Category Archives: Intelligence

What IF China had a WikiLeaks?

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Earlier this week, Tom Friedman had a column in which he “couldn’t help but wonder: What if China had a WikiLeaker…?”

It was a good column as far as it went, because it highlighted the way self-destructive American partisan gridlock prevents us as a nation from facing the future wisely and pragmatically — unlike the Chinese. So it was that he imagined a leaked Chinese diplomatic message that said in part:

Things are going well here for China. America remains a deeply politically polarized country, which is certainly helpful for our goal of overtaking the U.S. as the world’s most powerful economy and nation. But we’re particularly optimistic because the Americans are polarized over all the wrong things.

There is a willful self-destructiveness in the air here as if America has all the time and money in the world for petty politics. They fight over things like — we are not making this up — how and where an airport security officer can touch them….

Americans just had what they call an “election.” Best we could tell it involved one congressman trying to raise more money than the other (all from businesses they are supposed to be regulating) so he could tell bigger lies on TV more often about the other guy before the other guy could do it to him. This leaves us relieved. It means America will do nothing serious to fix its structural problems: a ballooning deficit, declining educational performance, crumbling infrastructure and diminished immigration of new talent.

The ambassador recently took what the Americans call a fast train — the Acela — from Washington to New York City. Our bullet train from Beijing to Tianjin would have made the trip in 90 minutes. His took three hours — and it was on time! Along the way the ambassador used his cellphone to call his embassy office, and in one hour he experienced 12 dropped calls — again, we are not making this up. We have a joke in the embassy: “When someone calls you from China today it sounds like they are next door. And when someone calls you from next door in America, it sounds like they are calling from China!” Those of us who worked in China’s embassy in Zambia often note that Africa’s cellphone service was better than America’s.

But the Americans are oblivious. They travel abroad so rarely that they don’t see how far they are falling behind. Which is why we at the embassy find it funny that Americans are now fighting over how “exceptional” they are. Once again, we are not making this up…

Very good points — the kinds of smart points that you expect Tom Friedman to make, which is why he’s one of my favorite columnists. But I was still disappointed on a gut level, because I had expected the column to answer the rhetorical question with an even blunter, simpler, more obvious truth.

As it happened, WSJ columnist Daniel Henninger today provided the straightforward three-word answer that Friedman did not (the boldfacing is mine):

China’s security solution is to suppress the flow of information, let creativity be damned, and steal from us. (The New York Times’s Thomas Friedman yesterday asked: “What if China had a WikiLeaker?” The three-word answer: They’d execute him.)

Henninger is not usually one of my faves, but this was a pretty decent column about how tough it is, bordering on futility, to prevent such leaks in the Internet age.

And my disappointment aside, Mr. Friedman’s column was excellent as well, because it, too, said things that need to be said over and over.

But it occurred to me that, whether you’re concerned that our nation isn’t pursuing the right priorities for our future competitiveness, or just outraged that the U.S. government hasn’t taken serious action to find, apprehend and lock up that sleazebag Julian Assange for the rest of his life and then some, the roots of the problem are the same.

I’ll put it this simply: The lack of national consensus. Or another way, a perverse refusal to acknowledge that we’re all in this together, and act accordingly.

I try to imagine someone like Julian Assange wandering free anywhere in the world controlled by allies of this country back, say, in the 1940s. And I can’t. There would have been such a powerful sense of a shared national interest, and instantaneous consensus that someone leaking classified military data and confidential diplomatic communications was the enemy of this country that effective action would have been taken to stop him.

Today, a creep like Assange exploits the HUGE division in our country over our role in the world. (We can’t even decide whether we’re fighting one or two wars.) Now before my antiwar friends loudly protest that I’m blaming them for not getting with the program, note that I am NOT. I’m not blaming either doves or hawks. It’s the GAP between us itself that I blame. That’s the No Man’s Land in which Assange walks with impunity. Only after diplomatic communications were compromised this week did we achieve anything like a consensus of outrage between left and right, and thus far even that is too tepid to lead to effective action. (Oh, and by the way, I’m not suggesting we be as ruthless as the Chinese. But somewhere between the harshness of that system and the utterly helpless fecklessness of ours today lies a rational medium, an effective course of action for liberal democracies that hope to survive.)

As for Mr. Friedman’s concerns… go back to that same time — the war years, and just after — and look at the way we formed consensus to do profoundly bold and intelligent things to provide for a better future for our own country and the rest of the world that we suddenly dominated: the GI Bill, the Marshall Plan, the interstate highway system, the policies that boosted homeownership, and on and on.

