Trouble & Attitude 1/Trouble and Attitude - Issue 01.iso/pc/pctext/almn4.txt

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UNITED STATES: CIA - Central Intelligence Agency was
created by the National Security Act of 1947 in
response to the Cold War. CIA relied on many
demobilized operatives of the wartime Office of
Strategic Services (OSS) and organizational advice
from the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS),
better known as MI6, though unfortunately, the MI6
liaison was Harold "Kim" Philby, the "third man" in
the Russian's Cambridge spy ring. The influence of
former OSS operatives remained for decades in CIA's
Operations Directorate. One of the best-known
Directors of Central Intelligence (DCI), Allen Dulles
[1953-1961], spent much of the war in Switzerland
encouraging the German resistance to kill Hitler and
shorten the war. He resigned after the Bay of Pigs
fiasco. His successors, also OSS veterans, pondered
any number of assassination attempts against Fidel
Castro and the Congo's leftist Patrice Lumumba, but
their schemes seemed to suffer a peculiar
"passive-aggressive" syndrome - all talk and planning,
no results. Inexplicable until Castro's DGI took to
Havana television several years ago with a documentary
showing that scores of Cuban citizens the CIA thought
worked for it were penetration agents of the DGI -
including those who were supposed to kill Castro.
        The decline of the CIA's reputation can be
traced to the Vietnam war period when inaccurate
predictions and projections regarding North Vietnamese
actions and intentions began to be interpreted as
"intelligence failures" by a Congress and public
inclined to think of clandestine activities in "James
Bond" terms. In 1973, two scandals erupted: Watergate,
in which the CIA collaborated with the Nixon White
House in providing information as well as disguises
for ex-CIA officer E. Howard Hunt; and clandestine
efforts to prevent the election of Marxist Salvador
Allende as president of Chile in 1970. At a hearing
before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in
February 1973, Director of Central Intelligence
Richard Helms unexpectedly was sworn; and once under
oath, he was asked by Senator Stuart Symington, "Did
you try in the CIA to overthrow the government of
Chile?"
        "No, sir," answered the DCI. Symington then
asked, "Did you have money passed to the opponents of
Allende?" "No, sir," he replied again. By the time
Helms pled guilty in 1977 to two charges of lying to
Congress, was fined and given a prison sentence of two
years (suspended), DCI William Colby [September 1973
to January 1976] had divulged to the Church Commit-
tee hearings the bag of dirty linen known as the
"Family Jewels," displayed on the hearing-room table
exotic assassination devices, and confirmed to a
newspaper reporter the existence of mail intercepts on
letters from the Soviet Union and a domestic
counterintelligence program called Operation CHAOS,
which used the name of the enemy side from the 1960s
spy spoof, Get Smart.
        In operations against the Soviet Union and
Warsaw Pact during the late 1970s and early 1980s, we
now know that the CIA had tremendous successes in
penetrating the KGB and Pact intelligence services and
obtaining the cooperation of scientists and
researchers. Now, a full year after his arrest, as the
debriefing of Aldrich Hazen Ames continues, recent
reports indicate that more than 100 CIA operations and
scores of people cooperating with the United States
were betrayed during his more than nine years work for
the KGB and that he may have been recruited by the KGB
during his 1981-1983 tour of duty in Mexico. The Ames
investigation showed that every Russian agent the CIA
was running in the mid-to-late 1980s was killed or
caught and "turned" by the KGB. Likewise, every agent
in East Germany and many in other Warsaw Pact states.
        Aside from Ames, the image of the CIA gleaned
from the headlines is that it has been all downhill
since the 1970s. Until hospitalized to die of brain
cancer, President Reagan's choice for Director of
Central Intelligence, OSS veteran William Casey, while
doing much to rebuild the morale of the Agency, worked
personally to the exclusion of many other matters at
being the case officer for Central America at a time
when Marxist insurrections in Nicaragua and El
Salvador were spreading throughout that region.
Several CIA clandestine services officers had their
careers ruined because they were directed by Casey to
work with White House aide Colonel Oliver North's
"off-the-shelf" and unauthorized contra support
program. This program was subsequently linked to the
supply of materiel and munitions to anti-communist
groups in Central America and the unlawful import of
narcotics into the U.S.
