One night in 1971, files were stolen from an F.B.I. office near Philadelphia. They proved that the bureau was spying on thousands of Americans. The case was unsolved, until now.

PHILADELPHIA — The perfect crime is far easier to pull off when nobody is watching.

So on a night nearly 43 years ago, while Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier bludgeoned each other over 15 rounds in a televised title bout viewed by millions around the world, burglars took a lock pick and a crowbar and broke into a Federal Bureau of Investigation office in a suburb of Philadelphia, making off with nearly every document inside.

They were never caught, and the stolen documents that they mailed anonymously to newspaper reporters were the first trickle of what would become a flood of revelations about extensive spying and dirty-tricks operations by the F.B.I. against dissident groups.

“Heroes. And a reminder to those who naively believe that the government can be trusted with the power to run a surveillance state. How quickly we forget Hoover and Nixon.”

The burglary in Media, Pa., on March 8, 1971, is a historical echo today, as disclosures by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden have cast another unflattering light on government spying and opened a national debate about the proper limits of government surveillance. The burglars had, until now, maintained a vow of silence about their roles in the operation. They were content in knowing that their actions had dealt the first significant blow to an institution that had amassed enormous power and prestige during J. Edgar Hoover’s lengthy tenure as director.

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John and Bonnie Raines, two of the burglars, at home in Philadelphia with their grandchildren. Mark Makela for The New York Times

“When you talked to people outside the movement about what the F.B.I. was doing, nobody wanted to believe it,” said one of the burglars, Keith Forsyth, who is finally going public about his involvement. “There was only one way to convince people that it was true, and that was to get it in their handwriting.”

Mr. Forsyth, now 63, and other members of the group can no longer be prosecuted for what happened that night, and they agreed to be interviewed before the release this week of a book written by one of the first journalists to receive the stolen documents. The author, Betty Medsger, a former reporter for The Washington Post, spent years sifting through the F.B.I.’s voluminous case file on the episode and persuaded five of the eight men and women who participated in the break-in to end their silence.

Unlike Mr. Snowden, who downloaded hundreds of thousands of digital N.S.A. files onto computer hard drives, the Media burglars did their work the 20th-century way: they cased the F.B.I. office for months, wore gloves as they packed the papers into suitcases, and loaded the suitcases into getaway cars. When the operation was over, they dispersed. Some remained committed to antiwar causes, while others, like John and Bonnie Raines, decided that the risky burglary would be their final act of protest against the Vietnam War and other government actions before they moved on with their lives.

“We didn’t need attention, because we had done what needed to be done,” said Mr. Raines, 80, who had, with his wife, arranged for family members to raise the couple’s three children if they were sent to prison. “The ’60s were over. We didn’t have to hold on to what we did back then.”

A Meticulous Plan
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Keith Forsyth, in the early 1970s, was the designated lock-picker among the eight burglars. When he found that he could not pick the lock on the front door of the F.B.I. office, he broke in through a side entrance.

The burglary was the idea of William C. Davidon, a professor of physics at Haverford College and a fixture of antiwar protests in Philadelphia, a city that by the early 1970s had become a white-hot center of the peace movement. Mr. Davidon was frustrated that years of organized demonstrations seemed to have had little impact.

In the summer of 1970, months after President Richard M. Nixon announced the United States’ invasion of Cambodia, Mr. Davidon began assembling a team from a group of activists whose commitment and discretion he had come to trust.

The group — originally nine, before one member dropped out — concluded that it would be too risky to try to break into the F.B.I. office in downtown Philadelphia, where security was tight. They soon settled on the bureau’s satellite office in Media, in an apartment building across the street from the county courthouse.

That decision carried its own risks: Nobody could be certain whether the satellite office would have any documents about the F.B.I.’s surveillance of war protesters, or whether a security alarm would trip as soon as the burglars opened the door.

The group spent months casing the building, driving past it at all times of the night and memorizing the routines of its residents.
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Mr. Forsyth today. Mark Makela for The New York Times

“We knew when people came home from work, when their lights went out, when they went to bed, when they woke up in the morning,” said Mr. Raines, who was a professor of religion at Temple University at the time. “We were quite certain that we understood the nightly activities in and around that building.”

But it wasn’t until Ms. Raines got inside the office that the group grew confident that it did not have a security system. Weeks before the burglary, she visited the office posing as a Swarthmore College student researching job opportunities for women at the F.B.I.

The burglary itself went off largely without a hitch, except for when Mr. Forsyth, the designated lock-picker, had to break into a different entrance than planned when he discovered that the F.B.I. had installed a lock on the main door that he could not pick. He used a crowbar to break the second lock, a deadbolt above the doorknob.

After packing the documents into suitcases, the burglars piled into getaway cars and rendezvoused at a farmhouse to sort through what they had stolen. To their relief, they soon discovered that the bulk of it was hard evidence of the F.B.I.’s spying on political groups. Identifying themselves as the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the F.B.I., the burglars sent select documents to several newspaper reporters. Two weeks after the burglary, Ms. Medsger wrote the first article based on the files, after the Nixon administration tried unsuccessfully to get The Post to return the documents.

Other news organizations that had received the documents, including The New York Times, followed with their own reports.
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At The Washington Post, Betty Medsger was the first to report on the contents of the stolen F.B.I. files. Now, she has written a book about the episode. Robert Caplin for The New York Times

Ms. Medsger’s article cited what was perhaps the most damning document from the cache, a 1970 memorandum that offered a glimpse into Hoover’s obsession with snuffing out dissent. The document urged agents to step up their interviews of antiwar activists and members of dissident student groups.

“It will enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and will further serve to get the point across there is an F.B.I. agent behind every mailbox,” the message from F.B.I. headquarters said. Another document, signed by Hoover himself, revealed widespread F.B.I. surveillance of black student groups on college campuses.

But the document that would have the biggest impact on reining in the F.B.I.’s domestic spying activities was an internal routing slip, dated 1968, bearing a mysterious word: Cointelpro.

Neither the Media burglars nor the reporters who received the documents understood the meaning of the term, and it was not until several years later, when the NBC News reporter Carl Stern obtained more files from the F.B.I. under the Freedom of Information Act, that the contours of Cointelpro — shorthand for Counterintelligence Program — were revealed.

Since 1956, the F.B.I. had carried out an expansive campaign to spy on civil rights leaders, political organizers and suspected Communists, and had tried to sow distrust among protest groups. Among the grim litany of revelations was a blackmail letter F.B.I. agents had sent anonymously to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., threatening to expose his extramarital affairs if he did not commit suicide.
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The F.B.I. field office in Media, Pa., from which the burglars stole files that showed the extent of the bureau’s surveillance of political groups. Betty Medsger
Recent Comments
silentbear 28 days ago

In celebration of these folks actions, I’d like to share this song:http://youtu.be/4JIbCZen1Tg
Pat Shea 28 days ago

People in the movement knew they were getting spied on anyway. At UW – Madison, the COINTELPRO photographers would lurk in the alleys along…
Paul Lerch 28 days ago

Two thumbs up to the Rainses’, Keith Forsyth and the five others who had the courage to really put themselves at risk in order to take an…
See All Comments

“It wasn’t just spying on Americans,” said Loch K. Johnson, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Georgia who was an aide to Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho. “The intent of Cointelpro was to destroy lives and ruin reputations.”

Senator Church’s investigation in the mid-1970s revealed still more about the extent of decades of F.B.I. abuses, and led to greater congressional oversight of the F.B.I. and other American intelligence agencies. The Church Committee’s final report about the domestic surveillance was blunt. “Too many people have been spied upon by too many government agencies, and too much information has been collected,” it read.

By the time the committee released its report, Hoover was dead and the empire he had built at the F.B.I. was being steadily dismantled. The roughly 200 agents he had assigned to investigate the Media burglary came back empty-handed, and the F.B.I. closed the case on March 11, 1976 — three days after the statute of limitations for burglary charges had expired.

Michael P. Kortan, a spokesman for the F.B.I., said that “a number of events during that era, including the Media burglary, contributed to changes to how the F.B.I. identified and addressed domestic security threats, leading to reform of the F.B.I.’s intelligence policies and practices and the creation of investigative guidelines by the Department of Justice.”

According to Ms. Medsger’s book, “The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret F.B.I.,” only one of the burglars was on the F.B.I.’s final list of possible suspects before the case was closed.
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Afterward, they fled to a farmhouse, near Pottstown, Pa., where they spent 10 days sorting through the documents. Betty Medsger

A Retreat Into Silence

The eight burglars rarely spoke to one another while the F.B.I. investigation was proceeding and never again met as a group.

Mr. Davidon died late last year from complications of Parkinson’s disease. He had planned to speak publicly about his role in the break-in, but three of the burglars have chosen to remain anonymous.

Among those who have come forward — Mr. Forsyth, the Raineses and a man named Bob Williamson — there is some wariness of how their decision will be viewed.

The passage of years has worn some of the edges off the once radical political views of John and Bonnie Raines. But they said they felt a kinship toward Mr. Snowden, whose revelations about N.S.A. spying they see as a bookend to their own disclosures so long ago.

They know some people will criticize them for having taken part in something that, if they had been caught and convicted, might have separated them from their children for years. But they insist they would never have joined the team of burglars had they not been convinced they would get away with it.

“It looks like we’re terribly reckless people,” Mr. Raines said. “But there was absolutely no one in Washington — senators, congressmen, even the president — who dared hold J. Edgar Hoover to accountability.”

“It became pretty obvious to us,” he said, “that if we don’t do it, nobody will.”

The Retro Report video with this article is the 24th in a documentary series presented by The New York Times. The video project was started with a grant from Christopher Buck. Retro Report has a staff of 13 journalists and 10 contributors led by Kyra Darnton, a former “60 Minutes” producer. It is a nonprofit video news organization that aims to provide a thoughtful counterweight to today’s 24/7 news cycle.

A version of this article appears in print on January 7, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Burglars Who Took On F.B.I. Abandon Shadows. Order Reprints|Today’s Paper|Subscribe

By MARK MAZZETTIJAN. 7, 2014

Find this story at 7 January 2014

© 2014 The New York Times Company

One of the great mysteries of the Vietnam War era has been solved. On March 8, 1971, a group of activists — including a cabdriver, a day care director and two professors — broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. They stole every document they found and then leaked many to the press, including details about FBI abuses and the then-secret counter-intelligence program to infiltrate, monitor and disrupt social and political movements, nicknamed COINTELPRO. They called themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. No one was ever caught for the break-in. The burglars’ identities remained a secret until this week when they finally came forward to take credit for the caper that changed history. Today we are joined by three of them — John Raines, Bonnie Raines and Keith Forsyth; their attorney, David Kairys; and Betty Medsger, the former Washington Post reporter who first broke the story of the stolen FBI documents in 1971 and has now revealed the burglars’ identities in her new book, “The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI.”

Click here to watch the one-hour Part 2 of this interview.
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Today, we will spend the rest of the hour unraveling one of the great mysteries of the Vietnam War era. On March 8th, 1971, a group of eight activists, including a cab driver, a daycare director and two professors, broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole every document they found. The activists, calling themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, soon began leaking shocking details about FBI abuses to the media. Among the documents was one that bore the mysterious word “COINTELPRO.”

AMY GOODMAN: No one involved in the break-in was ever caught. Their identities remained a secret until this week. Today, three of the FBI burglars will join us on the show, but first I want to turn to a new short film produced by the nonprofit news organization Retro Report for The New York Times. It’s titled Stealing J. Edgar Hoover’s Secrets.

NARRATOR: It’s the greatest heist you’ve never heard of and one of the most important.

HARRY REASONER: Last March, someone broke into the FBI offices in Media, Pennsylvania, stole some records and mailed copies of them around to the several newspapers.

NARRATOR: Those records would help bring an end to J. Edgar Hoover’s secret activities within the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

JOHN CHANCELLOR: He ordered his agents not only to expose New Left groups, but to take action against them to neutralize them.

UNIDENTIFIED: Many Americans were tapped and bugged, had their mail opened by the CIA and the FBI.

NARRATOR: The burglars were never caught, and the details have remained a mystery until now. A new book, The Burglary, reveals for the first time who did it and how they used a crowbar to pry open one of the best-kept and darkest secrets in American history.

JOHN RAINES: We were early whistleblowers before whistleblowers were known as such.

NARRATOR: The burglars are stepping out of the shadows just as new revelations about secret intelligence operations have many people asking, “How much is too much when personal privacy is at stake?”

In the spring of 1970, the war in Vietnam was raging.

JOHN CHANCELLOR: American battle deaths in Vietnam now number 40,142.

NARRATOR: And at home, antiwar protesters and law enforcement officers were violently clashing.

BONNIE RAINES: It felt like a nightmare was unfolding. I took what was outrage and horror about what was going on, and I realized that I had to take it somewhere.

NARRATOR: Bonnie Raines worked at a daycare center in Philadelphia. Her husband John taught religion at Temple University. They were the very picture of a golden couple.

BONNIE RAINES: We had an eight-year-old, a six-year-old and a two-year-old. We were family folks who also wanted to keep another track active in our lives, which was political activism.

NARRATOR: That activism attracted the attention of the FBI. Its director, the powerful and feared J. Edgar Hoover, perceived the antiwar movement, which ranged from radical revolutionaries to peaceful protesters, as a threat to national security.

BONNIE RAINES: At one rally, I had one of my children on my back, and not only did they take my picture, but they took her picture.

NARRATOR: Protesters like the Raines became increasingly convinced the FBI was conducting a covert campaign against them, tapping their phones and infiltrating antiwar groups.

JOHN RAINES: We knew the FBI was systematically trying to squash dissent. And dissent is the lifeblood of democracy.

NARRATOR: Determined to get proof, the FBI was crossing the line, fellow activist and Haverford physics professor William Davidon hatched a plan. He reached out to the Raines and six others, including a social worker, a graduate student and a taxi driver named Keith Forsyth.

KEITH FORSYTH: We agreed to meet someplace where we could talk. And he says, “What would you think about the idea of breaking into an FBI office?” And I look at him, and I’m like, “You’re serious, aren’t you?” I was pretty vehement in my opposition to the war, and I felt like marching up and down the street with a sign was not cutting it anymore. And it was like, OK, time to—time to kick it up a notch.

NARRATOR: The crew decided to break into a small FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania.

KEITH FORSYTH: Once I got over the shock of thinking that this was the nuttiest thing I’d ever heard in my life, I’m like, this is a great idea, because we’re not going to make any allegations; we’re going to take their own paperwork, signed by their own people, including J. Edgar Hoover, and give it to the newspapers. So, let’s see you argue with that.

NARRATOR: In the Raines’ third-floor attic, the team divvied up responsibilities and assigned tasks. They hung maps to learn about the neighborhood, planned escape routes, and they took extensive notes on the comings and goings in the building.