Today, we find it impossible to come up with a coherent, rational energy policy or keep our infrastructure up to date or deal with the deficit or accomplish anything else requiring bold action because ANY bold action envisioned by the right or the left will be fought, vilified, trashed and frustrated to the utmost of the opposition’s ability (and they’ll do so not because of any merit or lack of merit in the idea, but because the other side came up with it). And again, I’m not blaming either the right or the left, but the GAP, and the insane tit-for-tat game that BOTH sides think is more important than the real needs of the nation.

So whatever you think about the implications of a hypothetical Chinese WikiLeaker, the problem is the same.

It’s a problem that has so integrated itself into our public life that it’s hard even to think of a way out. It’s like a tumor with tentacles slithering to wrap themselves around every fold of the victim’s brain — very tough to remove. I don’t really know how to get to where we need to be. Except, of course, to vote UnParty (if ever given the chance).

Ranting about “Rubicon”

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I’ve been raving about AMC’s “Rubicon” all season, and now that I’ve seen the last episode, I’ll rant about it a bit.

But first… SPOILER ALERT! OK, now we’ll proceed…

What was THAT about? Call that an ending? Even for a season?

I’ll share with you this partial litany of objections that I just shared with Jim Foster, who has been sharing his enjoyment of the series with me via e-mail throughout the season:

  • What about… the woman who was just murdered?
  • What about… the DVD she didn’t give Will — and he didn’t bother to find and pick up?
  • What about… David’s last message (which she, incredibly, didn’t pause a few minutes to see — you know, in case the disc broke or something)?
  • What about… the foxy neighbor lady who turned out suddenly to be a spook?
  • WHY didn’t Will go to Kale Ingram — the only professional he has on his side, and the only person with a clue what to do in the face of violence — the instant he got back to the office?
  • WHY on Earth would he first confront Spangler alone, without witnesses, thereby giving the bad guy at least a chance of killing him before he is able to expose him to anyone?
  • How about that Maggie, huh? ‘Bout time he got around to her… (this is not actually relevant to my objections; I just wanted to say it)
  • What happened to the writers of all the earlier episodes, which were GOOD? Were they killed by terrorists just before this one?

“Rubicon”: Better than “Mad Men” — so far

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I sort of vaguely griped about the season opener of “Mad Men,” and I don’t seem to be alone in feeling a certain ennui regarding the doings of Don Draper et al. (although I agree the recent episode centered on the admirable Joan was an improvement).

But just to show that I don’t just gripe and criticize… the new AMC original series that runs right before it, “Rubicon,” is thus far excellent.

I still don’t know why it’s called “Rubicon” — who or what has crossed a line that means there is no going back? — but so far it invites comparison to the very best British dramas one finds on PBS (not just in terms of content, but the direction and cinematography; it just LOOKS and FEELS like one of those shows). It’s not quite up to the standard — yet — of the greatest spy drama ever shown on the telly, the BBC’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” but it’s very good (perhaps comparable to “Game, Set and Match“). And unlike with “Mad Men,” the characters don’t repel you; you can actually CARE what happens to them.

I was reminded to say something about “Rubicon” by my good friend Jim Foster, who wrote me earlier this week praising it. To which I responded:

I’ve watched the first two, and taped the third last night (I had to reach way back in my memory to recall how to tape anything, but I did it).
Way better than Mad Men so far.
Although I have problems. For one, let me ask you as a former newspaper features editor: How credible do you find it that a spy agency would be ABLE to coordinate messages in several different newspapers’ crossword puzzles? I mean, really? Hell, if you were the executive editor, you wouldn’t be able to coordinate it in your OWN paper…
Second: I find it incredible that this desk man walks the streets alert to surveillance and such, in his own home city. No way. A field agent in Moscow, or Beijing, or Tehran, mayBE — but a desk man walking home from work in the States? I don’t think so…

Jim answered that while a desk man’s tradecraft would be sloppy, he didn’t find it that incredible that he spotted a tail — especially when the follower was clumsy himself. As for my other point, he said, “I agree with you about the crossword puzzles but am willing to suspend my disbelief on that, just because it’s fun.” As the former editor who among many other things was responsible for the crosswords in The State, Jim knows the mechanisms involved in that process, and therefore how incredible this plot device is. But point taken; I’ll suspend my disbelief.

The whole thing’s good enough that it makes me rethink not wanting to see “Breaking Bad,” even though I’ve always found the premise and promotion so off-putting. AMC is developing quite a reputation for quality. Although I’d hate to see them give up showing classic movies, since that’s probably the main thing for which I have cable.