        After some years of quiet in the late 1980s
under former federal judge and FBI Director William
Webster and career intelligence officer Robert Gates,
the CIA was blamed for not knowing in 1990 that Iraqi
dictator Saddam Hussein planned to invade and annex
Kuwait. In fact, America's intelligence satellites
focused mainly on the Soviet Union to provide early
warning of imminent attack, assess the wheat and
barley crops, count tanks, missiles and ships under
construction or at anchor, and perhaps to
electronically monitor various Russian communications.
Saddam Hussein had to signal his military buildup by
inviting journalists to travel from Kuwait by road
north to Baghdad. Then the United States took plenty
of photographs showing tanks, trucks and supplies
moving south. However, based on Saddam's record for
bluffing, U.S. officials did not think there was a
serious threat of invasion. Washington's inaction [and
limp instructions the State Department gave Ambassador
April Glaspie] were interpreted by Saddam as a signal
the United States would not object seriously if he
took Kuwait. The Gulf war showed why highly placed
human agents who can, in Tu Mu's words, "give you the
facts of the situation in their country and determine
its plans against you," are essential.
        As a result of the Ames case, CIA
paradoxically has worse morale than in the 1970s.
Instead of a triumphant "Gotcha!" and satisfaction
that Ames will never step outside a maximum security
prison again, there is lamenting over all the
operations he betrayed. Clinton's DCI James Woolsey
made numerous political gaffes, starting in 1993 when
he authorized giving the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee a blunt, unflattering and fully truthful
profile of deposed Haitian President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide. Critics said Woolsey should have realized
that Aristide was the protegee of the Congressional
Black Caucus, whose support the president needed in
the 103rd Congress and that the document might be
leaked. At the same time, other critics asked how the
DCI in this day and age can refuse or falsify
information demanded by Congress. Woolsey, was again
perceived as fumbling again in September 1994, when he
imposed minor punishments on eleven former and serving
CIA officers for their part in not having detected
that Ames was working for the Russians. A number of
Ames' former superiors who recommended him for
promotion or transfer despite his heavy drinking and
mediocrity had already retired. The consensus in
Congress, more concerned with vote-getting than
justice, was that those who remained should have been
made an example of by immediate firing and loss of
pensions.
 Woolsey also was blamed by the media for
the CIA's "old boy" club atmosphere in which females
are regarded as clerks and secretaries, not as
suitable Operations Directorate officers. An
atmosphere that had existed since the Agency was
formed. The New York Times reported that in July 1994,
Janine Brookner, the CIA's first woman chief of
station, filed a sex discrimination suit in federal
court. Allegedly, she was the first to officially
report Ames' flagrant flouting of CIA security rules
and if her recommendations had been followed, he would
have been fired several months before his spying
career for the KGB started. Instead, in malicious
retaliation for doing her duty and trying to remove
drunken, incompe- tent, wife-beating male CIA
officers, her career was ruined. Woolsey, although he
was not serving as Director, or had any association
with the CIA during the Brookner days, was, of course,
held responsible.Operating on a budget of $3 billion,
CIA is one of the smallest sectors of the total $28
billion U.S. intelligence budge. With morale currently
at rock bottom, U.S. foreign intelligence faces
reorganization and down-sizing under the Clinton
administration's new nominee as Director of Central
Intelligence, retired Air Force General Michael P.C.
Carns, 57, a decorated veteran of 200 missions in the
Vietnam War, a military manager with a Harvard
business degree termed by other Air Force generals "a
good wing man" literally and figuratively. Carns has
absolutely no experience running intelligence
operations. It will take more than the change of the
top man to shake up and shape up a CIA that seems
determined to shoot itself in the foot. A case in
point, this month the Operations Directorate
circulated an e-mail message over the internal
computer system asking CIA employees to identify
everyone in Congress with whom they have "mutually
respectful relationships with congressional members,"
a "working relationship" or "school or family ties."
The e-mail message was promptly leaked and interpreted
as an illegal lobbying effort.
