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11/10/2005 | Military Spies in the U.S.: An Idea Whose Time Comes Again

Jeff Stein

Stripped to its basics, here's an example of how spying works: A CIA officer is handed the mission of finding out what's going on in Iran's nuclear program. Passing himself off as a Canadian businessman, he goes to a European conference of metallurgists, hangs out at the bar, and strikes up a conversation with the chief salesman of a German company that is suspected of selling uranium-enrichment centrifuges to Iran.

 

He nurtures the relationship over the ensuing weeks and months, even inviting the pigeon "home" for dinners. After secretly plumbing his target's political views, personal life, and knowledge of company operations, he gleans some useful facts: that he's pro-West but anti-American, that he hates his company's sales to Iran - even that he frequents prostitutes (blackmail fodder). The trap is now set to recruit him as a CIA source - not that he'll ever know it. He may think he's providing information to, say, the International Atomic Energy Agency. For years to come, perhaps, he'll share his innermost thoughts about his company colleagues and his personal life with his new "friend," his dossier forever thickening and providing leads for more CIA recruiters.

All of which is a roundabout way of elucidating the dry language of a little-noticed provision in the Senate Intelligence Authorization bill. It would give military intelligence agents the freedom to conduct operations
just like the one above - against U.S. citizens.

Shield Stripped

Previously, "Defense intelligence personnel [had] a very limited exemption" from laws designed to shield American citizens from government spies, notes the committee report on the authorization bill. Military secret agents were
permitted only a single "initial assessment contact outside the United States." But Section 431 of the unnumbered bill would give military intelligence operatives "the same protection enjoyed by the CIA when assessing and recruiting sources . . . and improve the ability of the DoD to conduct successful human intelligence operations."

Two Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats, Carl Levin of Michigan and Ron Wyden of Oregon, think this is a bad idea.

"We believe that DoD intelligence personnel should be required to tell United States citizens in the United States who are not suspected of any wrongdoing that they work for the government," they said in their own report on the bill. "We intend to support changes to this authority as the legislation moves forward."

California Uncovered

While the issue has received little attention here, it has already erupted in California, where the National Guard's Domestic Watch Center was discovered monitoring an antiwar demonstration on Mother's Day in Sacramento, according to press reports that garnered little attention outside the state. Governor Schwarzenegger's office was fully informed, the reports said.

In e-mails obtained by the San Jose Mercury News, California National Guard Chief of Staff Col. John Moorman provided intelligence on the demonstration to his boss, Maj. Gen. Thomas Eres, with the note, "Sir, Information you
wanted on Sunday's demonstration at the Capitol." Moorman copied the e-mail to other National Guard officers, including Col. Jeff Davis, who oversaw the Watch Center, according to reports. Davis responded: "Thanks, Forwarding same to our Intell. folks who continue to monitor."

A featured event at the demonstration was a concert by the "Raging Grannies," two 70-something Canadian women.

"We do not spy on people," said National Guard spokesman Col. Doug Hart. "Never have, never will." He said the unit had two members monitoring the military's classified e-mail system, and seven more who help measure the
security of bridges, buildings and other infrastructure.

Past Is Prologue?

Christopher Pyle has seen this kind of thing get out of hand before. While teaching at the Army Intelligence School at Fort Holabird, Md., in the 1960s, the former captain was shown a vast, computerized vault that monitored antiwar demonstrators and political dissidents.

"We got our passes and wound our way down through the maze of rooms inside of it, into a big brightly lit room with a steel cage standing in the middle of it, a mesh cage," he told Robert O'Harrow, author of "No Place to Hide,"
an examination of post-Sept. 11 security measures.

"Outside the cage, along the wall, were 13 Teletype machines chattering away, reporting on any demonstration of 20 people or more. The reports were written by 1,500 intelligence agents working out of 300 offices coast to coast. These were the agents who normally did security clearances for the Army, but their secondary duty was to monitor dissent: the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement particularly, but also the black power movement and anything else that moved."

"They all want to be spies," said Pyle, now a professor of constitutional law and civil liberties at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, by phone last week. "They all claim they're going to be highly trained and all that bull--. Well, they're not. I used to train them, and I know."

The National Military Intelligence Association did not return calls asking for comment.

Harry B. "Skip" Brandon, a former top FBI counterintelligence official, said freeing military agents to conduct clandestine interviews of U.S. citizens is "a bad idea."

"It just gets another group into the already confusing and muddled area of intell collection," Brandon said. "DoD has a mandate to collect [intelligence] in support of the military and military actions and it should stay that way and outside the U.S. We simply don't need another agency mucking around in the U.S."

The FBI is the lead domestic counterintelligence agency.

No one has yet come forward to champion the provision's inclusion in the Senate bill, which is now in the hands of the Armed Services Committee. No similar provision exists in the House Intelligence Committee version of the
bill , according to a Republican source who spoke only on background because of the matter's sensitivity.

"It's an issue that will probably be revisited in conference," he said, "and be reconciled. . . . We'll look at it then."

Back on the Senate side, an Intelligence Committee source predicted the issue would flare up in floor debate near the end of October.

Background Chatter

Six weeks before President Bush declared that 10 al Qaeda plots against the United States had been disrupted since Sept. 11, experts at a Washington symposium on suicide bombers hosted by the liberal New America Foundation were saying much the same thing. During the Aug. 25 panel, Mia Bloom, a University of Cincinnati terrorism specialist, said that "there have been a handful of incidents we don't talk about." The Rand Corp.'s senior terrorism expert, Bruce Hoffman, added that al Qaeda was operating "a robust exfiltration program from Iraq" that sent seasoned terrorists on to assignments in the West. Contacted independently later, government counterterrorism agents echoed those views but declined to provide details .


. . Long before al Qaeda there was a network of left-wing terror groups in Latin America bent on overthrowing the region's military dictatorships. How Chile's secret police cobbled together an intelligence consortium of like-minded governments to carry out secret "renditions," interrogate and in thousands of cases kill their underground opponents is the subject of "Condor: The First War on Terror," based on a 2004 book by investigative reporter John Dinges and now playing on the Sundance Channel . . . Also on the box, "Last Best Chance," the nuclear-terrorism thriller starring former Tennessee Republican senator and now full-time actor Fred Thompson. Financed by the Nuclear Threat Initiative organization headed by former Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga. (1972-97), the film has been screened for groups around the country since last spring but only this month finally found a home on HBO.


The one-hour drama, which revolves around a plot by al Qaeda agents to set off stolen Russian "loose nukes" here, debuts on HBO Oct. 17, but a visit to http://www.lastbestchance.org/ found DVDs available for free.

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.

Source: CQ Homeland Security
(c) 2005 Congressional Quarterly Inc. All Rights Reserved.

 

CQ (Estados Unidos)

 



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