We haven’t had a good spy swap in AGES…

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I’m watching with some fascination as the Russian spies we recently pulled in admit their guilt, and we get ready for a swap for some people the Russians are holding:

The US is to deport 10 people who spied for Moscow in exchange for four people convicted of espionage in Russia.
A judge in New York ordered the immediate deportation of the 10, and it is thought they may leave in hours.
The 10 had pleaded guilty to spying for a foreign country but a charge of laundering money was dropped.
Details of the four being freed by Russia were not given other than that all had had “alleged contact with Western intelligence agencies”.

Fascination, and a certain amount of nostalgia. Not only did I grow up in the Cold War (when world affairs were simpler — you were either on our side or theirs), but I’m a huge fan of such spy novelists as John le Carre and Len Deighton. This story’s got it all, including the James Bond/Austin Powers element of The Alluring Spy — a stock character that serious spy fiction didn’t stoop to, but there she is in the flesh, Anna Chapman of the bedroom eyes.

But wait? How are we going to have a proper swap without Checkpoint Charlie. Doh! I knew they shouldn’t have torn down that wall. The proper forms can’t be followed now!

That sort of ruins it for me. That, and the fact that these Russian spooks were so inept. Definitely not up to KGB standards. Putin should hang his head.

Another question — we’re swapping 10 for four? How come it always works out this way for us? And for Israel. You ever notice how Israel will do these swaps for like, 10,000 Palestinians for one IDF soldier? I suppose that says something about the value we place on our people, but still — seems to me like a rip-off.

The Candidate Was A Spy, and other startling revelations from Alvin Greene

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I may have found a paucity of coverage of the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in my local paper this morning, but the intel is coming in thick and fast from other sources today.

For instance, speaking of intel… didja know Alvin Greene served in military intelligence in the U.S. Army. Really. That’s what he told The Root, anyway. Kind of gives new meaning to the whole conspiracy theory thing, huh?

Read the whole interview here. An excerpt:

TR: Where did you campaign?
AG: All across the state.
TR: Any specificstops or speeches you can remember?
AG: Nothing in particular. I talked with a lot of people over the phone, and people in the press. They’ll print what they want in the press, just bits of it. I don’t know. It worked out. I worked hard. It’s not a big surprise.
TR: How do you plan to beat Jim DeMint in November?
AG: I would like to debate him in September. I would like an hour on a major network. Just to, you know, discuss issues about South Carolina and the rest of the country.
TR What do you think makes you a better candidate than DeMint?
AG: We have more unemployed now than any other time in South Carolina’s history, so something isn’t working. We spend two times more on inmates than students. Priorities are not in order. I want to make a difference and Jim–the incumbent Sen. Jim DeMint–he’s against the health care reform. They’re trying to repeal the health care law that was passed. The Republicans are trying to repeal the health care bill that was signed into law recently. Things like that. That’s the difference. I’m for health care reform. And getting folks to work here.
TR: Do you plan on getting a Web site now that you’re through the primaries?
AG: Well, I need campaign contributions to really get my Web site up. I’m working on that now, but that comes from campaign contributions.
TR: Do you have any?
AG: No, but I’m working on some things.

Sorry, but calling the president a ‘liar’ is out of bounds for BOTH parties

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Sigh. I really don’t want to have this argument with friends, especially not on the anniversary of 9/11, but I can’t let what Kathryn said over on Facebook stand without responding.

It was in reply to this post back here, in which I asserted that Democrats drag themselves down to Joe Wilson’s level when they respond to him by saying, “Bush lied.” I had thought it would be a teachable moment, in which I could say, See how bad y’all sounded over the past four years? See what it’s like when someone refuses to respect the president for partisan causes, declaring him and all he says illegitimate?

My good friend Kathryn responded:

Wait–Bush did lie, and got us into a war, and Obama didn’t lie last night at all–quite the contrary, and Wilson knew it according to the papers. Wilson was out of line and Democrats’ saying things today doesn’t put us on the level of a tantrum during the President’s speech either. Sorry.

To that, another friend, Randy Ewart, added:

I concur with Fenner – well said!

You know, I’d hoped we’d put this behind us when Bush went home to Texas. I certainly heaved a sigh of relief. I never liked the guy. I always resented the fact that he was president, when it should have been John McCain. (Remember how South Carolina ill-served the nation back in 2000?)

But the eight years of hatred that Democrats spewed at the guy, starting from the very beginning, with the Long Count in Florida, was an ugly thing to behold. And yes, it started that early. I remember a couple of conversations I had with Mike Fitts back in the summer of 2001, asking if he could explain the vitriol to me. It was obvious that Dems didn’t just disagree with the guy; they hated him. Which wasn’t good for the country. Yes, I had seen and decried the venom that Republicans had directed at Bill Clinton well before he’d had a chance to do anything to deserve it, too — I particularly recall the bumper stickers saying “Don’t Blame Me — I Voted for Bush” that cropped up on cars before his 1993 inauguration. But the reaction to Bush seemed to go even a step farther — and this was well before the “sins” that Democrats usually list when explaining their distaste for the man.