        Yet it is equally clear that the United States
will need an improved intelligence agency in the late
1990s and twenty-first century. Intelligence and
counterintelligence agencies are expensive and, since
human, fallible. However, a nation-state is a sitting
duck for its enemies without one.DIA - Defense
Intelligence Agency. The DIA provides foreign
intelligence and counterintelligence for the Secretary
of Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff and Pentagon
commands. DIA coordinates the information collected by
the intel- ligence services of the Air Force, Army,
Marines and Navy. DIA also assigns the military
attachees (senior officers from all four services) to
U.S. embassies. In peacetime circumstances, the U.S.
attachees conduct open liaison with the host country's
military. In volatile situations in peacetime,
military attachees do become actively involved in
covert intelligence activities. DIA's budget is some
$600 million.FBI - Federal Bureau of Investigation -
the U.S. counterintelligence agency also has
responsibility for preparing evidence in federal
criminal cases for prosecution and for what remains of
domestic intelligence. The FBI's counterintelligence
role has faced increasing constraint since the early
1970s when the burglary of the FBI Field Office in
Media, Pennsylvania, gave leaders of the pro-Hanoi
left in the United States access to classified
counterintelligence files. The broad informational
sweep of counterintelligence investigations, "dirty
tricks" against Moscow-controlled Communists, black
militants and civil rights figures, and widespread use
of "technical sources" [wiretapping] opened a broad
and prolonged attack on the FBI. From having been
viewed as one of the most respected government
institutions, the FBI's public image plummeted. The
public sense of outrage over being let down allowed
varied interests - the left that had been trying to
get the FBI abolished since the Rosenberg spy ring was
rounded up, supporters of North Vietnam and the
Vietcong, college students who did not want to be
drafted for Vietnam, civil libertarians who believe
government should be blind to all political activity,
ordinary citizens of varied concerns who viewed the
FBI as an enemy - to encourage Members of Congress to
excoriate the FBI.
        The public view came to be that any mention of
a person or organization in the index of a
counterintelligence investigation meant the FBI was
building a case for prosecution or was targeting them
unfairly for "dirty tricks." While reforms of the FBI
were essential, the total lack of effective response
from senior FBI offi- cials and the shakeups that
followed the death of the FBI's founder and sole
director to that time, J. Edgar Hoover, left that
image standing. By the late 1970s, the FBI had ended
domestic counterintelligence. Counterterrorism
investigations of the Communist Party, U.S.A. (CPUSA),
as an agency of the Soviet Union, and a limited number
of terrorist criminal groups, some based in
ethno-religious communities [Croat, Puerto Rican,
African-American, Hispanic, Armenian, Central
American, Jewish, Identity churches], continued. Some
counterter- rorism investigations also came under
attack by powerful members of Congress.
        In part, some attacks on the FBI have had a
partisan element to them. Documentary evidence
obtained in El Salvador and disseminated openly by the
U.S. State Department showed that the Salvadoran
Communist Party, assisted by Cuban intelligence
officers attached to the Cuban U.N. Mission in New
York and leading members of the CPUSA, collaborated in
1980 to establish a solidarity organization for El
Salvador's Marxist insurgents. The "trip report" of
the Salvadoran who established the solidarity network,
Farid Handal, brother of the Salvadorean Communist
Party chief, noted that the CPUSA arranged his meeting
with Congressman Ronald Dellums, who became a leader
of the solidarity group, called CISPES. The solidarity
lobby had an impact on public opinion and the decision
of the Democratic Congress to cut funds for the
Republican Central America policy. Thus, the
Democratic Congress was embarrassed when CISPES
obtained part of its FBI files under the Freedom of
Information Act. By that stage, Dellums was chairing a
House Armed Services subcommittee and was a senior
figure in the Congressional Black Caucus. The FBI
director and senior officials apologized for their
"mistake" - which was investigating a group with
powerful political connections. Exposing real and
alleged misdeeds of the FBI and alleged quirks of J.
Edgar Hoover remain part of the regular diet of
commercial networks, cable programming and the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
        China's great military theorist Sun Tzu stated
the principle of counterintelligence as concisely as
he did that of intelligence: "It is essential to seek
out enemy agents who have come to conduct espionage
against you. . . ." They should be well paid,
comfortably housed and given instructions to operate
as an agent in place for as long as possible, he said.
