the United States are tapping her phones, intercepting her e-mail and trying to intimidate her.

Her accusations are backed up by other dissidents, the FBI and a Virginia congressman whose own files were infiltrated by Chinese hackers.
Continue reading Chinese Dissident Here Describes Attacks by Beijing's Secret Agents.
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