Oh, and I don’t recall Bush lying. Yes, I realize it’s an article of faith among y’all that he DID (what was it again — the WMD that he and everyone else firmly believed were there in Iraq, seeing as how he had actually USED some of them — or something else?), just as it is an article of faith among Republicans such as Joe Wilson that this president is lying when he tries to set the record straight. It is so important to them to conflate their twin bugaboos — “socialized medicine” and illegal immigration — that it is heresy for anyone (particularly the Chief Heretic) to suggest otherwise, heresy so foul that it wrings furious cries from their lips at inopportune moments.

(Just an aside: Isn’t it ironic that two men who have grabbed national attention by calling these two presidents liars are both named Joe Wilson? Oh, and that other Joe Wilson was wrong, too — the intel he brought back from Niger did NOT conclusively refute the yellowcake reports, according to the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report.)

And I’m not even going to get into that “got us into a war” stuff, except to say that we were already IN a war. Argue whether we should have reopened the front in Iraq when we did, fine. But we were already in a war.

I know y’all mean what you say, but I’m sorry — I see an obvious symmetry between Joe calling this president a liar and y’all calling the last one the same.Y’all have your perspective as Democrats, and Joe has his as a Republican. And I have mine as founder of the UnParty, so consider the source.

‘Detainees?’ Why not just call them ‘prisoners?’

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Today, reading about the latest on Gitmo and torture and prosecutions and so forth, I reached my saturation point on the word “detainees.”

Personally, I’m not too squeamish to go ahead and call them “prisoners.” Why don’t we just go ahead and do that? We’ve been holding some of these people since 2001, and many of them we don’t ever intend to let go (and if we do, we’re crazy). So why not “prisoners?”

Yes, I get it that their legal status is unsettled, and in U.S. crime-and-punishment parlance we generally save “prisoner” for someone duly convicted to spend time in a “prison,” which is an institution we distinguish from jails where people await trial or holding cells where they await bail or whatever.

But if we can’t be honest enough to say that Gitmo is a prison and they are prisoners, whatever the technicalities, could we please come up with something that sounds a little less prissy, somewhat less a-tiptoe, than “detainees?”

Whenever I hear the term, I picture a Victorian gentleman saying “Pardon me, sir, but I must detain you for a moment…”

Whose sensibilities are we overprotecting by the use of this word? Those who feel like the “detainees'” “rights” are being trampled? Those like me who are glad we have a secure place to put some of these people? (Hey, go ahead and close Gitmo if you’d like. That’s what Obama says he’ll do and it’s what McCain would have done, too. Fine. But find someplace just as secure to put the ones we need to hang onto.)

Maybe we could sort out all the rest of the mess — the legal status, the security issues, who should interrogate and how, whom to keep and whom to send home and whom to send to a third location, whether any of our own should be prosecuted, etc. — if we started by coming up with something less mealy-mouthed to call these people.

Israel readies itself for Iran move

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One of my most trusted sources of naval intelligence, a veritable 21st century Stephen Maturin — and no, I can’t just come out and tell you his name; that would be indiscreet — brings to my attention this Reuters item:

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – An Israeli submarine sailed the Suez Canal to the Red Sea as part of a naval drill last month, defense sources said on Friday, describing the unusual maneuver as a show of strategic reach in the face of Iran.

Israel long kept its three Dolphin-class submarines, which are widely assumed to carry nuclear missiles, away from Suez so as not to expose them to the gaze of Egyptian harbormasters.

It was unclear when last month the vessel left the Mediterranean. One source said the voyage was planned for months and so was not related to unrest after the June 12 re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whom the Israelis see as promoting the pursuit of nuclear weapons to threaten them.

Sailing to the Gulf without using Suez would oblige the diesel-fueled Israeli submarines, normally based in the Mediterranean, to circumnavigate Africa — a weeks-long voyage. That would have limited use in signaling Israel’s readiness to retaliate should it ever come under an Iranian nuclear attack….

Egyptian officials at Suez said they would neither confirm nor deny reports regarding military movements. One official said that if there was such a passage by Israelis in the canal, it would not be problematic as Egypt and Israel are not at war….