This is one of the FBI's most critical
responsibilities. The Supreme Court confirmed the
government's duty to conduct foreign and domestic
counterintelligence activities. In 1967, Justice
Arthur Goldberg wrote in U.S. v. Robel (389 U.S. 258),
"The Constitution of the United States is not a
`suicide pact.' The Nation has the right and duty to
protect itself from acts of espionage and sabotage and
from attempts to overthrow the Government."In the
mid-1980s, the FBI scored some spectacular
counterintelligence successes. Using information
provided by defectors from the Soviet and Warsaw Pact
states and well as information volunteered by American
citizens, many spies were arrested. Among the better
known spies apprehended by the FBI between 1984 and
1985 were:
Ernst Forbrich, a West German who bought military
secrets from U.S. military personnel in the United
States and Germany for 17 years; Edward Lee Howard,
the dismissed CIA case officer who escaped to Moscow;
Thomas Cavanagh, an engineer at Northrop arrested for
trying to sell the "Stealth" technology in a "sting"
set up after the FBI intercepted his call to the
Soviet consulate in San Francisco; Ronald Pelton, a
fired National Security Agency (NSA) technician;
William Holden Bell, a Hughes project manager in the
Advanced Systems Division who from 1978 to 1981 sold
advanced radar secrets to the Poles (and Soviets) via
his case officer, Marion Zacharski; John Walker and
his friends-and-family spy ring in the U.S. Navy;
James Harper, who sold Polish and Russian intelligence
a huge array of materials on the Minuteman missile
system obtained via his mistress who worked for a
defense contractor; the swinging Czech illegals Karl
and Frieda Koecher, penetration agents trained by
Prague's StB, who were the CIA's chief Czech
translators; CIA operations staffer Sharon Scranage,
who gave secret documents to her Ghanaian intelligence
officer lover; and, of course, the FBI's sole known
defector to the KGB, counterintelligence agent Richard
Miller, who gave the KGB, via his Russian emigrÄ mis-
tress, Svetlana Ogorodnikova, a secret document
outlining U.S. foreign intelligence collection
priorities.
 At the same time American spies were
being caught, the FBI had a good success rate with
"dangle" operations in which an American acting under
FBI instruction pretends to want to sell secrets to
the Russians. When the KGB takes the bait, the U.S.
government quietly or publicly, depending on the state
of bilateral relations, declares the offending
intelligence officers persona non grata. Since the
breakup of the Soviet Union, the United States has
been very restrained in PNGing members of the SVRR and
GRU. Aleksandr Iosifovich Lysenko, counselor of the
Russian Embassy and the SVRR rezident in Washington,
was expelled after the arrest of the Ameses, since the
intelligence officers marking signals for meetings
overseas with Ames worked under his direction.
        The FBI still has problems: the public remains
ignorant of the difference between informational
investigations for intelligence purposes and
evidentiary information for court proceedings; many
Americans are highly sensitive to privacy issues;
unsophisticated FBI agents still write memos and
directives easily held up for ridicule; the FBI
institution has been sluggish responding to social
changes regarding the admission of African- American,
Hispanic and female special agents; and inept handling
of criticism on the part of the senior FBI officials
has made the agency the butt of jokes - "Flaming Bad
Investigators."FBI Director Louis Freeh, a former FBI
special agent and federal judge, has faced widespread
criticism for the FBI's mishandling of the Branch
Davidian siege under his predecessor, former Judge
William Sessions, who refused to resign and had to be
personally fired by President Clinton. At the same
time, Freeh is carving out a larger niche for the FBI,
expanding the Bureau's international law-enforcement
role against organized crime and narcotics
trafficking. This has meant the opening of FBI liaison
offices in a number of foreign capitals, including
Moscow. The FBI's forensics laboratories are world
renowned. FBI counterintelligence scored a great coup
against the Russians and the CIA in February 1994 when
after an investigation of nearly a year in which their
superior number of trained counterintelligence
investigators collected the evidence needed to
terminate the spy careers of Aldrich Hazen Ames, 52,
and his Colombian-born wife, Maria del Rosario Casas
Ames, two "moles" for the Russian KGB who worked
inside the CIA. As a result, the FBI
Counterintelligence has been given increased authority
to handle counterintelligence investigations of CIA
employees. In May 1994, President Clinton established
a seven-member National Counterintelligence Policy
Board to end the 47-year bureaucratic struggle,
sometimes exceedingly acrimonious, between the FBI and
CIA.NSA - National Security Agency - had been regarded
as the "Big Ears" and "Big Eyes" of the United States
until the existence of the National Reconnaissance
Office (NRO) was officially acknowledged after more
than a decade of its being a not really "open" secret.