KEITH FORSYTH: I signed up for a correspondence course in locksmithing. That was my job, to get us in the door. Practiced several times a week. After a month, you get pretty good.

NARRATOR: Bonnie was assigned the job of going inside and casing the office.

BONNIE RAINES: I was to call the office and make an appointment as a Swarthmore student doing research on opportunities for women in the FBI. So they gave me an appointment. I tried to disguise myself as best I could, and I went to say goodbye, and I acted confused about where the door was, and that gave me a chance then to check out both rooms and know where the file cabinets were.

NARRATOR: Bonnie discovered there was no alarm system and no security guards. She also found a second door leading inside.

JOHN RAINES: When she came back with that news, we became convinced, yes, I think we can get this done. We had more to lose than anybody else in the group, because we had these kids.

BONNIE RAINES: We faced the reality of, if we were arrested and on trial, we would be in prison for very many years. He had to make some plans for that.

NARRATOR: With a solid understanding of how they would conduct the break-in, they now needed to figure out when.

JOHN RAINES: March 8th, 1971, Frazier and Ali were fighting for the championship of the world. And we had the feeling that maybe the cops might be a little bit distracted.

NARRATOR: While the crew waited at a nearby hotel, Forsyth arrived at the office alone.

KEITH FORSYTH: Pull up, walk up to the door, and one of the locks is a cylinder tumbler lock, not a pin tumbler lock. And I just about had a heart attack. Bottom line is, I could not pick that lock.

NARRATOR: They almost called it off. But that second door that Bonnie noticed gave them another chance.

KEITH FORSYTH: At that point, you know that you’re going to have to wing it. Knelt down on the floor, picked the lock in like 20 seconds. There was a deadbolt on the other side. I had a pry bar with me, a short crowbar. I put the bar in there and yanked that sucker. At one point, I heard a noise inside the office. And I’m like, “Are they in there waiting for me?” Basically said to myself, “There’s only one way to find out: I’m going in.”

NARRATOR: Next, the inside crew walked into an empty office wearing business suits and carrying several suitcases. They cleaned out file cabinets and then made their way downstairs to the getaway car and drove off unnoticed. The group reconvened at a farmhouse an hour’s drive away and started unpacking.

KEITH FORSYTH: We were like, “Oh, man, I can’t believe this worked.” We knew there was going to be some gold in there somewhere.

JOHN RAINES: Each of the eight of us were sorting files, and all of a sudden you’d hear one of them, “Oh, look! Look at this one! Look!”

NARRATOR: After several long nights digging for documents that looked the most revealing, the burglars sent copies to journalists, including Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger.

BETTY MEDSGER: And the cover letter was from the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, and the first file that I read was about a group of FBI agents who were told to enhance the paranoia in the antiwar movement and to create an atmosphere that there’s an FBI agent behind every mailbox.

NARRATOR: Attorney General John Mitchell asked the Post not to write about the stolen documents, saying it could endanger lives.

BETTY MEDSGER: The attorney general called two key editors and tried to convince them not to publish.

NARRATOR: But the Post did publish the story, on the front page. It was the first of several reports and told how agents turned local police, letter carriers and switchboard operators into informants.

BETTY MEDSGER: There were very strong editorials calling for an investigation of the FBI.

NARRATOR: Another stolen document would prove even more explosive: a routing slip marked with a mysterious word, “COINTELPRO.” While reporters tried to uncover its meaning, the FBI was desperate to find the burglars. The bureau put nearly 200 agents on the investigation. Hoover’s best lead was the college girl who had visited their office.

BONNIE RAINES: His command was “Find me that woman!”

NARRATOR: Agents actively searched for Bonnie, but there were many antiwar activists who fit her description.

JOHN RAINES: We could hide within, you know, thousands of people. There were so many of us who were active.

NARRATOR: Two years later, NBC reporter Carl Stern figured out the meaning of that word, COINTELPRO.

JOHN CHANCELLOR: Secret FBI memos made public today show that the late J. Edgar Hoover ordered a nationwide campaign to disrupt the activities of the New Left without telling any of his superiors about it.

CARL STERN: Many of the techniques were clearly illegal. Burglaries, forged blackmail letters and threats of violence were used.

NARRATOR: The FBI initially defended its actions.

CLARENCE KELLEY: The government would have been derelict in its duty, had it not taken measures to protect the fabric of our society.

NARRATOR: But the bureau’s techniques were worse and the targets more far-reaching than the burglars ever imagined.

DAVID BRINKLEY: Diplomats, government employees, sports figures, socially prominent persons, senators and congressmen.

WALTER CRONKITE: The FBI at one time sought to blackmail the late Martin Luther King into committing suicide.

UNIDENTIFIED: Marriages were destroyed. Violence was encouraged. Many Americans were tapped and bugged, had their mail opened by the CIA and the FBI, and their tax returns used illegally.

AMY GOODMAN: An extended excerpt from Stealing J. Edgar Hoover’s Secrets, a short film produced by Retro Report for The New York Times. To watch the full video, visit RetroReport.org.

When we come back, three of the activists join us in studio—Keith Forsyth, Bonnie and John Raines—as well as the former Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger, who first broke the story of the stolen FBI documents in 1971. This week, she revealed the identities of the burglars in her new book, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI. We’ll go back in time and talk about today, as well. This is Democracy Now! Back in a moment.

[break]

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Joining us now in our studio are three of the activists who broke into the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, on March 8th, 1971. The break-in led to revelations about the FBI’s secret COINTELPRO program that targeted activists across the country.

None of the burglars were ever caught. On Tuesday, their identities were revealed for the very first time. Keith Forsyth, Bonnie Raines and John Raines all lived in Philadelphia in 1971. Forsyth was working as a cab driver. He was chosen to pick the lock at the FBI office. Bonnie and John Raines hosted many of the planning meetings for the burglary at their home, where they were raising three children. Bonnie, who worked as a daycare director, helped case the FBI office by posing as a college student interested in becoming an FBI agent. John Raines was a veteran of the Freedom Rides movement and a professor at Temple University. He used a Xerox machine at the school to photocopy many of the stolen documents.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re also joined by Betty Medsger, author of the new book, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI. Medsger first reported on the stolen documents while working at The Washington Post. She uncovered the identities of most of the burglars in her new book.

And we welcome you all to Democracy Now! Keith, I want to begin with you. Talk about the time and how you ended up going into the FBI office. What spurred you on?

KEITH FORSYTH: So, at that time, we had just, within a few years, gone through the sort of peak of the civil rights movement, and many of the laws, like the Voting Rights Act, had been passed some years before, but the reality of racial justice was still far from complete. There were—the war in Vietnam was raging at that point in time. And so, there were many, many people who were working for change in those areas, in particular.

My main focus at that time was the antiwar movement. I was, you know, spending as much time as I could with organizing against the war, but I had become very frustrated with legal protest—didn’t seem to be getting us anywhere. The government wasn’t listening. The war was escalating and not de-escalating. And I think what really pushed me over the edge was, shortly after the invasion of Cambodia, there were four students killed at Kent State and two more killed at—at Jackson State. And—I’m sorry, I’d think I’d have this down after all these years. And that really pushed me over the edge, that it was time to do more than just—than just protest and just march with a sign. And I joined the so-called Catholic Left, which is where I met John and Bonnie and also Bill Davidon. And from there, the next step was the Media action.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Keith, could you also talk about how you were invited to join this plan to break into—by William Davidon?

KEITH FORSYTH: If memory serves, he called me on the phone and asked—

AMY GOODMAN: And explain who William Davidon was.

KEITH FORSYTH: Oh, I’m sorry. Bill Davidon, at that time, was a professor of physics at Haverford College, and I knew him mainly as a fellow activist in the peace movement. He was very prominent in Philadelphia in both the legal and the illegal peace movements. And he called me on the phone one day and asked me if I wanted to come to a party, which was code for an action. And I believe I said, “Sure, I’m always up for a party.” You can check the FBI transcript, because they were tapping his phone at the time. And so, we met at an outdoor location, where we couldn’t be bugged, and he presented the idea to me then.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Bonnie Raines, talk about your involvement. What motivated you? You were a young mother of three.

BONNIE RAINES: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: How old were your children?

BONNIE RAINES: They were eight, six and two at that time. We’ve since had a fourth child. I became involved, as Keith said, beginning with the civil rights movement and when we lived in New York and were students. Then we moved to Philadelphia, very much opposed to the war in Vietnam, and found a whole community of activists in Philadelphia. We became acquainted with the—what was called the Catholic Left at that time. And the Berrigan brothers, Bill and Dan, were the leaders in that. And we participated with that group, called the East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives, in a draft board raid. We went into a draft board in the middle of the night as part of the draft resistance movement.

AMY GOODMAN: Where was that?

BONNIE RAINES: In North Philadelphia, a draft board in North Philadelphia. We targeted that draft board because it was in one of the poorest sections of the city, where they were bringing many, many, many young, poor young men into the armed forces to be sent as cannon fodder to Vietnam. Our government was lying to us about the casualties, both civilian and military casualties. So I participated, along with John, in going into a draft board and removing files and destroying those files so those young men could not be drafted.

AMY GOODMAN: And you mentioned the Berrigan brothers, the priests.

BONNIE RAINES: Yes, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Phil, the late Phil Berrigan—

BONNIE RAINES: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: —and Father Dan Berrigan—

BONNIE RAINES: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —who’s still alive. Catonsville, how significant in 1969 was this for you? I wanted to go to a clip right now—

BONNIE RAINES: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: —of the Catonsville action. That was Catonsville, Maryland, where a group of activists, led by Fathers Dan and Phil Berrigan, burned draft cards with napalm. They stole hundreds of draft records and torched them. They were sentenced to three years in prison, their action helping ignite a wave of direct actions against the draft in the Vietnam War.

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: We do not believe that nonviolence is dead, and that we don’t believe in interposing one form of violence for another, and that we believe that an action like this will still speak to our fellow Americans and bring home to them that a decent society is still possible, but it’s totally impossible if these files, and what they represent, are preserved and honored, and even defended, as those poor women tried to.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Father Dan Berrigan, as they stood around in a circle and burned, with napalm—napalm being used in Vietnam—draft records.

BONNIE RAINES: Yes, mm-hmm. That was a very dramatic moment for all of us, I believe. It took civil disobedience to another level and really brought us, clearly, to another level of protest against the war in Vietnam. And we followed their lead in targeting the draft as one of the real evil systems of that war. And that’s how we became involved in covert actions with draft boards in Philadelphia.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, John Raines, can you talk about your sense that the antiwar movement itself had been infiltrated by FBI informants?

JOHN RAINES: Oh, sure. I mean, that was obvious, for any of us who were involved in the civil rights movement, because it happened in the civil rights movement. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was all over the civil rights movement with infiltrators and surveillance, intense surveillance, and people that would report back on meetings and so on. And, of course, we’d all know that J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI went after Martin Luther King, tried to discredit him—indeed, even sent him a note suggesting that because of his activities with other women besides his wife, he now had no option but to commit suicide. That note was sent to Dr. King, suggesting—and it was from the FBI, suggesting that Dr. King commit suicide. So that we knew, from the civil rights actions, that J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI were very much against anything that promised significant social change. We brought that information, that knowledge, north with us when we came to the antiwar movement. And it became clear that the tactics he used to disrupt and destroy—try to destroy the protest movement in the South, he was using once again against the protesters against the war in Vietnam.

The problem was, J. Edgar Hoover was untouchable. He was a national icon. I mean, he had presidents who were afraid of him. The people that we elected to oversee J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI were either enamored of him or terrified of him. Nobody was holding him accountable. And that meant that somebody had to get objective evidence of what his FBI was doing. And that led us to the idea that Bill Davidon suggested to us: Let’s break into an FBI office, get their files and get what they’re doing in their own handwriting.

AMY GOODMAN: You and Bill Davidon were professors.

JOHN RAINES: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: He a professor at Haverford, you a professor at Temple University.

JOHN RAINES: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: What did you feel about the risk that you were taking? Were you concerned about getting caught?

JOHN RAINES: Well, Bonnie and I were parents, and we had three kids under 10, and that was a very serious consideration. We had to be persuaded that we could get away with this. And we had learned nice burglar skills from priests and nuns. And we had cased the FBI office in Media very carefully.

AMY GOODMAN: You had thought about Philadelphia, but thought it was too secure?

JOHN RAINES: Oh, yes, it was a big building downtown, as—you couldn’t touch that. But Media, you could. And we felt quite confident that if we could get in there and get out without leaving any physical evidence behind, that we could then disappear into the very, very large antiwar movement, thousands of people in the Philadelphia area.

AMY GOODMAN: You had prepared, in case you were caught, to have your children taken care of?

BONNIE RAINES: We had. We had. We knew the risks. We knew the jeopardy. We weren’t going to be reckless. We weren’t going to move ahead with our involvement except with the leadership of Bill Davidon, who we all had so much admiration and respect for. But we did feel that it was necessary to speak to John’s older brother and his wife and to my mother and father about caring for our children if—should the worst happen and we would be convicted and sent to federal prison.

AMY GOODMAN: Keith Forsyth, you chose the night of the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight—

KEITH FORSYTH: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: —to break in. Why? Why was this so significant, March 8th, 1971?

KEITH FORSYTH: Well, it was just—you know, there were many steps that we took to try to avoid getting caught, and this was one of them, because whoever suggested it—and I have no idea who it was—thought that it would add to the distraction, not only of the police, but of just people in general. The building in which the office was located had a live-in supervisor, and his apartment was directly below the FBI office. So, he was going to be on the next floor down while we were inside walking around opening cabinets. So, anything that could keep his mind off of the ambient sounds sounded like a good idea.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: How did you know that you would find what documents you would find, or did you know?

KEITH FORSYTH: We didn’t know. We were—we were pretty sure. You know, bureaucracies are the same everywhere. They love to keep records. But we really—we were taking a shot. So, in that sense, we got lucky that they did keep records.

AMY GOODMAN: This brings Betty Medsger into the story, whose book this week, The Burglary, reveals the identities of the activists involved in this burglary. Looks like J. Edgar Hoover found his match in this group of people. Talk about receiving in the mail the documents. You were a reporter at the time for The Washington Post.

BETTY MEDSGER: OK. I’d just like to say something about Bill Davidon, if I might, first, that the idea was Bill’s. And Bill participated in preparations for the book and the documentary that’s been made, 1971. And we should note that we’re all very sorry that Bill’s not with us. Bill died in November. But he was sort of a genius in coming up with this idea, because although many people in the various movements at that time thought that there was—there were FBI informers in their organizations, there was no evidence of that, and the public didn’t know. And Bill had this deep commitment that if the public could be presented with evidence, they would be very upset. Even though there—Hoover was an iconic figure, that if they knew that there was massive surveillance of the—political surveillance, that they would care and do something. And that’s what happened.