So let’s see — maybe Israel has nukes, and maybe not (officially, that is). And maybe their missiles can reach Iran from the Med, and maybe they can’t. But in case they can’t, one just took the shortcut to the Red Sea. And the Egyptians watched them do it. Or maybe they didn’t; they’re not saying…

Israel is making sure its pieces are in the proper places on the chessboard, in case Iran decides to go beyond bluster and make a move. And who wouldn’t, if they had (or didn’t have; they’re not saying) the pieces to move?

Who’s going to tell Al Gore?

I see in the Spartanburg paper that the “Father of the Internet” spoke to some students in the Upstate yesterday, and then I found to my surprise that his name is Leonard Kleinrock:

Speaking to the 18 students in Adriana Ahner’s Web page construction class — appropriately, via a 90-minute Webcast from his home in southern California, UCLA computer science professor Leonard Kleinrock spoke of how he overcame humble beginnings to eventually develop the mathematical theory of packet networks that became the foundation of Internet technology.

“I had a background of curiosity, independence and trying to make new things happen,” said Kleinrock, the son of Polish immigrants who was born and raised in New York City. “When I got to (Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a graduate student in the early 1960s), I decided not to follow the pack. I noticed that we were surrounded by computers that were full of information and interesting applications and capabilities and services, but they couldn’t talk to each other, and I figured that sooner or later that’s going to happen.”

Which makes me wonder — if this Kleinrock guy is the father of the Internet, then the Mother of the Internet needs to have a long talk with Al Gore.

Seriously, though, apparently the headline meant A father rather than THE father, because there were a number of guys involved in siring the ARPANet. Apparently, Mr. Kleinrock is actually the father (or a father) of packet switching, which I don’t really understand any more than I do the rest of how the Internet works; I just know it does.

But all this reminds me of the irony of the Internet — the most open, vulnerable (in a security sense) invention in the history of the world — starting as a defense thing. As we learned from the recent intel breach story regarding the Joint Strike Fighter, the LAST thing you want to put on the Internet is defense secrets. And yet, that’s now the whole thing started.

More security breaches

Just now got to looking at this morning’s Wall Street Journal, and I see they have another disturbing report about U.S. counterintelligence fecklessness.

Last week, it was Chinese and Russian spies probing our electricity grid to figure out how to shut in down in case of war.

This week, the WSJ reports that Chinese (probably) hackers have done the following:

WASHINGTON — Computer spies have broken into the Pentagon’s $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter project — the Defense Department’s costliest weapons program ever — according to current and former government officials familiar with the attacks.

Similar incidents have also breached the Air Force’s air-traffic-control system in recent months, these people say. In the case of the fighter-jet program, the intruders were able to copy and siphon off several terabytes of data related to design and electronics systems, officials say, potentially making it easier to defend against the craft.

The latest intrusions provide new evidence that a battle is heating up between the U.S. and potential adversaries over the data networks that tie the world together. The revelations follow a recent Wall Street Journal report that computers used to control the U.S. electrical-distribution system, as well as other infrastructure, have also been infiltrated by spies abroad…

The good news, to the extent that there was any, was that “while the spies were able to download sizable amounts of data related to the jet-fighter, they weren’t able to access the most sensitive material, which is stored on computers not connected to the Internet.”

Well, duh. So we actually took steps to defend SOME of our most sensitive national security data. Yay for our side.

But beyond that, we’re looking pretty pathetic.

Syria and WMD

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Just when you think you have time to worry about what Michael Phelps is smoking, there's always somebody out there coming up with something more pressing, something you hadn't even thought about lately.

Like Syria and Weapons of Mass Destruction. So you thought the Israelis had taken care of that with the strike on the nuke facility? Well, think again, according to Jane's, which sent me a release today about the following:

Syria Appears to be Developing its Chemical Weapons Capability

IHS Jane’s examines satellite imagery

London (18th February 2009) – Jane’s Intelligence Review used satellite images from commercial sources gathered between 2005 and 2008 to examine activity at the chemical weapons facility identified as Al Safir in northwest Syria.  Imagery from DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-1 satellite and GeoEye’s IKONOS satellite shows that the site contains not only a number of the defining features of a chemical weapons facility, but also that significant levels of construction have taken place at the facility’s production plant and adjacent missile base. This does not suggest that Syria is arming itself for an offensive, but it could have regional security implications given Syria’s tension with its neighbour, Israel.

One of the clearest indicators that Al Safir is a military facility as opposed to a civilian industrial complex is the level of defences protecting the site.  The facility is accessed only through a military checkpoint and each element within the facility has an additional security point.

