CIA - NSA - FBI-4

The lessons of Aldrich Ames

Richard Badalamente
Tri-City Herald, April 10, 2019

In the Fall of 1985, the KGB rolled up all of the CIA’s assets in the Soviet Union in one fell swoop. Ten agents were executed and countless others imprisoned. This was the direct result of Aldrich Ames’s treachery.

At the time of his arrest in 1994, Ames had compromised more highly-classified CIA assets than any other officer in history. Beyond the lives destroyed, the damage Ames did to U.S. national security and the security of our allies was and remains incalculable.

In my more than 40 years of military and government service, I have worked in a wide range of intelligence areas requiring different levels of clearance. When I retired from government service, I held a top secret/sensitive compartmented information (SCI) clearance. Before being granted my clearances, every facet of my life was interrogated, my neighbors were questioned, and I was subjected to polygraph examinations, repeated at intervals.

Such careful vetting is required in accordance with Executive Order 12968, “in order to protect our citizens, our democratic institutions, and our participation within the community of nations. The unauthorized disclosure of information classified in the national interest can cause irreparable damage to the national security and loss of human life.”

Multiple news outlets, including the New York Times, Newsweek, and the Washington Post, reported that President Trump pressured his then Chief of Staff, John Kelly, to facilitate getting the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a top secret clearance. He did this despite the recommendations of personnel security experts. Trump has denied he intervened.

As outlined in a PBS interview with Bloomberg’s Caleb Melby, Kushner fell afoul of three areas of EO 12968:

• He has substantial business, financial, or property interest in a foreign country, or in foreign-owned or foreign-operated business;

• He failed to report (multiple times) association with foreign nationals;

• Representatives or nationals from a foreign country are or may be acting to increase his vulnerability to possible future exploitation, inducement, manipulation, pressure, or coercion.

Whenever there is any doubt about the advisability of granting a clearance to any individual, according to EO 12968, the doubt is to be resolved in favor of national security.

Reportedly, John Kelly, and then Chief Counsel Don McGahn, felt so uncomfortable with Kushner’s clearance being granted that they each wrote memos for the record on the matter. The House Oversight Committee has requested information on the White House’s security clearance process. To date, the White House has not complied. Unfortunately, those memos, whether they turn up or not, won’t keep America safe. In order for that to happen, we need a president who learns from past mistakes and follows the guidelines designed to avoid future ones.

Aldrich Ames is serving a life sentence, without the possibility of parole, in the Federal Correctional Institution in Terre Haute, Indiana. He first obtained his job with the CIA through his father, who worked in the CIA Directorate of Operations.

Richard Badalamente served in the U.S. Air Force and worked at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the International Atomic Energy Agency. He is currently a writer living in Kennewick.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Lithuania and Romania complicit in C.I.A. renditions, European court says

The European Court of Human Rights censured Lithuania and Romania on May 31 for their complicity in the C.I.A.’s secret 1980s program of renditions, saying the two European nations had facilitated the ill-treatment and arbitrary detention of two men accused by the United States of terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks. The men — Abu Zubaydah, a stateless man of Palestinian heritage, and Abd al-Rahim Husseyn Muhammad al-Nashiri, a Saudi citizen of Yemeni descent — were at the center of an earlier hearing by the same court in Strasbourg, France.

The court ordered Lithuania to pay Abu Zubaydah a total of €130,000, roughly $152,000, in damages and costs. It also ordered Romania to pay €100,000 in damages to Mr. Nashiri.

The court said, both countries “had known of the purpose of the C.I.A.’s activities” on their territory, and the authorities were aware that both men had been subjected to “an extremely harsh detention regime.”

The two countries did not immediately respond publicly to the court’s findings, which offered judicial confirmation of widely reported cooperation with the C.I.A. after the attacks in 2001 in New York and on the Pentagon.

Abu Zubaydah, who was seized in Faisalabad, Pakistan, in March 2002, had been “initially considered by the U.S. authorities as the ‘third or fourth man’ in Al Qaeda” and “a planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and a senior lieutenant to Osama bin Laden,” the European court said in a summary of its findings. “He was the first so-called ‘high-value detainee’ detained by the C.I.A. at the start of the ‘war on terror’ launched by President George W. Bush,” the court said.

For his part, Mr. Nashiri was seized in Dubai in October 2002, suspected of involvement in an attack in 2000 on the United States Navy destroyer, the Cole, in Yemen the same year, and on a French oil tanker, the Limburg, in 2002. He had been held in Romania between 2004 and 2005, the court said.

In Abu Zubaydah’s case, the court said, his detention in Lithuania “according to C.I.A. documents had as standard practice included blindfolding or hooding, solitary confinement, the continuous use of leg shackles, and exposure to noise and light.”

The court cited testimony from the two men to the International Committee of the Red Cross in 2006 and to the United States military’s Combatant Status Review Tribunal in 2007. Both had spoken of experiencing harsher ordeals.

Mr. Nashiri had accused his interrogators of “hanging him upside down for almost a month; subjecting him to waterboarding; making him stand in a box for a week; slamming him into a wall; and keeping him in positions of stress.”