I was a reporter. And one day this envelope appeared in my mailbox. And it said it was from Liberty Publications—that was the return address—Media, Pennsylvania. That didn’t mean anything to me. But when I opened it, there was a cover letter, said it was from Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. That was a new organization to me. And there was—the letter explained that a group of eight people had burglarized an FBI office on the night of March 8th, and that enclosed were some of the files that they had removed from the office.

And some of those files were very shocking. I think the one—and you showed the excerpt from this on the Retro Report—the first shock—and this also resonated very much with the public when it was published and discussed—was the one that instructed agents to enhance the paranoia and then also make people think that there’s an FBI agent behind every mailbox. And that was a pretty stunning statement and said so much. And the burglars were—themselves, were shocked, I understand, when they found that the first—saw that document the first night after the burglary. So that stunned me.

And I guess the other files—there were many about individuals, and they were all serious, but the—one of the things that I remember most from those files was the truly blanket surveillance of African-American people that was described. It was in Philadelphia, but it also prescribed national programs. And it was quite stunning. First, it described the surveillance. It took place in every place where people would gather—churches, classrooms, stores down the street, just everything. But it also specifically prescribed that every FBI agent was supposed to have an informer, just for the purpose of coming back every two weeks and talking to them about what they had observed about black Americans. And in Washington, D.C., at the time, that was six informers for every FBI agent informing on black Americans. The surveillance was so enormous that it led various people, rather sedate people in editorial offices and in Congress, to compare it to the Stasi, the dreaded secret police of East Germany.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Could you talk about how the editors at The Washington Post responded when you showed them these documents?

BETTY MEDSGER: The editors responded very positively to them. I should point out that—two things. First, this was the first time that a journalist had ever received secret government documents from a source who had—from the outside, an outside source who had stolen the documents. So that tended to pose a different kind of consideration as to what you would do—in their minds, as to what you’d do with the documents. But it was a particularly tough decision for Katharine Graham, who until this time had never faced anything like this.

AMY GOODMAN: The publisher.

BETTY MEDSGER: The publisher, Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, because it was the first time that she had been faced with a demand from the Nixon administration that she suppress a story. And she did not want to publish. And the in-house counsel, the lawyers, also did not want to publish. But two editors, from the beginning, realized it was a very important story and pushed it—Ben Bradlee and Ben Bagdikian. I was just back there innocently writing my story, talking—I had been a reporter in Philadelphia and was talking to sources from the past, confirming information. Didn’t know until 6:00 that there was a question as to whether or not they would publish. By 10:00 that night, she decided to publish.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about the reaction, and the reporters who did not get to publish the story, because you weren’t the only person that these activists sent the documents to.

BETTY MEDSGER: They sent them to five people. These are the first files that they released. They sent them to Senator George McGovern and Representative Parren Mitchell from Baltimore. And they immediately returned the files to the FBI when they received them and didn’t make them public. They sent them to three journalists. In addition to sending them to me, they sent them to Jack Nelson at the Washington Bureau of the Los Angeles Times —

AMY GOODMAN: The great crusading reporter who wrote Terror in the Night about the Klan in the South.

BETTY MEDSGER: Right, and Tom Wicker, columnist then at The New York Times. Now, it’s also important to keep in mind, in addition to the fact that we didn’t really know—the public didn’t know what was happening inside the FBI, that very few journalists ever wrote investigative work or critical comment about the FBI. And Jack Nelson and Tom Wicker were two of about three or four who had, up until that point. At the L.A. Times, Jack never received the envelope, even though it was addressed to him, and it was delivered to the FBI immediately. I didn’t know this until years later, when I read the investigative report on the FBI’s investigation. It’s a little less clear what happened at the Times as to whether Tom Wicker received, and what they did do was the same thing: They immediately gave the files to the FBI. And—but they apparently kept them and copied them, unlike the L.A. Times, because the day after we broke the story, then they wrote stories on the same files.

AMY GOODMAN: Keith, before we go to break, can you talk about parallels to today? It is hard to look at—and for a moment, I want to turn to the Church Committee hearings that took place a few years later. Senator Frank Church of Idaho led this investigation. The Senate’s Church Committee investigated the CIA and FBI’s misuse of power at home and abroad. The multi-year investigation in the mid-’70s followed the exposure of COINTELPRO, which stands for Counterintelligence Program—and it was the first time people had seen that word, was in the documents you released—examining the FBI and CIA’s efforts to infiltrate and disrupt leftist organizations, the CIA’s attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, and much more. This is Senator Frank Church speaking during one of the committee’s hearings.

SEN. FRANK CHURCH: We have seen today the dark side of those activities, where many Americans, who were not even suspected of crime, were not only spied upon, but they were harassed, they were discredited, and, at times, endangered.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Senator Frank Church. The Church Committee hearings led to major changes in what the FBI could do, and also dealing with the press, as well. You listen to Frank Church, you could be hearing possible hearings today, though they haven’t started, to do with Edward Snowden.

KEITH FORSYTH: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: What are your thoughts on Edward Snowden today?

KEITH FORSYTH: I think there are some parallels. It’s not an exact parallel. But, to me, one of the most significant ones is that not long before Edward Snowden released these documents, James Clapper went in front of Congress and the American public and was asked a direct question whether the NSA was engaged in this kind of surveillance, and he said no, which was obviously a lie. And I think if he had said, “Oh, we can’t talk about that because that’s national security,” I might have had some respect for that answer. But to come out and lie to the public about it—and, of course, not suffer any punishment as a result—so, to me, Edward Snowden—I’ve seen no evidence, personally, that Edward Snowden has released anything that was actually harmful to our national security. You know, certainly has been embarrassing, but, to me, the young man is definitely a whistleblower and has performed a great service by enabling us to have the conversation. You know, we couldn’t—we couldn’t have the conversation about whether this is right or wrong before, because we were not told about it. So he’s made that conversation possible, and I think—I think we owe him something, a debt for that.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and come back to this conversation. Our guests are Keith Forsyth and Bonnie and John Raines. They were part of the—what they called themselves, the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, activists during the Vietnam War era who broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and took the documents they got and sent them to The Washington Post and other publications to let people know what the FBI was doing. We’re also joined by the woman who has revealed the names of these activists—and we’ll talk about why they decided to come forward—Betty Medsger, former Washington Post reporter, author of The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh, as we continue our discussion looking at how activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, in 1971 and disclosed secrets about the FBI’s COINTELPRO program—that’s Counterintelligence Program—first came to public attention with the release of these documents. We are joined, as well as Bonnie and John Raines, who were among those who broke into the FBI office that day, March 8th, 1971, by the reporter who broke the story then and now, released the names of those involved with this break-in, Betty Medsger. She wrote The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI. We’re also joined by David Kairys, who has represented this group until this day for what, more than 40 years?

DAVID KAIRYS: Forty-three years.

AMY GOODMAN: Forty-three years. But, John Raines, why have you decided to come forward 43 years—what, 42 years later?

JOHN RAINES: Well, the simple answer is: A book came out. And, of course, that’s not accidental. We decided years ago that we would trust Betty with this story. And she’s done a wonderful job, spending years of research writing a very substantial book. It tells a very interesting story.

We decided that it was time to, once again, come forward with the question of government surveillance, government intimidation, and the right of citizens to vocally dissent. I think that the gasoline of democracy is the right to dissent, because wherever there’s power, wherever there’s privilege, power and privilege are going to try to remove, insofar as they can, from public discourse anything they want to do. That leaves the citizens’ right to dissent as the last line of defense for freedom. Now, that’s what we were faced with back in 1970s. I think that’s what we’re faced with once again today. It should not surprise us. I mean, it should not surprise us that those in power in Washington want to make the decisions that really count off stage, out of sight from the rest of us. But democracy depends upon the rights of citizens to have the information they need in order for them, the citizens—who are the sovereigns—for them to decide what the government should be doing and should not be doing. They must have that information so that they can make up their minds.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain that moment that night when Betty Medsger came over and you revealed who you were. What year was it?

JOHN RAINES: I think that was in 1988. We had known Betty when she was a reporter there in Philadelphia.

AMY GOODMAN: That was more than 20 years ago.

JOHN RAINES: Oh, more than 20 was ago. And Betty was then living in San Francisco, but she was on a trip to the East Coast. And we invited her for supper, and Betty was nice enough to say, “Sure, I’ll come.” And I think it was—we had had supper, and finally, our youngest daughter, Mary, came down. She was, I think, 12 or 13, something like that. And without thinking about it, I just said, “Mary, come on in. We want you to meet Betty Medsger, because she was the one that we sent those FBI files to.” And Betty’s chin dropped down to her chest, and it was out of the bag. That’s how it started.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: David Kairys, as the attorney who has worked on this case for so long, could you talk about the significance of the statute of limitations on the case, as well as what you saw as the illegality—what was indeed the illegality of what these documents exposed about what the FBI was doing?

DAVID KAIRYS: Well, sure. The statute of limitations, by any fair reading, is five years. The FBI themselves closed the file in 1976, because five years had elapsed and there was no charges. Excuse me. There are arguments one can make, but there’s really no legitimate or good-faith basis to bring any legal—any legal charges at this point.

As for the illegality of the FBI, they’re supposed to enforce the law. Here they are interposing themselves as almost a political counterforce to stop certain movements. And it had a direction to it: They were stopping left-liberal movements. And they were using techniques that we usually associate with state police in countries and systems that we usually think of as alien.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And how did you come to become involved in the case?

DAVID KAIRYS: Well, I was regularly doing civil rights work, and I was—I would represent demonstrators of all kinds. And so, two of them checked with me before, what’s my home number. And they—Keith kids me that he’s still got my phone number from back then on his arm. And so, that was the beginning. I didn’t know then exactly what they were going to do, but then two of them got arrested in the Camden 28 case, where I was lead counsel.

AMY GOODMAN: And, in fact, remarkably, five days before this break-in, Bill Davidon met with Henry Kissinger at the White House, the national security adviser for Richard Nixon.

DAVID KAIRYS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: We don’t have time for the story, but we’re going to talk about it in our post-show interview, and we’ll post it online at democracynow.org. How was this secret kept for so many decades? It’s not just the two of you, John and Bonnie Raines; there were nine of you. One person dropped out. There were eight of you. This is decades later. How did you keep this secret?

BONNIE RAINES: Well, we—

AMY GOODMAN: A hundred FBI agents looking for you. And, Bonnie, you had gone into the FBI office in Media to case it out and pretend you were a young woman looking for an FBI job and sat with the official there.

BONNIE RAINES: Mm-hmm, and did not know, following that, that there was a sketch that was then circulated of me by the FBI. It was—we knew—

AMY GOODMAN: We have 30 seconds.

BONNIE RAINES: We knew that we had to pull the curtain down, not meet after we did our work, and just not talk about it with anybody at all, because our work was done at that point, and we were not looking for anything more than for the general public and Congress to follow suit in a way that we hoped they would.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you feel it accomplished what you wanted?

BONNIE RAINES: I think, in certain ways. In certain ways, it did. We were encouraged when there was a Church Committee that was—that was taking their task seriously, and there were reforms that did take place.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you so much for all being with us, and also thank Johanna Hamilton. Her film, 1971, on the same subject, is just coming out. We’ll be interviewing her. The book is The Burglary. Thanks so much, all, for joining us.

Find this story at 8 January 2014

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U.S. intelligence officials believe that Iranian commandos took part in a deadly attack on a compound of dissidents inside Iraq and then spirited seven members of the group back to Iran, highlighting Tehran’s increasingly free hand inside Iraq in the wake of the U.S withdrawal from the country.

The Sept. 1 attack on a base called Camp Ashraf killed at least 50 members of the Mujahedeen-e Khalq, or MEK, which had disarmed at the request of the U.S. military after the American invasion of Iraq and received explicit promises of protection from senior commanders. Instead, gory videos released by the group showed that many of its members had been shot with their hands tied behind their backs or in one of the camp’s makeshift hospitals. MEK leaders, backed by an array of U.S. lawmakers, said Iraqi security forces carried out the attack.

Baghdad has long denied the charge, and U.S. officials have now concluded that a small number of Iranian paramilitaries from its feared Islamic Revolution Guards Corps helped plan and direct the assault on the camp. Three officials, speaking to Foreign Policy for the first time, said gunmen from two of Tehran’s Iraqi-based proxies, Kitab Hezbollah and Asaib Ahl al-Haq, then carried out the actual attack. The Iranian involvement in the Ashraf massacre hasn’t been reported before.

“Iraqi soldiers didn’t get in the way of what was happening at Ashraf, but they didn’t do the shooting,” a U.S. official briefed on the intelligence community’s assessment of the attack said in an interview. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified information.

U.S. officials say that Iran’s role in the attack didn’t end with the killings of the MEK members at Ashraf. Instead, officials believe that Iranian commandos and fighters from the country’s Iraqi proxies also abducted seven MEK members and smuggled them back to Iran. The missing MEK supporters haven’t been seen or heard from since the attack.

Direct Iranian involvement in the Ashraf assault is one of the clearest signs yet of Tehran’s growing power within Iraq, a dynamic of deep concern to American policymakers. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite government has long maintained close ties with top Iranian leaders, and U.S. officials believe that Tehran prodded Maliki to refuse to sign a bilateral security pact in the fall of 2010 that would have kept some U.S. troops in the country. Perhaps under Iran’s influence, Maliki has alienated Iraq’s sizable Sunni and Kurdish minorities by centralizing power in Baghdad and refusing to share power or fairly divvy up the country’s oil revenues.

The timing of the attack also raises questions about whether Iran’s security services are as committed to finding a rapprochement with Washington as its civilian government appears to be. The assault took place in September, several months after negotiators from the two governments had begun secret nuclear talks in Oman that ultimately led to last month’s landmark nuclear pact between the Obama administration and the government of Iranian President Hasan Rouhani. The deadly attack on a U.S.-allied group inside Iraq suggests that at least some elements within Tehran are willing to take steps that risk upsetting that fragile equilibrium.

MEK leaders in Washington strongly disagree with the U.S. conclusions about the Ashraf attack. They point out that the facility is guarded by fences, checkpoints and more than 1,200 Iraqi troops, making it extremely difficult for gunmen to reach the camp without, at a minimum, the active cooperation of Iraqi forces. They also note that survivors said the masked gunmen spoke Arabic and argue that the group’s own operatives within Iran would know if the seven missing members had been brought into the country. They believe that Tehran ordered the attack, but say that it was carried out by Iraqi soldiers loyal to Maliki.

“The repeated statements by U.S. officials that Iraq has had no role in the September 1 massacre at Ashraf are only designed to exonerate the Iraqi prime minister and his senior officials from any responsibility in this manifest case of crime against humanity and to help him elude justice,” Shahin Gobadi, a spokesman for the National Council of Iran Resistance, said in a written statement.