Christian Le Mière, editor of Jane’s Intelligence Review, explained: “Construction at the Al Safir facility appears to be the most significant chemical weapons production, storage and weaponisation site in Syria.  Its presence indicates Syria’s desire to develop unconventional weapons either to act as a deterrent to conflict with Israel or as a force enhancer should any conflict ensue. The satellite imagery that IHS Jane’s has examined suggests that Damascus has sought to expand and develop Al Safir and its chemical weapons arsenal.”

LeMière concluded: “Further expansion of Al Safir is likely to antagonise Israel and highlight mutual mistrust, even as peace talks between the two neighbours progress intermittently.  Although an Israeli air strike on the facility may not yet be likely, such developments only serve to underline and exacerbate regional tensions.”

            ###

Actually, I'd tell you more but you have to subscribe to Jane's to get more. And I've got enough to worry about… They even offered me a contact number in case I wanted to see the satellite image. But I just don't have time to spend half a day shaking off surveillance, doubling back on my tracks, to meet a guy in Lisbon with a magazine in his left hand who will say, "Do you like good curry?," to which I have to remember the right thing to say or he'll garrote me.

Even if I went to the trouble, bud still wouldn't believe me that the WMD exists…

WashPost: CIA helps Pakistan, India work together on Mumbai case

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Today I got a release from The Washington Post touting a good-news story that for me explained a lot:

The Washington Post today reports that in the aftermath of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, the CIA orchestrated back-channel intelligence exchanges between India and Pakistan, allowing the two former enemies to quietly share highly sensitive evidence while the Americans served as neutral arbiters.
 
The exchanges, which began days after the deadly assault in late November, gradually helped the two sides overcome mutual suspicions and paved the way for Islamabad's announcement last week acknowledging that some of the planning for the attack had occurred on Pakistani soil, report Joby Warrick and Karen DeYoung.
 
The intelligence went well beyond the public revelations about the 10 Mumbai terrorists, and included sophisticated communications intercepts and an array of physical evidence detailing how the gunmen and their supporters planned and executed their three-day killing spree in the Indian port city.
 
Indian and Pakistani intelligence agencies separately shared their findings with the CIA, which relayed the details while also vetting the intelligence and filling in blanks with gleanings from its networks, the sources said. The U.S. role was described in interviews with Pakistani officials and confirmed by U.S. sources with detailed knowledge of the arrangement. The arrangement is ongoing, and it is unknown whether it will continue after the Mumbai case is settled.

As I've read reports in recent weeks about Pakistan making arrests and acknowledging the involvement of its nationals, I've sort of wondered at the back of my mind why this case has proceeded without a lot more tension — and maybe actions that went beyond tension — between these too long-time adversaries. Think about it — we could have had a nuclear war in the region by now. Then I read this.

This is just the kind of thing you HOPE your government is secretly doing, but you fear that too often it is not…

The passing of Yuri Nosenko

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Boy, we really have been preoccupied in this country with this presidential election, haven’t we? Me included.

Somehow, I had missed the fact that Yuri Nosenko had died, way back on Aug. 23, until I finally saw the obit in LAST week’s Economist.

Two things to say about Comrade Nosenko’s passing:

  1. Did you ever see the 1986 made-for-TV movie about him (I think it was on HBO), starring Tommy Lee Jones? Excellent.
  2. I often think of Mr. Nosenko when I hear from the antiwar people who talk about mistaken WMD intel as having been "lies," rather than a case of the administration simply believing the wrong intel.

The Nosenko case is a classic example of the fact that in intelligence, you often have to choose WHICH intel you are going to believe. After we locked up Mr. Nosenko for years, interrogating him under horrific conditions that one might choose to call "torture" without stretching the meaning of the word, believing him to be a KGB plant meant to discredit another defector (and to absolve the Kremlin of the JFK assassination), we finally rehabilitated him, said he was OK, gave him a check and a new identity.

But to this day, one can probably get a fierce debate going among folks with high security clearances as to which set of assumptions about Mr. Nosenko was the one based on lies.

In fact, the only reason we say he is dead is because the authorities TELL US he’s dead. We don’t even know what name he was living under "somewhere in the Southern United States." As the NYT reported:

Claire George, a former C.I.A. deputy director of operations, told The
Washington Post, which first reported Mr. Nosenko’s death on Wednesday,
that Mr. Nosenko’s treatment “was a terrible mistake.” But, he added,
“you can’t be in the spy business without making mistakes.”

Not up to KGB standards

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Waiting for Palin — Huckabee’s talking now — I got to thinking about the other side of the world. Have you read about the Russians’ lame attempt to pin the Georgian conflict on this guy Michael Lee White, who they claim is some sort of CIA master spy?

They base this on a passport White lost in 2005, and had replaced. They claim they found it at an outpost used by Georgian special forces.