The European court, sitting as a panel of seven judges, concluded that the detention center where Abu Zubaydah was held in Lithuania was one code-named Site Violet. “The Lithuanian authorities had known of the purposes of the C.I.A.’s activities on its territory and had cooperated,” the judges found.

Their rulings used similar language to describe Romania’s behavior at a location identified as Detention Site Black. It accused both European nations of failing to carry out “proper” investigations of their roles in the rendition program.

In 2013, the Open Society Justice Initiative, a rights advocacy group, said that more than 50 countries had cooperated in the C.I.A.’s detention, rendition and interrogation program after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The cases shed light on the murky and once-hidden world of renditions, in which captives suspected of major terrorist acts were shuttled between secret detention facilities and subjected to what the Bush administration labeled “enhanced” interrogation techniques — a phrase taken by rights activists to mean torture and degradation.

The European court had previously ruled in 2014 that Abu Zubaydah and Mr. Nashiri had been subjected to “torture and inhuman or degrading treatment” at a center run by the C.I.A. after they were brought to a prison in northeast Poland. The court ordered the Polish government to make similar payments to the two men.

In separate rulings issued simultaneously on May 31, the court said that both had been moved between secret facilities in Afghanistan and elsewhere before they were transferred to the United States prison at Guantánamo Bay. The court said it had been permitted no access to either man because they were both “still being held by the U.S. in very restrictive conditions” at the Guantánamo facility.

– edited from The New York Times, May 31, 2018
PeaceMeal. July/August 2018

A newly assertive C.I.A. expands its Taliban hunt in Afghanistan

The C.I.A. is expanding its covert operations in Afghanistan, sending small teams of highly experienced officers and contractors alongside Afghan forces to hunt and kill Taliban militants across the country, according to two senior American officials, the latest sign of the agency’s increasingly integral role in President Trump’s counterterrorism strategy.

The assignment marks a shift for the C.I.A. in the country, where it primarily had been focused on defeating Al Qaeda and helping the Afghan intelligence service. The C.I.A. has tradition-ally been resistant to an open-ended campaign against the Taliban, the primary militant group, believing it was a waste of the agency’s time and money and would put officers at greater risk as they embarked on more frequent missions.

Former agency officials assert that the military, with its vast resources and manpower, is better suited to conducting large-scale counterinsurgencies. The C.I.A.’s paramilitary division, which is taking on the assignment, numbers only in the hundreds and is deployed all over the world.

The expansion reflects the C.I.A.’s assertive role under its new director, Mike Pompeo, to combat insurgents around the world. The agency is already poised to broaden its program of covert drone strikes into Afghanistan. It had been centered on the tribal regions of Pakistan, with occasional strikes in Syria and Yemen.

But the mission is a tacit acknowledgment that to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table — a key component of President Trump’s strategy for the country — the United States will need to aggressively fight the insurgents. In outlining his security policies for Afghanistan and the rest of South Asia this summer, Mr. Trump vowed to loosen restrictions on hunting terrorists. “The killers need to know they have nowhere to hide, that no place is beyond the reach of American might and American arms,” Mr. Trump said. “Retribution will be fast and powerful.”

The new effort will be led by small units known as counterterrorism pursuit teams. They are managed by C.I.A. paramilitary officers from the agency’s Special Activities Division and operatives from the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s intelligence arm, and include elite American troops from the Joint Special Operations Command. The majority of the forces, however, are Afghan militia members.

For years, the primary job of the C.I.A.’s paramilitary officers in the country has been training the Afghan militias. As the American military drew down its presence in Afghanistan in 2014, the counterterrorism teams continued to conduct missions in Afghan cities and in the surrounding countryside, and with greater autonomy. The units have long had a wide run of the battlefield and have been accused of indiscriminately killing Afghan civilians in raids and with airstrikes.

The C.I.A.’s expanded role will augment missions carried out by military units, meaning more of the United States’ combat role in Afghanistan will be hidden from public view. “The American people don’t mind if there are C.I.A. teams waging a covert war there,” said Ken Stiles, a former agency counterterrorism officer.

In announcing the C.I.A.’s expansion into the field, Mr. Pompeo said, “If we are not out pushing the envelope, the agency simply will not succeed.” The change comes amid an increase in violence in Afghanistan in recent months. Attacks on security forces and the police have taken a heavy toll. A record number of civilians, 1,662, were killed in the first half of the year, and another 3,581 were wounded, according to the United Nations.

– edited from The New York Times, October 22, 2017
PeaceMeal, Nov/December 2017

Lawsuit opens a window on brutal C.I.A. interrogations

Fifteen years after he helped devise the brutal interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects in secret C.I.A. prisons, John Bruce Jessen, a former military psychologist, expressed ambivalence about the program. He described himself and a fellow military psychologist, James Mitchell, as reluctant participants in using the techniques, some of which are widely viewed as torture, but also justified the practices as effective in getting resistant detainees to cooperate.“I think any normal, conscionable man would have to consider carefully doing something like this,” Dr. Jessen said in a deposition. “I deliberated with great, soulful torment about this, and obviously I concluded that it could be done safely or I wouldn’t have done it.”