U.S. officials, for their part, say that the Iranian commandos could have used Arabic to mask their identities or stayed just outside the camp while the Iraqi gunmen carried out the assault. They also say at the missing MEK members might have been executed shortly after being brought into Iran or imprisoned in secret facilities for interrogation.

The Obama administration has largely declined to publicly address Iranian involvement in the Ashraf attack. During a contentious hearing of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs earlier this month, Secretary of State John Kerry said he couldn’t respond to a question about the missing MEK members in an open, unclassified session.

Still, other senior officials have provided hints about their whereabouts. At a sparsely-attended congressional hearing in mid-November, Brett McGurk, the deputy assistant secretary of state for Iraq and Iran, told lawmakers that the seven MEK members “are not in Iraq.”

McGurk told the lawmakers that the remaining 2,900 MEK members in Iraq wouldn’t be safe until they could be brought out of the country and resettled elsewhere.

“The Iraqi government needs to do everything possible to keep those people safe, but they will never be safe until they’re out of Iraq,” McGurk said at the time. “And we all need to work together — the MEK, us, the committee, everybody, the international community — to find a place for them to go.”

Tehran’s antipathy towards the MEK isn’t surprising. The group has spent years publicly decrying the Iranian government and telling lawmakers that it has broad support within Iran and could help turn the country into a democracy. It has also revealed key details about the country’s nuclear program. In response, Iranian-backed forces inside Iraq have frequently targeted the group. In February, six of its members were killed and dozens were wounded when mortar shells landed at an MEK refugee camp on the grounds of a former U.S. base called Camp Liberty. A Hezbollah affiliate claimed responsibility.

Outgunned in Iraq, the MEK has tried to score points in the Washington influence game. It has enlisted former members of the military and both the Bush and Obama administrations as public advocates and unofficial lobbyists. The State Department designated it as a “foreign terrorist organization” in 1997, but removed the listing in September 2012 after strong pressure from MEK supporters like retired Marine Gen. Jim Jones, Obama’s first national security advisor, and former Attorney General Mike Mukasey. Most of the MEK’s most prominent backers are paid for making public appearances on the group’s behalf, but they also do pro bono work for the organization and say they genuinely believe in its cause.

The group also enjoys strong support on Capitol Hill. In the weeks after the Ashraf assault, New Jersey Democrat Bob Menendez, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a staunch MEK supporter, told Wendy Sherman, the No. 3 official at the State Department, that he would suspend U.S. weapons sales to Iraq until Maliki’s government did more to protect the MEK members still in the country.

The Obama administration, for its part, says the MEK’s members will only be safe once they’ve left Iraq. It’s not clear, however, if or when other countries will step forward and announce a willingness to accept them.

BY Yochi Dreazen DECEMBER 17, 2013 – 06:11 PM

Find this story at 17 December 2013

Copyright foreignpolicy.com

The MEK can use some of that cash to pay legal settlements with former members that
they tortured, as well as the families of Iranians they killed when they fought on the side of
Saddam against Iran.

The controversial Iranian exile organization MEK, which the United States calls a terrorist
group, could soon see a windfall of tens of millions of dollars as the result of the European
Union’s decision Monday to take it off its list of terrorist organizations.
If so, it will mark dramatic turnaround the group’s fortunes.

The MEK, shorthand for the Mujahedin-e Khalq, and also known as the People’s
Mujahideen Organisation of Iran, looked like it was on the ropes only days ago, when Iraqi
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said he wanted its U.S.-protected military base near the
Iranian border closed within two months.

But the E.U.’s Jan. 26 decision not only unlocks untold millions of dollars frozen in
European banks, it allows the militant anti-Iran organization to go public with appeals for
millions more, perhaps catapulting it into a leading role in the Iranian opposition abroad.
The MEK could claim $9 million held in France alone, along with “tens of millions of
dollars” worth of assets locked away in other EU countries, its spokesman told Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty.

What will it do with the windfall?

“Set off car bombs around Iran,” jibed former CIA operative Robert Baer, whose pursuit
was dramatized by George Clooney in the 2005 movie “Syriana.”
The group says it has renounced violence, but the MEK has carried out dozens of terrorist
attacks and assassinations against Iranian targets both inside and outside of the country.
Some of those were launched from its base in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, before the 2003
U.S. invasion.

MEK leader Maryam Rajavi said the unfrozen millions “will be used to increase our political
activities … including to further disclose the mullah regime’s secret nuclear weapons sites.”
Since Hussein’s overthrow, the 3,000 MEK fighters in Camp Ashraf, as it’s called, have
been under the “protection” of U.S. troops, even though they’re still officially labeled
terrorists by the State Department.

The seeming anomaly can be at least party explained by frequent reports that the MEK
has been secretly helping the CIA run operations against the Islamic regime from its base
in southeastern Iraq.

Its terrorist label was earned before the 1979 Iranian Islamic revolution, when the group,
which bills itself as Marxist-Islamist, targeted Americans working in Iran. Indeed, 30 years
ago this month the group helped overthrow the U.S.-backed shah and take 52 American
hostages.

But eventually it turned against the religious regime. In 2001 its sustained opposition to
Iran, its supposed renunciation of violence, and its portrayal of itself as a “progressive”
political force won it admirers in the Bush administration and pro-democracy groups in
Europe. Of no small note, it has also played a major role in exposing Iran’s nuclear
activities.

Walid Phares, a scholar on terrorism and American of Lebanese descent, called the
closing of Camp Ashraf “a significant Iranian victory.”
“Ashraf was the only base for the MEK against Iran’s regime,” he said by e-mail. “If it is
shut down, they will lose the only base they have.”
“More than a military base of the opposition against Tehran,” he added, “Ashraf was a
political base for broadcast and political outreach to the opposition in the inside.”
On the other hand, the E.U.’s decision will conceivably allow MEK fighters entry into
Europe, at least temporarily solving the problem of what to do with them once Ashraf is
closed.

That, and the new money, can only add to the MEK’s political clout, which was put on
display last year when the group drew 85,000 people to an anti-Iran protest outside Paris.
To date, exile communities have been divided over the MEK because of its attacks on
Iranian troops from Iraqi soil during the two nations’ 10-year war. Some call the
organization a puritanistic “cult,” because of its iron-fist leadership by a husband and wife
team who have been accused of violating the human rights of their own followers.
But the E.U.’s decision could give the MEK a big boost over its rivals, Phares suggests.
“Once they are decertified [as a terrorist group] they will act as an international NGO [nongovernmental organization] and will most likely receive even more donations from Iranian
exiles,” said Phares, a senior fellow at the hawkish Foundation for the Defense of
Democracies in Washington.

“De-certification by itself will strengthen the group within the Iranian diaspora,” he
continued. “Will they access to frozen funds in EU banks? This is another issue and will
have to be negotiated. But certainly they will have a legal base. They will spend it to widen
their base, and on strategic communications regarding Iran.”
All things considered, it’s not hard to suspect a hidden American hand in the E.U. decision,
or at least acquiescence in it, since it so neatly finesses the eviction notice served on
Camp Ashraf by Prime Minister Maliki.

In any event, it keeps MEK alive — and more — despite the threatened closing of its
longtime base in Iraq.

The Iranian regime reacted sharply to the E.U. move, accusing the union of a “double
standard” on terrorism. It also said it was drafting a plan to put MEK members on trial,
“either in the Islamic Republic or outside the country,” according to Press TV, an Iranian
news service.

By Jeff Stein | January 28, 2009

Find this story at 28 January 2009

Copyright Jeff Stein

(Reuters) – At least 47 people were reported killed at an Iranian dissident camp in Iraq on Sunday, the United Nations said, urging Baghdad to investigate the “tragic events” at a site north of the capital.

The violence took place hours after a mortar bomb attack on the camp which the dissent group Mujahadin-e-Khalq (MEK) blamed on the Iraqi army.

Two Iraqi security sources said that army and special forces had opened fire on residents who had stormed a post at the entrance to Camp Ashraf, a site that Iraq’s government wants closed down. They said at least 19 were killed, 52 wounded and 38 arrested and that they believed residents were not armed.

However, the U.N. statement had a figure closer to the toll given by MEK, which said 52 of its roughly 100 members at the camp had been killed.

An advisor to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said reports that security forces had opened fire on the residents were baseless and said that Maliki had ordered an investigation into what had happened.

“We want to know the truth,” advisor Ali al-Moussawi said. He said it was unclear what had caused the blast in the morning. Residents could have been killed in the explosion or through infighting at the camp, he said. He gave no casualty figures.

In a statement, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon appealed for the urgent restoration of security in the camp.

“The United Nations deplores the tragic events at Camp Ashraf today that have reportedly left 47 killed,” he said. Baghdad should “promptly investigate the incident and disclose the findings.”

MEK, which the U.S. State Department removed from its list of terrorist organizations last year, said some residents were machine-gunned with their hands tied behind their backs.

The U.S. embassy in Iraq condemned “the terrible events that took place in Camp Ashraf” and the UN said it would send in a team from its Iraq office to carry out its own probe.

“We further call on Iraqi authorities to act with urgency to immediately ensure medical assistance to the wounded and to secure the camp against any further violence or harm to the residents,” the U.S. embassy statement said, calling for a full, independent investigation.

MALIKI ORDERS PROBE

MEK emailed photos of people it said had been shot in the head during the clashes. Men and women were shown lying on blood-covered floors. It was not possible for Reuters independently to verify the images.

“The Iraqi government stresses the need for help to deport elements of the Mujahadin-e-Khalq who are on Iraqi soil illegally but at the same time confirms its commitment to the safety of souls on its territory,” Maliki’s office said in a statement referring to “events” at Camp Ashraf.

It gave no further details.

MEK wants Iran’s clerical leaders overthrown and fought with former Iraqi Sunni Muslim leader Saddam Hussein’s forces in the 1980s Iran-Iraq war.

It has been seeking to recast itself as an Iranian opposition force but is no longer welcome in Iraq under the Shi’ite Muslim-led government that came to power after U.S.-led forces toppled Saddam in 2003. Iraq’s current government is close to Iranian authorities.

Mortar bomb attacks on a newer MEK camp in a former military compound in western Baghdad, where authorities had relocated most Camp Ashraf MEK members, took place in February and June. At the time, MEK blamed Iran’s Quds force – an elite unit of the Revolutionary Guards with a special focus on foreign operations.

MEK, also known as the People’s Mujahideen Organisation of Iran, led a guerrilla campaign against the U.S.-backed Iranian Shah during the 1970s that included attacks on U.S. targets.

(Additional reporting by Ahmed Rasheed and a Reuters reporter in Diyala, Iraq; Writing by Sylvia Westall; Editing by Jon Boyle)

By Kareem Raheem and Sylvia Westall
BAGHDAD Sun Sep 1, 2013 4:47pm EDT

Find this story at 1 September 2013

Copyright Thomson Reuters

Iraq has threatened to send MKO members at Camp Ashraf back to Iran, where many fear imprisonment or death.

At its monthly meeting of foreign ministers, the European Union has decided to remove the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO) from its list of terrorist organizations.

The decision marks the first time the EU has “de-listed” an organization from its terrorist index, and could free the MKO, also known as the People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran, to expand its activities in Europe. It is also likely to further strain Tehran’s already damaged relations with the West.

Formed in the 1960s to fight the shah’s regime, the Islamic-socialist MKO joined the 1979 Islamic revolution that overthrew him, but later fell out with the new clerical regime and fought with Saddam Hussein during Iraq’s 1980-88 war with Iran. Major attacks by the MKO against Tehran ceased by the early 1990s and the group renounced violence in 2001, but Tehran continues to seek MKO members’ extradition.

Maryam Rajavi, the France-based leader of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the political branch of the MKO that has been active in Europe in recent years, characterized the EU move as a “stinging defeat for Europe’s policy of appeasement” of Tehran.

And Said Mahmudi, a professor of international law at the University of Stockholm, says it will end the MKO’s difficulties in raising funds in Europe.

“Even though they had the possibility to contact different political organizations, there were some groups and bodies — particularly some individuals — who, because of the terrorist branding of the group, avoided it and didn’t give it public backing,” Mahmudi says.

“Now that the MKO has been removed from the EU terror list, all the groups that are sympathetic to the MKO will be able to support them publicly and help them without any problem,” he adds.

Shahin Gobadi, a spokesman for the group, says that $9 million had been frozen in France alone, with “tens of millions of dollars” worth of assets also locked away in other EU countries.

History Of Opposition

The development marks a striking turnaround for an organization that remains on the United States’ terrorism list, while remaining a fierce enemy of Tehran.

After its founding in 1965, members of the group took up arms against the Iranian shah and were involved in the killings of several U.S. citizens working in Iran in the 1970s. The group initially supported the 1979 revolution, but then went underground when an uprising against the newly established Islamic regime went awry.

Iranian protesting the decision outside the French Embassy in Tehran
Within years of the revolution, many MKO members were jailed, some were executed, and others fled Iran and went into exile.

The MKO later helped orchestrate a number of attacks against Iran’s leaders, including a 1981 bombing in which Iran’s prime minister and president were killed. In 1986, in the midst of the Iran-Iraq War, the organization’s leaders and members relocated to Iraq, where Saddam Hussein granted them refuge.

The MKO’s support for Iraq in the 1980-88 war is today seen by observers as the main reason for its limited support among Iranians. It is also accused by critics of collaborating with Saddam during his bloody campaign against the Kurds, charges that the MKO denies.

But the militant group renounced violence in 2001 and has not kept arms since 2003. It has also long sought to be removed from the EU and U.S. terror lists as Tehran continued its efforts to oust the group from Iraq.

Renouncing Violence

Iran’s largest opposition group in exile, the MKO follows an ideology that combines Islam and Marxism and says it is the best hope for establishing democracy in Iran. In 2002, the MKO exposed Iran’s covert nuclear activities.

But critics cast doubt on its effectiveness in opposing the Iranian regime, while organizations such as Human Rights Watch (in a 2005 report) have accused it of subjecting dissident members to torture and prolonged solitary confinement.

Massoud Khodabandeh, a former MKO member who currently works as an analyst with the French Center for the Study of Terrorism and an adviser to Iraq’s government, describes the MKO as a personality cult obsessed with celibacy.

“I witnessed forced divorces amid cries and shouts. I witnessed how 150 children under the age of 7 — the youngest was only two months old — were separated from their mothers and sent to other countries because the MKO leader had said [the children] are disrupting my relations with you,” Khodabandeh says.

MKO leaders have in the past rejected similar charges, but the reputation that precedes the group has opened questions about whether Brussels’s move fits with its efforts to promote human rights and to fight terrorism.

“If a group makes a pronouncement that it is abandoning violence, then I think we should be able to give them the chance to prove the case, so I think that’s what the European policy on these matters should be,” says professor John Wilkinson, chairman of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews.