From what I’ve read, if this guy’s a spy, he’s SO good, and so successful at NOT looking like a spy, that it seems unlikely he’d leave his passport lying around.

Look, if Putin wants to pin it on this guy, at the very least he could live up to the KGB tradition and make it look GOOD. They would have CAUGHT the guy, and turned him up at a press conference.

Why back in the day, the Rooskies could shoot down an ACTUAL U2 pilot, complete with a frickin’ poison needle hidden in a frickin’ silver dollar, and catch Ike lying about it.

Those were the days. Whatever happened to standards?

Colombians now have their own Entebbe

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Betancourt

    "We have an amazing military. I think only the Israelis can possibly pull off something like this."

            — Ingrid Betancourt

Just a week or two back, I read a front-page story in the WSJ about Ingrid Betancourt. The thrust of the story ("A Hostage to Fame") was that she was such a cause celebre around the world that she had too much value to the FARC, and therefore would probably never be traded. This caused me to think, "And this story isn’t helping with that, is it?"

But what wonderful news yesterday! Just goes to show good things can happen, even when they seem impossible.

And good for the Colombian military — they now have their own Entebbe, and that’s saying something. Nobody but the Israelis can say that, and the Israelis have gone through a good, long dry spell without one. Sure, there was the Syrian/North Korean nuke plant, but that’s nothing like putting boots on the ground way into the interior of Africa, complete with major-league deception and an impossible rescue.

One of my colleagues said this was better than Entebbe — it was, after all, cleaner. No hostages or rescuers killed, the deception complete from start to finish. Absolutely. Of course, the rescuers in this case had a lot more time to plan, months in which to infiltrate and gain the guerrillas’ trust. In the end, different kinds of operations. Entebbe was a brilliantly executed military coup de main. This latest caper was more of a perfect intelligence operation, involving no actual combat between armed antagonists. No, that’s not a perfect distinction — the military operation involved great intel, and the intelligence operation required military skills and discipline — but it serves.

Anyway, it was a great job, and the Colombians deserve a big Way to Go! from civilized folk everywhere.

France_betancourt_wart

Somebody’s Big, Stupid Second Cousin

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There was an intriguing piece today in the WSJ applying the principles of The Wisdom of Crowds to predicting the outcome of the 2008 presidential election. The logic of it was persuasive when it invoked Wikipedia, which I find to be far more useful and reliable than detractors claim (when people say it’s inaccurate, I want to know, Compared to what source of such breadth and depth?)

It was less persuasive in the preceding sentence, when it said,

This collective intelligence also accounts for why Google results,
determined by an algorithm reflecting the popularity of Web results
matching a search, are so relevant….

Today, wearing my vice president hat, I heard a presentation on new vistas of user-specific smart online advertising that the presenter described more than once in “Big Brother” terms — not as a bad thing, but in terms of Big Brother’s storied effectiveness and, I suppose, intrusiveness into private thinking patterns.

But you know what? So far, I’ve been hugely unimpressed by the effectiveness of software that is supposed to get to know me well enough that it can predict what I want. Take Netflix, for instance. I have freely given Netflix more than its share of info on my preferences. I have, for instance — and I’m embarrassed to admit this — rated 1,872 movies on the one-through-five-star system. Yes, that’s one thousand, eight hundred and seventy-two. Any time Netflix has said I need to “rate more movies” — and it seems to have an insatiable appetite in this regard — I have taken a few moments (in the evenings, of course) to oblige.

I have done this in a vain attempt to give Netflix enough info to at least make a wild guess as to what sort of movies I like. It still doesn’t seem any deeper or more intuitive than what a clerk at an ’80s-style video store might have guessed after less than a dozen rentals. Or so it seems to me.

For instance, Netflix is convinced I’ve got a fierce hankering to watch “Classics” — you know, movies with Clark Gable or Myrna Loy or whatever. Apparently, this is based on the fact that I’ve given high ratings to, for instance, “It Happened One Night” and “The Thin Man.” But of course I give those high ratings! Any literate movie fan would! That doesn’t mean I want to see them again, or that I want to see lesser films with the same actors in them! I don’t have a black-and-white jones here, people. I just acknowledge quality, and I think my judgments along those lines are fairly conventional, really. What I need you to do is extrapolate what I might like among films I haven’t seen or heard about…

Whatever. Anyway, this sort of software hasn’t figured me out, even when I’ve wanted it to. It’s more like somebody’s stupid second cousin than Big Brother.

We’d KILL a guy for passing intel to Israel?

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Kadish

Somehow I just caught up with this news, and I’ve got to ask, We’re talking about killing a guy for passing intel to the Israelis?