The two psychologists, whom C.I.A. officials have called architects of the interrogation program — a designation they dispute, were defendants in the only lawsuit likely to hold participants accountable for causing harm.

The interrogation program has been well documented, but under deposition Drs. Jessen and Mitchell provided new details about it, their roles and their rationales. Their accounts were sometimes at odds with their own correspondence at the time, as well as previous portrayals of them by officials and other interrogators as eager participants in the program.

The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Spokane, Wash., was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Gibbons law firm of Newark on behalf of three former prisoners of the Central Intelligence Agency: Mohamed Ben Soud, a Libyan who was detained by the C.I.A. in Afghanistan and was locked in small boxes, slammed against a wall, and doused with buckets of ice water while naked and shackled; Suleiman Salim, a Tanzanian captured in 2003 and also held by the C.I.A. in Afghanistan, who was beaten, isolated in a dark cell for months, doused with water, and deprived of sleep for days; and Gul Rahman, an Afghan, who was taken from his home in Pakistan in 2002 and died of hypothermia in a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan several weeks later after being shackled to a floor in near-freezing conditions.

The suit sought unspecified monetary damages for the two surviving plaintiffs and the estate of the third.

Revelations about the C.I.A. practices set off global denunciations and bitter divisions at home. They led to an eventual ban on the techniques and a prohibition by the American Psychological Association against members’ participation in national security interrogations. A 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report condemned the interrogation techniques as brutal and ineffective in providing “unique” intelligence information by other means.

For years, Dr. Mitchell, polished and assertive, has defended the two men’s actions in the press and in a recent book, while Dr. Jessen remained silent. But Dr. Jessen answered questions under oath on January 20, the same day that President Trump was inaugurated. During the election campaign, Mr. Trump had pledged to revive the use of torture, including waterboarding, though he later backed off.

The two psychologists argued that the C.I.A., for which they were contractors, controlled the program. But it is difficult to successfully sue C.I.A. officials because of government immunity.

Under the agency’s direction, the two men said, they proposed the “enhanced interrogation” techniques — which were then authorized by the George W. Bush Justice Department — applied them and trained others to do so. Their business received $81 million from the agency over the years of their contract.

The two psychologists dispute the C.I.A.’s designation of them as the architects of the interrogation program. Yet, Dr. Mitchell has offered himself as a public speaker about his role in the C.I.A. program and his insights on “the minds of those trying to destroy America.” His fee is listed as $15,000 to $25,000 on the site of Worldwide Speakers Group, which states: “Dr. Mitchell led the development of the C.I.A.’s enhanced interrogation program after 9/11 and was a primary interrogator from its inception.”

In his deposition, Dr. Mitchell, who once said that most people would prefer to have their legs broken than to be waterboarded, disagreed with a plaintiff lawyer’s reference to the practice as painful. “It sucks, you know. I don’t know that it’s painful,” he said. “I’m using the word distressing.”

At the same time, he revealed in his deposition that he, along with others, urged the C.I.A. to destroy graphic videotapes the agency had made of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques. The destruction of the tapes became the subject of investigations by the Justice Department and Congress.

Both Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen rejected the notion that men subjected to the harsh techniques suffered any long-term physical or psychological damage. But The New York Times found a pattern of long-term psychological damage among dozens of former detainees subjected to brutal treatment by the United States. The men described grappling with depression, anxiety, withdrawal and flashbacks.

The advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights released a report contending that the two psychologists and the C.I.A. engaged in unethical experimentation on detainees, which is banned by the Nuremberg Code for health professionals developed after World War II. The group said the explicit mention of applied research in the psychologists’ contracts with the agency and similar references in C.I.A. cables indicated that the enhanced interrogation program “was itself an applied research regime and implicitly conceptualized as such by the C.I.A.”

At a hearing in Spokane on July 28, federal Judge Justin L. Quackenbush said he would deny motions by both sides to rule summarily in their favor in advance of a trial scheduled for September 5. He further stated he would not allow it to become a political trial. Instead, he said, the trial would focus on whether the plaintiffs were subjected to torture, and if so, whether the defendants legally and factually aided and abetted that torture.

An out-of-court settlement in the landmark lawsuit, announced August 17, marked the first time the C.I.A. or its private contractors have been held accountable for the interrogation program, legal experts said. Deborah Pearlstein, professor at the Cardozo Law School in New York, said, “This puts an exclamation mark at the end of ‘don’t torture!’ ”

The group Physicians for Human Rights said the case shows that health professionals who participate in torture will be held accountable. “These two psychologists had a fundamental ethical obligation to do no harm, which they perverted to inflict severe pain and suffering on human beings in captivity,” said Donna McKay, executive director of the group.

Terms of the settlement were not disclosed.

– edited from The New York Times and The Associated Press
PeaceMeal, Sept./October 2017