“Let us find political pathways away from violence where we can,” he continues. “If a group proves that it has not lived up to its claim to abandon violence then, of course, we must revert to using the instruments of criminal justice and law enforcement to deal with it.”

Future Of The People’s Mujahedin

Some 3,000 MKO members are currently based at Camp Ashraf in Iraq. Their presence there has led to increased concern over their fate since the Iraqi government took over responsibility for the camp from U.S. forces earlier this month.

Washington, while keeping the MKO on its list of terrorist organizations, has given members of the group who stay at Ashraf the status of “protected persons” under the Geneva Conventions.

Iraqi officials have made it clear that the group “is not wanted” on Iraqi territory, and have called on MKO members to leave voluntarily. This, in turn, led supporters and rights groups to warn that they could face torture or death if they returned to Iran.

Khodabandeh believes that the EU decision could mean a way out for those MKO members who are willing to leave Ashraf, including a number of his “friends.”

“I hope that the removal of MKO from the EU terror list will enable some of those individuals to be saved from the situation they’re facing in Iraq,” he says. “About 1,000 of them were based in [Europe] before; they should be given the right to return to their families.”

It’s not clear whether the EU decision will have an impact on Washington’s designation of the group as a foreign terrorist organization. The NCRI’s Rajavi, for one, urges the United States to follow the EU’s example.

The former U.S. administration reaffirmed its designation of the MKO as a foreign terrorist organization on January 7.

But Iran, which has said that nothing has changed “in the terrorist nature” of the group, can be expected to take some sort of action against the EU ruling.

In a possible hint at what might come, the head of the National Security Committee of the Iranian parliament on January 25 warned the EU against making a “mistake.”

“There is no reason for Iran to continue tens of billions of euros in economic and trade ties with the EU in this case,” Alaeddin Borujerdi said, adding that Iran has “many options” for new partners.

The Iranian parliament is expected on January 27 to discuss a draft bill “to authorize the government and the judiciary to bring those MKO members who have committed crimes to justice.”

By Golnaz Esfandiari

January 26, 2009

Find this story at 29 January 2009

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty © 2014 RFE/RL, Inc.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — An Iranian opposition group based in Iraq, labeled a terrorist organization by the United States, gets protection from the U.S. military despite Iraqi pressure to leave the country.

The U.S. considers the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, or MEK, a source of valuable intelligence on Iran.

The group also is credited with helping expose Iran’s secret nuclear program through spying on Tehran for decades.

Iranian officials tied the MEK to an explosion in February at a girls school in Zahedan, Iran. (Full story)

The U.S. State Department considers the MEK a terrorist organization — meaning no American can deal with it; U.S. banks must freeze its assets; and any American giving support to its members is committing a crime.

The U.S. military, though, regularly escorts MEK supply runs between Baghdad and its base, Camp Ashraf.

“The trips for procurement of logistical needs also take place under the control and protection of the MPs,” said Mojgan Parsaii, vice president of MEK and leader of Camp Ashraf.

That’s because, according to U.S. documents, coalition forces regard MEK as protected people under the Geneva Conventions.

“The coalition remains deeply committed to the security and rights of the protected people of Ashraf,” U.S. Maj. Gen. John D. Gardner wrote in March 2006.

The group also enjoys the protection of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

“The ICRC has made clear that the residents of Camp Ashraf must not be deported, expelled or repatriated,” according to an ICRC letter.

Despite repeated requests, neither Iran’s ambassador in Baghdad nor the U.S. military would comment on MEK, also known as Mojahedin Khalq Organization, or MKO.

The State Department said Friday the Geneva Conventions protections apply only to MEK residents of Camp Ashraf, and the organization as a whole and its members elsewhere are subject to prosecution for terrorist or criminal acts.

“We still regard them as a terrorist organization,” former U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said.

When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Green Berets arrived at Camp Ashraf to find gardens and monuments, along with more than 2,000 well-maintained tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery, anti-aircraft guns and vehicles.

All 3,800 camp residents were questioned by Americans. No arrests were made, and the camp quickly surrendered under a cease-fire agreement — an agreement that also guaranteed its safety.

“Everyone’s entry to the camp and his departure are controlled by the U.S. military police force,” Parsaii said.

The MEK denies it is a terrorist group. Both Iran and the Iraqi government, however, accuse the group of ongoing terrorist attacks, and the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government wants it out.

“We gave this organization a six-month deadline to leave Iraq, and we informed the Red Cross,” said Shirwan al-Wa’eli, Iraq’s national security minister. “And presumably, our friends the Americans will respect our decision and they will not stay on Iraqi land.”

For now, however, the United States continues to protect MEK.

“There are counter-pressures, too,” Khalilzad said. “There are people who say, ‘No, they should be allowed to stay here.’ And as you know, around the world there are people with different views toward them.”

POSTED: 1553 GMT (2353 HKT), April 6, 2007

Find this story at 6 April 2007

© 2007 Cable News Network.

Camp Ashraf once housed more than 3,000 exiles, but most have moved to another camp (file photo)

Violence has erupted at a camp in Iraq for dissident Iranians, who say dozens of residents have lost their lives.

The Mujahideen-e Khalq group accused Iraqi forces of attacking Camp Ashraf north-east of Baghdad, killing at least 52 of its members – some shot in the head at close range.

However Iraqi officials said no soldiers entered the camp.

UN representatives have condemned the bloodshed and urged Iraq swiftly to establish the facts.

A statement from the UN mission in Iraq also called on Iraqi officials to ensure security for residents at the camp and urged an end to the violence so medical help could reach the wounded.

“The only thing we can confirm is there are a lot of casualties,” Eliana Nabaa, a spokeswoman for the UN mission to Iraq was quoted as saying.

The population of Camp Ashraf, once home to more than 3,000 members of the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), was believed to have dwindled to about 100 before the violence.

In recent years, Iraqi authorities have been trying to dismantle the camp and eject the group, which has been based in Iraq since the 1980s.
Mortars

Accounts of the violence given by MEK spokesmen and different local officials vary.

MEK officials said Iraqi forces attacked Camp Ashraf early on Sunday, firing mortar rounds.

Some Iraqi reports confirmed that mortar rounds had been fired without identifying their origin, but said the deaths came during subsequent clashes. Others said the blasts heard at the camp were caused by oil and gas canisters exploding.

Another source said there had been a raid on the camp overnight, but put the death toll at 19.

One source said Iraqi security forces opened fire after a crowd stormed a post at the camp entrance, wounding about 50 people, Reuters reported.

Local hospitals reported that three Iraqi soldiers were killed and four wounded in the violence, AFP said.

MEK officials sent out photographs and a video of people said to have been shot in the head during the clashes, but the images have not been independently verified.

A spokesman for the Iraqi prime minister confirmed there had been deaths among camp residents, but said initial investigations suggested they had resulted from infighting, AP reported.

Prime Minister Nouri Maliki has ordered an investigation, Reuters said.

Camp Ashraf was set up in the late 1980s to launch raids on Iran. It was welcomed by Iraq’s then president, Saddam Hussein, who was fighting a war against Iran.

Most members of the MEK – also known as the People’s Mujahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI) – were moved to a new camp last year.

Iran considers the MEK a terrorist group

The group was removed from the US State Department’s list of terrorist organisations last year.

1 September 2013 Last updated at 19:57 ET

Find this story at 1 September 2013

BBC © 2014

Johannesburg – At the time of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda a horrified missionary was famously reported as exclaiming there were devils left in hell and they had all gone to Rwanda.

The political legacy of that horror now appears to have moved to greater Johannesburg, as came into focus this week with the apparent assassination of shadowy former Rwandan spymaster ex-Colonel Patrick Karegeya in lurid circumstances in a room in Sandton’s top-end Michelangelo Towers Hotel.

Though the one-time head of Rwandan strongman Paul Kagame’s sinister external intelligence operation was apparently strangled – a bloodied towel and curtain cord were discovered in the hotel room’s safe together with the lifeless body on New Year’s Day – detectives were also investigating the possibility he had been drugged before the actual commission of the murder.

While the South African government has yet to point a finger of blame at Kagame’s government and officially continues to investigate the killing as an ordinary and not political murder, details that have come to light around Karegeya’s last hours strongly suggest a connection with the Rwandan regime.

According to Karegeya’s political associates, at the time of his death Karegeya had been in the company of a Rwandan national, a businessman called Appolo Kiririsi Gafaranga. A figure with a chequered history – a poly-linguist and dealer in grey weapons, and also drug trafficker convicted under UK law – Kiririsi had apparently convinced Karegeya of his bona fides as a fellow conspirator against Kagame’s authoritarian rule.

Though as yet no evidence has come to light of the presence of accomplices in the murder, Karegeya’s close associate and controversial fellow Rwandan dissident and former army chief General Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa has said there was evidence that “no less than three or four men” had been present at the killing.

Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame, left, and his army chief of staff Maj. General Kayumba Nyamwisa consult their watches soon after addressing the first contingent of a Rwandan battalion who were pulled out of Congo at Kigali, the Rwandan capital in this file picture. (AP Photo/Rodrique NgowiI)

AP

Rwanda has emphatically denied any involvement in the murder.

The country’s high commissioner to South Africa, Vincent Karega, this week told sister paper, The Star, it did not make sense to blame his government for Karegeya’s death.

“Why would we have waited six years?” Karega asked, referring to the years Karegeya had stayed in South Africa.

Meanwhile allegations have surfaced in intelligence circles of a series of high-level meetings in the area of Gikondo in Rwanda late last year – including a briefing by Kagame himself on December 20 – at which the assignation was apparently planned and directed. Involving a hand-picked group of close Kagame associates, including members of his immediate family, the claimed killing network is allegedly co-ordinated by the head of Kagame’s military intelligence, Jack Nziza, and has been linked in the past to several kidnappings and attempted assassinations both inside Rwanda and in other African states, notably Kenya and Tanzania.

The dissident exile publication Ikaze Iwacu goes so far as to name the alleged six-man hit squad dispatched from Kigali to back up Kiririsi on his mission.

The same general network has been linked to two attempted assassinations on Nyamwasa in South Africa in 2010. In the same year, Karegeya – who had been living in exile in South Africa since fleeing Rwanda in 2007 – together with Nyamwasa and two other prominent former Kagame insiders established the Rwanda National Congress (RNC) in Johannesburg as an opposition in exile to their former political master.

17\03\06 Michelangelo tower in Sandton.Pic:Mike Dibetsoe 493

INLSA

Two men arrested in connection with the attempted assassinations will appear in court later this month. In the wake of the attempted assassinations and the ongoing refusal of the government to accede to Rwandan demands that the dissidents be extradited to face Rwandan justice after being convicted in absentia, diplomatic relations descended to an all-time low with the recall of South Africa’s ambassador to the Great Lakes country. More recently, South Africa emerged as a major driving force on the African stage in the deployment under the UN banner of a peace-keeping mission in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo with an unprecedented mandate to use force against militants threatening stability in the region. Especially targeted by the highly effective UN intervention force – whose major military asset emerged as the South African Rooivalk helicopter gunship – was the M23 rebel grouping. Though Rwanda continues to deny any involvement in M23, observers as well as UN analysts have consistently linked the insurgency to Kagame’s expansionist ambitions.

For its part, the Kagame administration – which, despite mounting evidence of human rights abuses and Machiavellian intrigue, presides over a strongly performing economy – accuses South Africa of meddling in its internal affairs and sponsoring its enemies. The claim is backed up by the fact that until 2011, Karegeya was under official South African protection and quietly furnished with political asylum. In the fallout from the 2010 assassination attempts, Nyamwasa continues to fall under the protection of the South African security apparatus, and no action has been taken against the RNC since its formation.

The International Crisis Group said Karegeya’s killing raised more questions on the safety of exiled Rwandese. The group’s Piers Pigou said South Africa and Rwanda “should engage” on the attacks.

“All we hear from the Rwanda government is denials and more denials. But there seems to be a pattern of attempts on lives of Rwandese in exile,” Pigou said.

In the meantime, the official protest against the dissident grouping has been strengthened by reports of links between the RNC and Hutu billionaires and other fugitive power-players linked to the Hutu genocide of Tutsis in the 1994 horrors.

In offering shelter to the Rwandan dissidents, South Africa also appears to be playing host to what seems a deeply sinister spook culture. The role attributed by Kagame’s critics to Jack Nziza was pioneered by Karegeya in his position as head of Rwanda’s external intelligence – co-ordinating cross-border kidnappings and alleged assassinations, before falling out with the Tutsi strongman in 2006 and serving an 18-month sentence in prison before his South African exile.

In 2011, a curious report appeared in the Burundian press around the death in Johannesburg of Rwandan singer Jean Christophe Matata on a concert tour in Johannesburg. Though no foul play was reported at the time, an unnamed woman said the death had followed a sequence of events springing from a sexual triangle with Karegeya as the third point of reference.

As she narrated it, she had revived, on a clandestine basis, a long-standing relationship with the singer, while at the same time offering sexual favours to Karegeya, whom she described as her “Boss” since he paid her for sex.

Thinking her dalliance with Matata was unknown, she went to see Karegeya, who confronted her with details of the illicit affair. He then proceeded, she says, to say he suspected Matata had been sent as a spy by Kagame to infiltrate his networks, and he was looking to access evidence to this effect.

At this point, she claims, he tasked her with slipping a drug (which he provided) into the singer’s drink at their next meeting, which would knock him out and allow for his baggage to be searched while he slept.

This, the woman claims, she did and Karegeya’s agents duly searched Matata’s effects. The plan, as she understood it, however, went awry when the singer never recovered from the sleeping draught, finally booking himself into hospital in Johannesburg where he breathed his last.

Hawks spokesman, Paul Ramaloko, could not be reached for comment yesterday. But on Friday he told the media the hunt for the killer of Karegeya was continuing. – The Sunday Independent

January 5 2014 at 11:55am

Find this story at 5 January 2014

© Copyright 1999 – 2012 Independent Online

Patrick Karegeya formed an opposition party in 2010

Exiled former Rwandan intelligence chief Patrick Karegeya has been apparently murdered in a Johannesburg hotel room, South African police say.

They say the dissident might have been strangled, with a rope and bloodied towel found in the hotel room safe.

Mr Karegeya was stripped of the rank of colonel after falling out with his former ally, President Paul Kagame.

President Kagame’s allies have previously denied accusations of links to a series of dissident attacks.

Mr Karegeya, 53, formerly head of Rwanda’s foreign intelligence service, had lived for the past six years in South Africa, where he had been granted political asylum.

Ex-general Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa: “He must have been strangled”

A fellow exiled dissident, former army chief Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, has survived two assassination attempts since fleeing to South Africa in 2010.
Critics of Rwandan President Paul Kagame tend to flee the country as soon as they fall out with him because they fear it is too dangerous to stay.

But many have met mysterious deaths abroad, although the president and his allies have always denied any responsibility.