That’s what the NYT reported this morning:

On Wednesday, one day after Mr. Kadish, 84, was charged with slipping secret military documents to the Israeli government during the 1980s, they were trying to square the gruff, kindly man they knew as so honorable as never to cheat at cards with a criminal suspect who could face the death penalty if convicted.

You’re kidding, right?

I mean, look at the sweet old guy (above): So this is James Bond all of a sudden? Or perhaps I should say, Kim Philby (whom we didn’t kill, by the way, even though he was working for the real bad guys)?

For one thing, what secrets do we think we could possibly have that the Mossad didn’t know already?

Second, we’re talking the Israelis here, people! Don’t we tell them stuff anyway? And don’t they tell us stuff? I mean, am I expected to believe that George W. Bush and the boys figured out the whole North Korea-Syria nuke thing all by their lonesome?

Sure, there are certain lines one doesn’t cross (unless invited to) even with your best friends, but come on — this would be like whacking a guy for passing info to the Brits (speaking of Mr. Philby).

And when’s the last time we did that? Major André? Speaking of which — and I hope this isn’t going to get me into a lot of trouble — I recently crossed paths with Major André. Really.

You know that column I had Sunday about my conversation with the Pennsylvania waitress? ImmediatelyAndre
after that conversation, I walked up the street and ran into the historical marker at right (which tells you which diner, if you’re really, really good at central PA geography).

In fact, I took the picture on my phone — and then promptly forgot about it, until I happened to read about Mr. Kadish, and got to thinking about executing spies, and the Israelis, and the British, which led to Major André, which led to "Hey, I think I shot a picture of that."

And now that I think further about it, it occurs to me that the compact device I used to capture that image would probably have been described as a "spy camera" back in the early ’80s, which is when Mr. Kadish was allegedly letting an Israeli "diplomat" take pictures in his basement of stuff he brought home from work. Makes ya think, huh?

Danger is my middle name.

1962 NIE: No Cuban Missiles

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FYI,  the WSJ notes today that the NIE of Sept. 19, 1962 said:

    The USSR could derive considerable military advantage from the establishment of Soviet medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba, or from the establishment of a submarine base there. . . . Either development, however, would be incompatible with Soviet practice to date and with Soviet policy as we presently estimate it.

That’s 25 days before the start of what we call the Cuban Missile Crisis.

So do you think the CIA is better at that stuff now, or then? And is it better than it was in 2005, when it concluded the opposite of what the latest NIE concluded? And is it better than the Israelis, or the Brits?

Someone on this post raises the yellowcake case to discredit MI6. First, like the NIE, that whole thing was a lot more complicated than either side’s shorthand version. Second, the British are historically seen as better at human intelligence than we are. The Americans do satellites, the Brits do people. And the latest NIE was based, in part, on humint.

Brits say our spooks did their sums wrong

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This last post reminds me of something that was brought to my attention this morning: The Mossad aren’t the only intelligence source saying our latest NIE on Iran got it wrong (at least, the headline part that everyone seems to be talking about, anyway). This was in The Daily Telegraph today:

Iran ‘hoodwinked’ CIA over nuclear plans
    British spy chiefs have grave doubts that Iran has mothballed its nuclear weapons programme, as a US intelligence report claimed last week, and believe the CIA has been hoodwinked by Teheran.   
    The timing of the CIA report has also provoked fury in the British Government, where officials believe it has undermined efforts to impose tough new sanctions on Iran and made an Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities more likely.
    The security services in London want concrete evidence to allay concerns that the Islamic state has fed disinformation to the CIA…

Remember when secret agents were secretive?

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Something that strikes me about some of the recent news — the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, the NIE before that one, and the news about the CIA destroying recordings of interrogations…

Remember back when spy stuff was actually classified, which means, NOT in the newspapers? Remember the Patrick McGoohan series, or for that matter the Joseph Conrad novel — or the Johnny Rivers song? "Secret Agent Man," remember?

Seems like, not so very long ago, it was a bad thing that Bob "Prince of Darkness" Novak blew Valerie Plame’s cover. Some folks thought so, anyway. I mean, before she wrote her memoir.

Didn’t NIEs used to be secret? And what was the CIA doing taping interrogations anyway? Isn’t it sort of part of the etiquette of intrigue that the rubber-hose business isn’t on YouTube?

I can think of only one practical reason why spies would record an interrogation — for use on the subject, to extract more information. It’s one of the classic ploys — actually, it’s sort of the classic ploy — for the brutish business of intelligence gathering: You get a guy to spill a little, then you say, What if we told your pals on the other side what you’ve already told us? If you don’t want that to happen, tell us more…

But that was back when secret agent stuff was secret.