The sprawling NSA headquarters complex along the
Baltimore-Washington Parkway at Fort Meade [and
assorted outlying complexes near Baltimore-Washington
International Airport and other sites scattered around
the state of Maryland] has two critical functions:
maintaining communications security for the United
States and breaking the codes of other countries. To
carry out that mission, the NSA employs thousands of
mathematicians, engineers, computer programmers,
cryptanalysts, traffic analysts, linguists and
translators backed by banks of antennas, tape
recordings and an army of supercomputers looking for
the algorithms that will allow a military or
diplomatic code to be unraveled. Recent reports put
the NSA budget at $4 billion
        .Encrypted communications from diplomats, the
military including missile-test telemetry and spies
get closest attention; but communications broadcast
"in the clear" are important. These communications use
telephone channels flowing through commercial
communications satellites carrying long-distance and
international voice telephonic conversations, cellular
telephone calls from homes and vehicles, facsimile
images, and computer modem messages including e-mail.
NSA long has been reported to have computerized
equipment to zero in on calls to and from particular
telephones of interest, record every conversation and
either automatically translate them in fifty languages
or to screen them for words of interest. This is one
reason that many organized criminals, terrorists and
spies use coded phrases or euphemisms.The vast flow of
unencrypted communications around the world may have
intelligence or commercial value for the United
States. The enormous flood of reports on the world's
wire services, newspapers, radio and television
broadcasts provide a vast amount of open source
information - political, economic, environmental -
more than all the world's spies ever could. Organized
crime and drug cartel funds shifted by wire transfers
from one money laundry to another are of interest; so,
too, might be the indiscreet conversations of a
diplomat in one country to family or colleagues in
another.  Engineering designs sent between two
factories of a foreign defense company may be of
interest for industrial and economic intelligence.
Several months after the December 1988 bombing of Pan
Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, for example,
investigators reportedly found there were large wire
transfers of cash from Iran to the accounts of Ahmed
Jibril's Damascus-based Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC).
While no report specifically stated that the NSA
gleaned the information from the airways, it may have
Thus it is extremely useful that U.S. intelligence can
intercept and decrypt a great deal of information.In
the past, complex and rigorous encryption methods were
available only to governments for diplomatic, military
and intelligence codes that are changed regularly. For
enhanced security, one-time codes often are used. Of
course, no encryption system is infallible. Agents may
steal encryption codes. With plenty of computer time -
expensive computer time - even the very large numbers
used as encryption keys can be factored. The NSA
evidently plans to take the high-technology route.
Last August, NSA awarded the Cray Computer Corporation
a $4.2 million contract to develop a new type of
supercomputer.
 The development of cheap and good
encryption software for the general public with the
advent of the personal computer horrified NSA. Pretty
Good Privacy, one very popular data-protection
program, was available on the Internet as shareware.
Heightened business and private awareness of the ease
with which computer hackers and industrial espionage
agents can intercept private banking data, take credit
card numbers from computer shopping networks, pry into
proprietary business data and communications has led
to a growing private-sector market for encryption. The
NSA's solution was to try an end run around private
encryption by secretly developing the "clipper chip" -
an electronic backdoor key.The "clipper chip" was
supported by the FBI and other federal law-enforcement
agencies and the Clinton administration introduced
legislation mandating its use in all U.S.-made
electronic communications media - computers, modems,
faxes, telephones, and so forth. The "clipper chip"
was and is strongly resisted by the telecommunications
and computer industries. The computer industry in
particular noted that the "clipper chip" would destroy
the U.S. export industry since no foreigner would
willingly buy machines created to facilitate American
eavesdropping. No one in the computer industry
believes that the NSA "clipper" does not have some
built-in way for the government to easily decrypt any
message sent using it. Though the administration
backed away from mandating use of the "clipper chip,"
it intends to mandate its presence in all
communications equipment purchased by the U.S.
government, hoping to use the enormous purchasing
power of the federal government to make the "clipper
chip" the de facto standard.