Rwanda’s first post-genocide Interior Minister, Seth Sendashonga, was shot dead in Nairobi shortly after resigning in 1996, leading to a diplomatic row between Kenya and Rwanda. The Metropolitan Police has warned two dissidents based in London of threats to kill them. And there were two attempts to kill former army chief Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa in South Africa.

The apparent murder of Patrick Karegeya, also in South Africa, will make Rwandan dissidents feel even less safe. His death is a big blow to the opposition party he founded, the Rwanda National Congress. But it also has the potential to be a huge embarrassment for President Kagame.

The pair formed a new opposition party – the Rwanda National Congress – in 2010.

Gen Nyamwasa told the BBC that Mr Karegeya had gone to the upmarket Michelangelo Towers hotel to meet “somebody he knew very well, somebody who had come from Kigali”.

He accused the Rwandan government of being behind the killing.

Rwanda’s ambassador to South Africa, Vincent Karega, dismissed this as an “emotional reaction and opportunistic way of playing politics”, reports The Associated Press news agency.

“We encourage the authorities to really look into the matter so that we know exactly what happened,” the Reuters news agency quotes him as telling local radio.

A police statement on Mr Karegeya’s death said: “Preliminary investigations revealed that his neck [was] swollen – there is a possibility that he might have been strangled.”

He leaves a widow and three children.

Rwandan exiles in several Western countries including the UK and US say local security agents have warned them of plots to kill them.

The Rwandan government has denied trying to kill its opponents.

Mr Karegeya and Gen Nyamwasa were among four exiled former top officials for whom Rwanda issued international arrest warrants in 2011.

A military court earlier sentenced them to long jail terms in absentia for threatening state security and promoting ethnic divisions.

Both men were part of Mr Kagame’s rebel forces which came to power in 1994, ending the genocide of their fellow ethnic Tutsis.

Mr Kagame has been accused of not tolerating opposition.

He maintains that Rwanda needs a strong government to prevent a return to ethnic conflict.

2 January 2014 Last updated at 09:07 ET

Find this story at 2 January 2014

BBC © 2014

Patrick Karegeya,Rwanda’s former spy chief, who was found dead, possibly strangled, in a hotel in Joburg.

Johannesburg – Rwanda’s murdered ex-intelligence chief agreed to scrap his South African security detail before he was strangled to death in a Johannesburg hotel room, according to a political ally.

Patrick Karegeya, 53, was discovered slumped on a bed by staff at the hotel on New Year’s Day, prompting accusations that Rwandan President Paul Kagame had ordered a hit.

Karegeya was the former head of Rwanda’s external intelligence service and once a close ally of Kagame. But after a decade spent as the gatekeeper to Rwanda’s foreign intelligence network he fell out of favour.

In 2007 he fled into exile in South Africa, where he became a fierce critic, describing Kagame as a dictator and alleging he had first-hand knowledge of the state killing of Rwandan dissidents abroad.

“When Karageya first entered this country… the South African government put him under state protection,” political ally Frank Ntwali told AFP late Thursday.

The decision was influenced by assassination attempts against former army chief of staff Kayumba Nyamwasa, another Rwandan exile in South Africa, according to Ntwali.

But in 2012 Karageya and the South African government had agreed to end the close protection, said Ntwali, who heads the Rwanda National Congress in Africa

“They agreed that they would allow him to walk without bodyguards or without protection, which has turned out to be a miscalculation,” said Ntwali.

“He was on his own,” he said.

Ntwali said his friend had expressed fears for his safety, but after years in South Africa became comfortable.

“He knew that his life definitely was in danger… that’s why he fled Rwanda, but I think he got to a level where he thought that here he would be able to evade them.”

In a last ill-fated meeting, Karageya had visited Johannesburg’s luxurious Michelangelo Towers hotel to talk with a man Ntwali named as a Rwandan national.

“This individual… was claiming to be running away as well from the regime of the Rwanda. He was claiming harassment, detention, expropriation of his properties.”

South African police did not respond to inquiries about the identity of the man. – AFP

January 3 2014 at 03:59pm

Find this story at 3 January 2014

© Copyright 1999 – 2012 Independent Online

The 50-year-old Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), once considered the best-funded insurgency in the world, is at its smallest and most vulnerable state in decades, due in part to a CIA covert action program that has helped Colombian forces kill at least two dozen rebel leaders, according to interviews with more than 30 former and current U.S. and Colombian officials.

The secret assistance, which also includes substantial eavesdropping help from the National Security Agency, is funded through a multibillion-dollar black budget. It is not a part of the public $9 billion package of mostly U.S. military aid called Plan Colombia, which began in 2000.

Above: A Colombian Air Force member cleans an A-29 Super Tucano, a turboprop aircraft typically involved in strikes on FARC targets. (Raul Arboleda/AFP via Getty Images)

The previously undisclosed CIA program was authorized by President George W. Bush in the early 2000s and has continued under President Obama, according to U.S. military, intelligence and diplomatic officials. Most of those interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity because the program is classified and ongoing.

The covert program in Colombia provides two essential services to the nation’s battle against the FARC and a smaller insurgent group, the National Liberation Army (ELN): Real-time intelligence that allows Colombian forces to hunt down individual FARC leaders and, beginning in 2006, one particularly effective tool with which to kill them.

That weapon is a $30,000 GPS guidance kit that transforms a less-than-accurate 500-pound gravity bomb into a highly accurate smart bomb. Smart bombs, also called precision-guided munitions or PGMs, are capable of killing an individual in triple-canopy jungle if his exact location can be determined and geo-coordinates are programmed into the bomb’s small computer brain.

In March 2008, according to nine U.S. and Colombian officials, the Colombian Air Force, with tacit U.S. approval, launched U.S.-made smart bombs across the border into Ecuador to kill a senior FARC leader, Raul Reyes. The indirect U.S. role in that attack has not been previously disclosed.

The covert action program in Colombia is one of a handful of enhanced intelligence initiatives that has escaped public notice since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Most of these other programs, small but growing, are located in countries where violent drug cartels have caused instability.

Sources: U.S. State Department, Pais Libre, Colombian Defense Ministry and the Air Force. Research and data compiled by Elyssa Pachico. Graphic by Cristina Rivero. Map by Gene Thorp.

The roster is headed by Mexico, where U.S. intelligence assistance is larger than anywhere outside Afghanistan, as The Washington Post reported in April. It also includes Central America and West Africa, where trafficking routes have moved in response to U.S. pressure against cartels elsewhere.

Asked to comment on U.S. intelligence assistance, President Juan Manuel Santos told The Post during a recent trip to Washington that he did not wish to speak about it in detail, given the sensitivities involved. “It’s been of help,” he said. “Part of the expertise and the efficiency of our operations and our special operations have been the product of better training and knowledge we have acquired from many countries, among them the United States.”

A spokesman for the CIA declined to comment.

Colombia and the FARC have been in peace negotiations in Havana for a year. They have agreed so far on frameworks for land reform, rural development and for allowing insurgents to participate in the political process once the war ends. The two sides are currently discussing a new approach to fighting drug trafficking.

Police outside El Nogal nightclub after the FARC destroyed it with a car bomb in February 2003. More than 20 people were killed. The bombing further united Colombia against the insurgents. (Javier Galeano/AP)
Instability in Colombia

Over the past decade, many indicators of insecurity have improved . . .

. . . as terrorist group strength has weakened and extraditions to the United States for criminal trials have increased.

2004, 2005 and 2010 not available.

*Includes FARC-related kidnappings and killings.

Sources: U.S. State Department, Pais Libre, Colombia Defense Ministry, Colombian Air Force, compiled by Elyssa Pachico
On the verge of collapse

Today, a comparison between Colombia, with its vibrant economy and swanky Bogota social scene, and Afghanistan might seem absurd. But a little more than a decade ago, Colombia had the highest murder rate in the world. Random bombings and strong-arm military tactics pervaded daily life. Some 3,000 people were kidnapped in one year. Professors, human rights activists and journalists suspected of being FARC sympathizers routinely turned up dead.

The combustible mix of the FARC, cartels, paramilitaries and corrupt security forces created a cauldron of violence unprecedented in modern-day Latin America. Nearly a quarter-million people have died during the long war, and many thousands have disappeared.

The FARC was founded in 1964 as a Marxist peasant movement seeking land and justice for the poor. By 1998, Colombia’s president at the time, Andres Pastrana, gave the FARC a Switzerland-sized demilitarized zone to encourage peace negotiations, but its violent attacks only grew, as did its links with the narcotics trade.

By 2000, the emboldened insurgency of 18,000 took aim at Colombia’s political leaders. It assassinated local elected officials. It kidnapped a presidential candidate and attempted to kill a presidential front-runner, hard-liner Alvaro Uribe, whose father the FARC had killed in 1983.

Fearing Colombia would become a failed state with an even greater role in drug trafficking into the United States, the Bush administration and Congress ramped up assistance to the Colombian military through Plan Colombia.

By 2003, U.S. involvement in Colombia encompassed 40 U.S. agencies and 4,500 people, including contractors, all working out of the U.S. Embassy in Bogota, then the largest U.S. embassy in the world. It stayed that way until mid-2004, when it was surpassed by Afghanistan.

“There is no country, including Afghanistan, where we had more going on,” said William Wood, who was U.S. ambassador to Colombia from 2003 to 2007 before holding the same post in war-torn Afghanistan for two years after that.

When Bush became president, two presidential findings were already on the books authorizing covert action worldwide. One allowed CIA operations against international terrorist organizations. The other, signed in the mid-1980s by President Ronald Reagan, authorized action against international narcotics traffickers.

A presidential finding is required for the CIA to do things other than collect and analyze overseas intelligence. Giving spy equipment to a partner, supporting foreign political parties, planting propaganda, and participating in lethal training or operations all require a finding and a notification to congressional intelligence committees.

The counternarcotics finding had permitted the CIA and a technical unit of the clandestine Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) to provide support to the years-long hunt for Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, killed by Colombian forces 20 years ago this month. It also made possible CIA-supported operations against traffickers and terrorists in Bolivia and Peru years ago.

Under the Colombian program, the CIA is not allowed to participate directly in operations. The same restrictions apply to military involvement in Plan Colombia. Such activity has been constrained by members of Congress who had lived through the scandal of America’s secret role in Central America’s wars in the 1980s. Congress refused to allow U.S. military involvement in Colombia to escalate as it had in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras and Panama.

In February 2003, the FARC took three U.S. contractors hostage after their single-engine Cessna, above, crashed in the jungle near La Esperanza. A covert CIA program was launched to find them. (El Tiempo via AP)
The FARC miscalculates

The new covert push against the FARC unofficially began on Feb. 13, 2003. That day a single-engine Cessna 208 crashed in rebel-held jungle. Nearby guerrillas executed the Colombian officer on board and one of four American contractors who were working on coca eradication. The three others were taken hostage.

The United States had already declared the FARC a terrorist organization for its indiscriminate killings and drug trafficking. Although the CIA had its hands full with Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush “leaned on [CIA director George] Tenet” to help find the three hostages, according to one former senior intelligence official involved in the discussions.

The FARC’s terrorist designation made it easier to fund a black budget. “We got money from a lot of different pots,” said one senior diplomat.

One of the CIA officers Tenet dispatched to Bogota was an operator in his forties whose name The Washington Post is withholding because he remains undercover. He created the U.S. Embassy Intelligence Fusion Cell, dubbed “the Bunker.”

It was a cramped, 30-by-30-foot room with a low ceiling and three rows of computers. Eight people sat at each row of consoles. Some scoured satellite maps of the jungle; others searched for underground FARC hiding places. Some monitored imagery or the movement of vehicles tagged with tracking devices. Voice intercepts from radio and cellphone communications were decrypted and translated by the National Security Agency.

Bunker analysts fused tips from informants and technically obtained information. Analysts sought to link individuals to the insurgency’s flow of drugs, weapons and money. For the most part, they left the violent paramilitary groups alone.

The Bunker’s technical experts and contractors built the Colombians their own nationwide intelligence computer system. They also later helped create regional fusion centers to push tactical intelligence to local commanders. The agency also paid for encrypted communications gear.

“We were very interested in getting the FARC, and it wasn’t so much a question of capability, as it was intelligence,” said Wood, “specifically the ability to locate them in the time frame of an operation.”

Outside the Bunker, CIA case officers and contractors taught the art of recruiting informants to Colombian units that had been vetted and polygraphed. They gave money to people with information about the hostages.

Meanwhile, the other secret U.S. agency that had been at the forefront of locating and killing al-Qaeda arrived on the scene. Elite commandos from JSOC began periodic annual training sessions and small-unit reconnaissance missions to try to find the hostages.

Despite all the effort, the hostages’ location proved elusive. Looking for something else to do with the new intelligence equipment and personnel, the Bunker manager and his military deputy from the U.S. Special Operations Command gave their people a second mission: Target the FARC leadership. This was exactly what the CIA and JSOC had been doing against al-Qaeda on the other side of the world. The methodology was familiar.

“There was cross-pollination both ways,” said one senior official with access to the Bunker at the time. “We didn’t need to invent a new wheel.”

At the urging of President George W. Bush and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, left, the CIA program to find the U.S. hostages began targeting FARC leaders with U.S.-provided intelligence and smart bombs. (Charles Dharapak/AP)
A request from Colombia’s president

Locating FARC leaders proved easier than capturing or killing them. Some 60 times, Colombian forces had obtained or been given reliable information but failed to capture or kill anyone senior, according to two U.S. officials and a retired Colombian senior officer. The story was always the same. U.S.-provided Black Hawk helicopters would ferry Colombian troops into the jungle about six kilometers away from a camp. The men would creep through the dense foliage, but the camps were always empty by the time they arrived. Later they learned that the FARC had an early-warning system: rings of security miles from the camps.

By 2006, the dismal record attracted the attention of the U.S. Air Force’s newly arrived mission chief. The colonel was perplexed. Why had the third-largest recipient of U.S. military assistance [behind Egypt and Israel] made so little progress?

“I’m thinking, ‘What are we killing the FARC with?’ ” the colonel, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said in an interview.

The colonel, a cargo plane expert, said he “started Googling bombs and fighters” looking for ideas. Eventually he landed on the Enhanced Paveway II, a relatively inexpensive guidance kit that could be strapped on a 500-pound, Mark-82 gravity bomb.

The colonel said he told then-defense minister Santos about his idea and wrote a one-page paper on it for him to deliver to Uribe. Santos took the idea to U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. In June 2006, Uribe visited Bush at the White House. He mentioned the recent killing of al-Qaeda’s chief in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. An F-16 had sent two 500-pound smart bombs into his hideout and killed him. He pressed for the same capability.

“Clearly this was very important” to Uribe, said retired Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who had taken over as CIA director just months earlier.

First, there was the matter of fitting the smart bombs onto a Colombian aircraft. Colombia did not have F-16s. Raytheon, the kit manufacturer, sent engineers to figure out how to mount the equipment on a plane. First they tried mounting it on a Brazilian-made Embraer A-29 Super Tucano, a turboprop aircraft designed for low-flying counterinsurgency missions. But affixing the cable that ran from the bomb’s computer brain to the cockpit meant drilling too close to the fuel cell. Instead, they jerry-rigged it to an older Cessna A-37 Dragonfly, a light attack aircraft first developed by the U.S. Special Operations air force for Vietnam and later used in the Salvadoran civil war.

Then the engineers and Colombian pilots tested the first of three PGMs in a remote airfield near the Venezuelan border. The target was a 2-by-4 stuck in the ground. The plane launched the bomb from 20,000 feet. “It landed about a foot from it,” the colonel said. The results were so good, he thought, “why waste two more kits?” The smart bombs were ready for use.

But White House lawyers, along with their colleagues from the CIA and the departments of Justice, Defense and State, had their own questions to work through. It was one thing to use a PGM to defeat an enemy on the battlefield — the U.S. Air Force had been doing that for years. It was another to use it to target an individual FARC leader. Would that constitute an assassination, which is prohibited by U.S. law? And, “could we be accused of engaging in an assassination, even if it is not ourselves doing it?” said one lawyer involved.

The White House’s Office of Legal Counsel and others finally decided that the same legal analysis they had applied to al-Qaeda could be applied to the FARC. Killing a FARC leader would not be an assassination because the organization posed an ongoing threat to Colombia. Also, none of the FARC commanders could be expected to surrender.

And, as a drug-trafficking organization, the FARC’s status as a threat to U.S. national security had been settled years earlier with Reagan’s counternarcotics finding. At the time, the crack cocaine epidemic was at its height, and the government decided that organizations that brought drugs to America’s streets were a threat to national security.

There was another concern. Some senior officials worried that Colombian forces might use the PGMs to kill their perceived political enemies. “The concerns were huge given their human rights problems,” said a former senior military officer.

To assure themselves that the Colombians would not misuse the bombs, U.S. officials came up with a novel solution. The CIA would maintain control over the encryption key inserted into the bomb, which unscrambled communications with GPS satellites so they can be read by the bomb’s computers. The bomb could not hit its target without the key. The Colombians would have to ask for approval for some targets, and if they misused the bombs, the CIA could deny GPS reception for future use.

“We wanted a sign-off,” said one senior official involved in the deliberations.

To cut through the initial red tape, the first 20 smart bomb kits — without the encryption keys — came through the CIA. The bill was less than $1 million. After that, Colombia was allowed to purchase them through the Foreign Military Sales program.
Secretly assisting Colombia against rebels
Bomb
Guidance
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Raytheon’s Enhanced Paveway II is a laser-guided bomb upgraded with a GPS-guided capability, which works better against targets in the thick jungle. An encryption key inserted into the guidance system allows the bomb’s computer to receive military-grade GPS data used to guide a bomb to its target.

Anatomy of Lethal Air Operations in Colombia

First strike: In a typical mission, several Cessna A-37 Dragonflys, a light attack aircraft first developed by the U.S. Special Operations for Vietnam, fly at 20,000 feet carrying smart bombs. They can be launched once the planes get within three miles of the target. The bombs communicate with GPS satellites to know where they are at all times and to hit the target.

Bombardment: Several Brazilian-made Embraer A-29 Super Tucanos, a turboprop aircraft flown at a much lower altitude, follow the A-37s. They drop conventional gravity bombs in a pattern near the smart bombs to flatten the jungle and kill other insurgents in the FARC camp.

Gunship strike: Low-flying Vietnam era AC-47 gunships, nicknamed Puff the Magic Dragon, strafe the area with machine guns, shooting the survivors, according to one of several officials who described the scenario.

Ground units Finally, if the camp is far into the jungle, Colombian army troops are usually ferried in by U.S.-provided Black Hawk troop-carrying helicopters. Troops would collect the remains of the killed FARC leader if possible, round up survivors and gather electronic equipment like cellphones and computers that could yield valuable information about FARC operations.
A first strike

Tomas Medina Caracas, also known as Negro Acacio, the FARC’s chief drug trafficker and commander of its 16th Front, was the first man the U.S. Embassy Intelligence Fusion Cell queued up for a PGM strike.

At about 4:30 a.m. on Sept. 1, 2007, pilots wearing night vision goggles unleashed several Enhanced Paveway II smart bombs into his camp in eastern Colombia as officials in both capitals waited. Troops recovered only a leg. It appeared by its dark complexion to belong to Acacio, one of the few black FARC leaders. DNA tests confirmed his death.

“There was a great deal of excitement,” recalled William Scoggins, counternarcotics program manager at the U.S. military’s Southern Command. “We didn’t know the impact it would have, but we thought this was a game changer.”

Six weeks later, smart bombs killed Gustavo Rueda Díaz, alias Martin Caballero, leader of the 37th Front, while he was talking on his cellphone. Acacio’s and Caballero’s deaths caused the 16th and 37th fronts to collapse. They also triggered mass desertions, according to a secret State Department cable dated March 6, 2008, and released by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks in 2010. This was just the beginning of the FARC’s disintegration.

To hide the use of the PGMs from public discovery, and to ensure maximum damage to a FARC’s leaders’ camp, the air force and U.S. advisers developed new strike tactics. In a typical mission, several A-37 Dragonflys flying at 20,000 feet carried smart bombs. As soon as the planes came within a three-mile “basket” of the target, a bomb’s GPS software would automatically turn on.

The Dragonflys were followed by several A-29 Super Tucanos, flying at a much lower altitude. They would drop a series of dumb bombs in a pattern nearby. Their blast pressure would kill anyone close in and also flatten the dense jungle and obscure the use of the smart bombs.

Then, low-flying, Vietnam-era AC-47 gunships, nicknamed Puff the Magic Dragon, would strafe the area with mounted machine guns, “shooting the wounded trying to go for cover,” according to one of several military officials who described the same scenario.

Only then would Colombian ground forces arrive to round up prisoners, collecting the dead, as well as cellphones, computers and hard drives. The CIA also spent three years training Colombian close air support teams on using lasers to clandestinely guide pilots and laser-guided smart bombs to their targets.

Most every operation relied heavily on NSA signal intercepts, which fed intelligence to troops on the ground or pilots before and during an operation. “Intercepts . . . were a game changer,” said Scoggins, of U.S. Southern Command.

The round-the-clock nature of the NSA’s work was captured in a secret State Department cable released by WikiLeaks. In the spring of 2009, the target was drug trafficker Daniel Rendon Herrera, known as Don Mario, then Colombia’s most wanted man and responsible for 3,000 assassinations over an 18-month period.

“For seven days, using signal and human intelligence,” NSA assets “worked day and night” to reposition 250 U.S.-trained and equipped airborne commandos near Herrera as he tried to flee, according to an April 2009 cable and a senior government official who confirmed the NSA’s role in the mission.

The CIA also trained Colombian interrogators to more effectively question thousands of FARC deserters, without the use of the “enhanced interrogation” techniques approved for use on al-Qaeda and later repudiated by Congress as abusive. The agency also created databases to keep track of the debriefings so they could be searched and cross-referenced to build a more complete picture of the organization.

The Colombian government paid deserters and allowed them to reintegrate into civil society. Some, in turn, offered valuable information about the FARC’s chain of command, standard travel routes, camps, supply lines, drug and money sources. They helped make sense of the NSA’s voice intercepts, which often used code words. Deserters also sometimes were used to infiltrate FARC camps to plant listening devices or beacons that emitted a GPS coordinate for smart bombs.

“We learned from the CIA,” a top Colombian national security official said of the debriefing program. “Before, we didn’t pay much attention to details.”

FARC commander Raul Reyes in 2002 in Los Pozos, Colombia. In 2008, Colombia, with tacit U.S. approval, launched U.S.-made smart bombs into Ecuador, killing Reyes, considered to be the group’s No. 2 leader. (Scott Dalton/AP)
Ecuador and the not-forgotten hostages

In February 2008, the U.S.-Colombian team got its first sighting of the three U.S. hostages. Having waited five years, the reaction was swift at U.S. Special Operations Command headquarters in Tampa, which began sending JSOC commandos down, said a senior U.S. official who was in Colombia when they arrived.

The JSOC team was headed by a Navy SEAL Team Six commander. Small units set up three operational areas near the hostages and conducted long-range reconnaissance, the senior official said. The NSA increased its monitoring. All eyes were on the remote jungle location. But as initial preparations were underway, operations were heating up elsewhere.

Just across the Putumayo River, one mile inside Ecuador, U.S. intelligence and a Colombian informant confirmed the hideout of Luis Edgar Devia Silva, also known as Raul Reyes and considered to be the No. 2 in the seven-member FARC secretariat.

It was an awkward discovery for Colombia and the United States. To conduct an airstrike meant a Colombian pilot flying a Colombian plane would hit the camp using a U.S.-made bomb with a CIA-controlled brain.

The Air Force colonel had a succinct message for the Colombian air operations commander in charge of the mission. “I said, ‘Look man, we all know where this guy is. Just don’t f— it up.’ ”

U.S. national security lawyers viewed the operation as an act of self-defense. In the wake of 9/11, they had come up with a new interpretation of the permissible use of force against non-state actors like al-Qaeda and the FARC. It went like this: If a terrorist group operated from a country that was unable or unwilling to stop it, then the country under attack — in this case, Colombia — had the right to defend itself with force, even if that meant crossing into another sovereign country.

This was the legal justification for CIA drone strikes and other lethal operations in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and, much later, for the raid into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden.

So minutes after midnight on March 1, three A-37 Dragonflys took off from Colombia, followed by five Super Tucanos. The smart bombs’ guidance system turned on once the planes reached within three miles of Reyes’s location.

As instructed, the Colombian pilots stayed in Colombian airspace. The bombs landed as programmed, obliterating the camp and killing Reyes, who, according to Colombian news reports, was asleep in pajamas.

Above: The 2008 bombing of Raul Reyes’s camp in Ecuador sparked a diplomatic dispute. Ecuador moved troops to border towns such as Puerto Nuevo. (Rodrigo Buendia/AFP via Getty Images; Dolores Ochoa/AP)

Colombian forces rushed across the border into Ecuador to retrieve Reyes’s remains and also scooped up a large treasure trove of computer equipment that would turn out to be the most valuable FARC intelligence find ever.

The bombing set off a serious diplomatic crisis. Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez called Colombia “a terrorist state” and moved troops to the border, as did Ecuador. Nicaragua broke off relations. Uribe, under pressure, apologized to Ecuador.

The apology, while soothing relationships in Latin America, angered the small circle of U.S. officials who knew the back story, one of them said. “I remember thinking, ‘I can’t believe they’re saying this,’ ” he said. “For them to be giving up an important legal position was crazy.”

But the flap did not damage the deep ties between U.S. and Colombian forces or deter the mission to rescue the hostages. In fact, the number of JSOC troops continued to mount to more than 1,000, said the senior official then in Colombia. Officials thought for sure they would be spotted, but they never were. A U.S.-Colombian military exercise provided sufficient cover when the International Committee of the Red Cross showed up at isolated bases and stumbled upon some burly Americans, said two U.S. officials.

After six weeks of waiting to find the hostages, most of the JSOC troops left the country for pressing missions elsewhere. One unit remained. On July 2, 2008, it had the role of unused understudy in the dramatic and well-documented Operation Checkmate, in which Colombian forces pretending to be members of a humanitarian group tricked the FARC into handing over the three U.S. hostages and 12 others without a shot fired. The JSOC team, and a fleet of U.S. aircraft, was positioned as Plan B, in case the Colombian operation went awry.

A Colombian pilot boards a Super Tucano in Bogota in 2006. Recently, Colombia has fitted smart bombs onto some of its Super Tucanos, which have been largely used to drop dumb bombs during airstrikes. (Jose Miguel Gomez/Reuters)
Santos continues the smart-bomb war

As a sign of trust, in early 2010 the U.S. government gave Colombia control over the GPS encryption key. There had been no reports of misuse, misfires or collateral damage from the smart bombs. The transfer was preceded by quick negotiations over the rules of engagement for smart-bomb use. Among the rules was that they would be launched only against isolated jungle camps.

President Santos, who was defense minister under Uribe, has greatly increased the pace of operations against the FARC. Almost three times as many FARC leaders — 47 vs. 16 — have been killed under Santos as under Uribe. Interviews and analysis of government Web sites and press reporting show that at least 23 of the attacks under Santos were air operations. Smart bombs were used only against the most important FARC leaders, Colombian officials said in response to questions. Gravity bombs were used in the other cases.

President Juan Manuel Santos, who was Colombia’s defense minister when the CIA covert program ramped up, has increased efforts to weaken the FARC. (Jose Cendon/Bloomberg)

Colombia continues to upgrade its air capabilities. In 2013, the air force upgraded its fleet of Israeli-made Kfir fighter jets, fitting them with Israeli-made Griffin laser-guided bombs. It has also fitted smart bombs onto some of its Super Tucanos.

Having decimated the top FARC leadership and many of the front commanders, the military, with continued help from the CIA and other intelligence agencies, appears to be working its way through the mid-level ranks, including mobile company commanders, the most battle-hardened and experienced remaining cadre. One-third of them have been killed or captured, according to Colombian officials.

The Santos administration has also targeted the financial and weapons networks supporting the FARC. Some critics think the government has been too focused on killing leaders and not enough on using the army and police to occupy and control rebel territory.

Killing an individual has never been a measure of success in war, say counterinsurgency experts. It’s the chaos and dysfunction that killing the leadership causes to the organization that matters. The air operations against the FARC leadership “has turned the organization upside down,” said a senior Pentagon official who has studied the classified U.S. history of Colombia’s war.

Some have fled to Venezuela. One member of the secretariat hides out intermittently in Ecuador, according to senior Colombia officials, breaking the important psychological bond with ground troops and handicapping recruitment.

For fear of being located and targeted, units no longer sleep in the same place two days in a row, so camps must be sparser. “They know the government has so much information on them now, and real-time intelligence,” said German Espejo, security and defense counselor at the Colombian Embassy. Worried about spies in their midst, executions are common.

The FARC still mounts attacks — a car bombing of a rural police station Dec. 7 killed six police officers and two civilians — but it no longer travels in large groups, and it limits most units to less than 20. No longer able to mount large-scale assaults, the group has reverted to hit-and-run tactics using snipers and explosives.

The weariness of 50 years of transient jungle life has taken its toll on the FARC negotiating team, too. Those who have lived in exile seem more willing to continue the fight than those who have been doing the fighting, said Colombian officials. The negotiations, Santos said in the interview, are the result of the successful military campaign, “the cherry on the cake.”