        The issue has not died out. Expect the
"clipper chip" controversy to return.The NSA works
intimately with Britain's GCHQ. NSA's greatest
embarrassment in recent years was the discovery that a
drunken, drug-using former employee, Ronald Pelton,
had sold secrets of U.S. intercepts under the Sea of
Okhotsk to Moscow.NRO - National Reconnaissance Office
- is the top secret agency formed in 1960 that designs
and operates America's "national means of
intelligence" - her spy satellites - and is
responsible for imaging and data processing. Though
the existence of the NRO has been known since the
early 1980s when sources leaked its existence hidden
in the Directorate of Special Projects of the Office
of the Secretary of the Air Force, the NRO was only
officially acknowledged recently. In August 1994, the
NRO received most unwelcome attention. Satellites are
costly. The NRO budget is estimated at $7 billion. The
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence publicly
accused the intelligence community of improperly
concealing from Congress the rising cost of a $310
million headquarters for the NRO near Chantilly,
Virginia. The "cover" for construction was that it was
an office building being built for a major defense
contractor. In Senate hearings on August 10, Director
of Central Intelligence James Woolsey irritated the
Senators by listing the number of times the
Intelligence Committee had been briefed in secret on
the NRO headquarters. In July 1994, the Wall Street
Journal noted that the NRO had awarded Martin Marietta
a contract worth more than $2 billion to develop and
build a new generation of sensing satellites. The
contract initially was awarded to TRW, but was
reopened after complaints from Martin Marietta and
Lockheed.
 The NRO operates a battery of satellites
with a wide assortment of imaging capabilities. Some
are now well known like the Rhyolite or "Big Bird" and
the low- altitude KH-11 "Keyhole" series. Reportedly,
satellites have capabilities including digital image
sensing in real time, infrared sensors to give early
warning of ballistic missile launches, SIGINT
capabilities to pick up telemetry from missile tests,
side-looking radars capable of imaging while the
satellite is near the horizon, and radar imaging
capable of penetrating cloud cover and even
vegetation. Allegedly, the current satellites are so
sensitive they can detect a single Russian border
guard lighting his cigarette. A great blow to the U.S.
sensing satellites came after a low- level ex-CIA
employee, William Kampiles, stole the operating manual
for the KH-11 and sold it to the KGB in 1978. After a
short time, the Russians realized the fine resolution
of the cameras and that it broadcast its images in
real time to distant processing centers in places like
Australia. The Soviets started putting missiles and
aircraft under wraps, camouflage became a Russian
military high art, missile test telemetry was
encrypted. Clearly Moscow now was aware of the
capabil- ities of the Keyhole through which the United
States was looking. Kampiles was caught and sentenced
to a forty- year federal prison term.

URUGUAY: DII - Directorate of Information and
Intelligence - Uruguay's intelligence directorate.SID
- Defense Intelligence Service - Uruguay.SIDE - Army
Intelligence Service - Uruguay.

VENEZUELA: DIM - Military Intelligence Directorate -
of Venezuela.DISIP - Directorate of Intelligence and
Prevention Services. Venezuela's intelligence and
counterintelligence.

VIETNAM: Despite the advent in 1987 of the policy of
doi moi [reform], Vietnam's version of perestroika,
and the recent commencement of formal diplomatic
relations between Washington and Hanoi, Vietnam
remains a milita- rized country - at least for the
time being. Military veterans head the government -
President Le Duc Ahn, 85, for example, is a four-star
army general and Prime Minister Vo Vann Kiet, 73, is a
senior general.The Interior Ministry, which has been
growing in authority in recent years as a result of
doi moi, has responsibilities for counterintelligence
and secret police operations. The Interior Ministry's
Tong Cuc Phan Gian [Counterintelligence General
Department] is headed by Major General Duong Thong,
and according to 1995 visitors to Hanoi is motivated
by a hatred for all things American. The most
important intelligence and counter- intelligence
organizations operate under the General Political
Department of the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN).
(continued as next chapter)