On Dec. 15, the FARC said it would begin a 30-day unilateral cease-fire as a sign of good will during the holiday season. The Santos administration rebuffed the gesture and vowed to continue its military campaign. Later that day, security forces killed a FARC guerrilla implicated in a bomb attack on a former minister. Three days later, the army killed another five.

Elyssa Pachico and Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Find this story at 21 December 2013

© 1996-2014 The Washington Post

FILE – In this July 23, 2013 file photo, United Nations peacekeepers stop to greet Malian soldiers at a checkpoint, during a patrol on the outskirts of Timbuktu, Mali. For 10 months until January 2013, the city of Timbuktu was occupied by al-Qaida’s branch in North Africa. When they fled, they left behind thousands of pages of documents, including over 100 receipts, showing that they assiduously tracked their cash flow, down to the $0.60 cents one of them spent for a single light bulb. The accounting system on display suggests that far from being a fly-by-night terror organization, al-Qaida is attempting to behave like a corporation. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell, File)

This receipt for groceries, which includes prices paid for tomatoes, onions, charcoal, meat and a lightbulb, was retrieved from a building occupied by al-Qaida’s North African branch in Timbuktu, Mali. The receipt is one of more than 100 receipts and invoices that show an organization intent on documenting even the most minor expenses. (AP Photo)

This receipt for house-cleaning equipment and labor, air conditioner repairs and security guards, which was retrieved from a building occupied by al-Qaida’s North African branch in Timbuktu, Mali, is one of more than 100 receipts and invoices that show an organization intent on documenting even the most minor expenses. The al-Qaida fighters threw themselves into construction projects, making frequent trips to the hardware store to buy everything from bags of cement, to parts for a new shower, to tubes of superglue. (AP Photo)

FILE – In this July 23, 2013 file photo, French soldiers patrol through the central market in Timbuktu, Mali. A branch of al-Qaida occupied Timbuktu for 10 months, up until January 2013, when France sent soldiers to flush out the extremists. When they fled, they left behind thousands of pages of documents, including over 100 receipts, showing that they assiduously tracked their cash flow, down to the $0.60 one of them spent for a single light bulb. The open-air market pictured here is one of many where the fighters bought supplies, carefully tracking their expenses on a notepad. The accounting system on display suggests that far from being a fly-by-night terror organization, al-Qaida is attempting to behave like a corporation. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell, File)

FILE – In this July 23, 2013 file photo, a French soldier stands guard during a patrol through the central market in Timbuktu, Mali. A branch of al-Qaida occupied Timbuktu for 10 months, up until French soldiers intervened in January 2013. When they fled, they left behind thousands of pages of documents, including over 100 receipts, showing that they assiduously tracked their cash flow, down to the $0.60 one of them spent for a single light bulb. The accounting system on display suggests that far from being a fly-by-night terror organization, al-Qaida is attempting to behave like a corporation. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

This document retrieved from a building occupied by al-Qaida’s North African branch in Timbuktu, Mali, outlines the budget for an Islamic Tribunal, which handed down sentences, including public amputations for theft. Included within this budget are the expenses for members of the tribunal, their guardians and cooks, support staff, transportation and telecommunications. It is one of more than 100 receipts and invoices that show an organization intent on documenting even the most minor expenses. (AP Photo)

ADVANCE FOR USE MONDAY, DEC. 30, 2013 AND THEREAFTER – This document retrieved from a building occupied by al-Qaida’s North African branch in Timbuktu, Mali, is a list of advances for top leaders of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, including Yahya Abou el-Hammam, the head of operations for al-Qaida in the Sahara Desert. The document is one of more than 100 receipts and invoices that show an organization intent on detailing even the most minor expenses. Several receipts, including this one, show that Ansar Dine, a Malian jihadist group that initially refused to acknowledge ties to al-Qaida, was on al-Qaida’s payroll. (AP Photo)

This document retrieved from a building occupied by al-Qaida’s North African branch in Timbuktu, Mali, is a signed advance to the terror group’s fighters. It says: “In the name of Allah, the most Clement, I gave Omar Mohamed Abou Khalid, the emir of Tashara Zarho, 460,000 fcfa ($920) for his monthly expenses from September 21, 2012 to October 21, 2012 for 34 soldiers.” The document, signed by the fighter, is one of more than 100 receipts and invoices that show an organization intent on documenting even the most minor expenses. (AP Photo)

This receipt for car expenses, which was retrieved from a building occupied by al-Qaida’s North African branch in Timbuktu, Mali, is one of more than 100 receipts and invoices that show an organization intent on documenting even the most minor expenses. In addition to oil, this receipt includes milk, tea, soap, and other grocery items. Many of the receipts include both car repairs and groceries, suggesting that cars were out for long periods of time, and mechanics or sidelined fighters needed to be fed. (AP Photo)

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TIMBUKTU, Mali (AP) — The convoy of cars bearing the black al-Qaida flag came at high speed, and the manager of the modest grocery store thought he was about to get robbed.

Mohamed Djitteye rushed to lock his till and cowered behind the counter. He was dumbfounded when instead, the al-Qaida commander gently opened the grocery’s glass door and asked for a pot of mustard. Then he asked for a receipt.

Confused and scared, Djitteye didn’t understand. So the jihadist repeated his request. Could he please have a receipt for the $1.60 purchase?

This transaction in northern Mali shows what might seem an unusual preoccupation for a terror group: Al-Qaida is obsessed with documenting the most minute expenses.

In more than 100 receipts left in a building occupied by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb in Timbuktu earlier this year, the extremists assiduously tracked their cash flow, recording purchases as small as a single light bulb. The often tiny amounts are carefully written out in pencil and colored pen on scraps of paper and Post-it notes: The equivalent of $1.80 for a bar of soap; $8 for a packet of macaroni; $14 for a tube of super glue. All the documents were authenticated by experts.

The accounting system on display in the documents found by The Associated Press is a mirror image of what researchers have discovered in other parts of the world where al-Qaida operates, including Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq. The terror group’s documents around the world also include corporate workshop schedules, salary spreadsheets, philanthropy budgets, job applications, public relations advice and letters from the equivalent of a human resources division.

Taken together, the evidence suggests that far from being a fly-by-night, fragmented terror organization, al-Qaida is attempting to behave like a multinational corporation, with what amounts to a company-wide financial policy across its different chapters.

“They have to have bookkeeping techniques because of the nature of the business they are in,” said Brookings Institution fellow William McCants, a former adviser to the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism. “They have so few ways to keep control of their operatives, to rein them in and make them do what they are supposed to do. They have to run it like a business.”

The picture that emerges from what is one of the largest stashes of al-Qaida documents to be made public shows a rigid bureaucracy, replete with a chief executive, a board of directors and departments such as human resources and public relations. Experts say that each branch of the terror group replicates the same corporate structure, and that this strict blueprint has helped al-Qaida not just to endure but also to spread.

AL-QAIDA’S GROCERY LIST

Among the most revealing documents are the receipts, which offer a granular view of how al-Qaida’s fighters lived every day as well as its larger priorities.

“For the smallest thing, they wanted a receipt,” said 31-year-old Djitteye, who runs the Idy Market on the sand-carpeted main boulevard in Timbuktu. “Even for a tin of Nescafe.”

An inordinate number of receipts are for groceries, suggesting a diet of macaroni with meat and tomato sauce, as well as large quantities of powdered milk. There are 27 invoices for meat, 13 for tomatoes, 11 for milk, 11 for pasta, seven for onions, and many others for tea, sugar, and honey.

They record the $0.60 cake one of their fighters ate, and the $1.80 bar of soap another used to wash his hands. They list a broom for $3 and bleach for $3.30. These relatively petty amounts are logged with the same care as the $5,400 advance they gave to one commander, or the $330 they spent to buy 3,300 rounds of ammunition.

Keeping close track of expenses is part of al-Qaida’s DNA, say multiple experts, including FBI agents who were assigned to track the terror group in the years just after its founding.

This habit, they say, can be traced back more than three decades to when a young Osama bin Laden entered King Abdul Aziz University in Saudi Arabia in 1976 to study economics, and went on to run part of his millionaire father’s construction company.

After he was exiled to Sudan in 1992, bin Laden founded what became the country’s largest conglomerate. His companies and their numerous subsidiaries invested in everything from importing trucks to exporting sesame, white corn and watermelons. From the get-go, bin Laden was obsessed with enforcing corporate management techniques on his more than 500 employees, according to al-Qaida expert Lawrence Wright, author of a well-known history of the terror group. Workers had to submit forms in triplicate for even the smallest purchases — the same requirement bin Laden later imposed on the first al-Qaida recruits, he said.

In Afghanistan, detailed accounting records found in an abandoned al-Qaida camp in 2001 included salary lists, stringent documentation on each fighter, job application forms asking for level of education and language skills, as well as notebook after notebook of expenses. In Iraq, U.S. forces recovered entire Excel spreadsheets, detailing salaries for al-Qaida fighters.

“People think that this is done on the back of an envelope. It isn’t,” says Dan Coleman, a former FBI special agent who was in charge of the bin Laden case file from 1996 to 2004.

One of the first raids on an al-Qaida safe house was led by Coleman in 1997. Among the dozens of invoices he found inside the operative’s home in Kenya were stacks of gas station receipts, going back eight years.

TERRORIST EXPENSE REPORTS

This detailed accounting system allows al-Qaida to keep track of the significant sums of money involved in feeding, training and recruiting thousands of fighters. It’s also an attempt to keep track of the fighters themselves, who often operate remotely.

The majority of the invoices found on a cement floor in a building in Timbuktu are scribbled by hand, on post-it notes, on lined math paper or on the backs of envelopes, as if operatives in the field were using whatever writing surface they could find. Others are typed, sometimes repeating the same items, in what may serve as formal expense reports for their higher-ups. Al-Qaida clearly required such expense reports — in a letter from the stash, middle managers chide a terrorist for not handing his in on time.

In informal open-air markets such as those of Timbuktu, vendors didn’t have receipts to hand out. So, traders say, members of al-Qaida came in pairs, one to negotiate the sale, and the other to record prices on a notepad. This practice is reflected in the fact that almost all the receipts are written in Arabic, a language few residents of Timbuktu know how to write.

The fighters would ask for a price, and then write it down in their Bloc Note, a notebook brand sold locally, said pharmacist Ibrahim Djitteye.

“It surprised me at first,” he said. “But I came to the conclusion that they are here for a very specific mission…. And when you are on assignment, you need to give a report. They have their own higher-ups, who are expecting them to account for what they spent.”

The corporate nature of the organization is also on display in the types of activities they funded.

For example, two receipts, for $4,000 and $6,800, are listed as funds for “workshops,” another concept borrowed from business. A flier found in another building occupied by their fighters confirms that al-Qaida held the equivalent of corporate training retreats. It lists detailed schedules: Early morning exercise from 5 to 6:30 a.m.; lessons on how to use a GPS from 10 to 10:30 a.m.; arms training from 10:30 a.m. to noon; and various afternoon classes on preaching to other Muslims, nationalism and democracy.

THE NUTS AND BOLTS OF GOVERNING

A relatively small ratio of the receipts are expense reports for fighters and weapons. One unit presented a politely worded request for funds, entitled: “The list of names of mujahideen who are asking for clothes and boots to protect themselves from the cold.”

Far more deal with the mundane aspects of running a state, such as keeping the lights on. Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb invaded Timbuktu in April 2012, and took over its state-run utilities, paying to have fuel trucked in from neighboring Algeria. One invoice shows they paid $3,720 for 20 barrels of diesel for the city’s power station.

There’s also an advance for the prison and a detailed budget for the Islamic Tribunal, where judges were paid $2 per day to hear cases.

Along with the nuts and bolts of governing, it’s clear that the fighters were actively trying to woo the population. They set aside money for charity: $4 for medicine “for a Shiite with a sick child,” and $100 in financial aid for a man’s wedding. And they reimbursed residents for damages, such as $50 for structural repairs, with a note that the house in question “was hit by mujahideen cars.”

And it’s obvious that the fighters spent a good part of their time proselytizing, with expense reports for trips to distant villages to impart their ultra-strict vision of Islam. One receipt bluntly lists $200 for a “trip for spreading propaganda.”

While not overtly explained, the sizable receipts for car repairs suggest regular missions into the desert. The many receipts for oil changes, car batteries, filters and parts indicate the tough terrain battered the fighters’ Toyota Land Cruisers.

Finally, the names on the receipts reveal the majority of fighters on the group’s payroll were foreign-born. There’s a $1,000 advance to a man identified as “Talhat the Libyan.” Another is issued to “Tarek the Algerian.”

The names furthermore confirm that the top leaders of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb were based in Timbuktu. Among them is Abou Zeid, probably the most feared of al-Qaida’s local commanders who orchestrated the kidnappings of dozens of Westerners until his death this spring.

“In the name of Allah, the most merciful,” begins a request for funds dated Dec. 29, 2012, and addressed to Abou Zeid. “We are writing to inform you that we need rockets for our camp — a total of 4 is needed. May God protect you.”

The extent of the documentation found here, as well as in the other theaters where al-Qaida operates, does not mean the terror group runs as a well-oiled machine, cautions Jason Burke, author of the book “Al-Qaida.”

“Bureaucracy, as we know, gives senior managers the illusion they are in control of distant subordinates,” Burke said. “But that influence is much, much less than they would like.”

Al-Qaida’s accounting practices left a strong impression on at least one person in Timbuktu: Djitteye, the convenience store manager.

The al-Qaida commander who came in for mustard was Nabil Alqama, the head of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb’s “Southern Command.” He became a regular. One day, he asked the store employee to get a receipt book printed so he could provide more official-looking invoices.

Djitteye obliged.

The green receipt book with neat boxes now sits under his cash register. These days, whenever customers come in, he always asks if they would like a receipt.

No one ever does.

By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI
— Dec. 30, 2013 11:36 AM EST

Find this story at 30 December 2013
The documents can be viewed here

AP News | © 2014 Associated Press

A member of the White House review panel on NSA surveillance said he was “absolutely” surprised when he discovered the agency’s lack of evidence that the bulk collection of telephone call records had thwarted any terrorist attacks.
“It was, ‘Huh, hello? What are we doing here?’” said Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago law professor, in an interview with NBC News. “The results were very thin.”
While Stone said the mass collection of telephone call records was a “logical program” from the NSA’s perspective, one question the White House panel was seeking to answer was whether it had actually stopped “any [terror attacks] that might have been really big.”
“We found none,” said Stone.
Under the NSA program, first revealed by ex-contractor Edward Snowden, the agency collects in bulk the records of the time and duration of phone calls made by persons inside the United States.
Stone was one of five members of the White House review panel – and the only one without any intelligence community experience – that this week produced a sweeping report recommending that the NSA’s collection of phone call records be terminated to protect Americans’ privacy rights.
The panel made that recommendation after concluding that the program was “not essential in preventing attacks.”
“That was stunning. That was the ballgame,” said one congressional intelligence official, who asked not to be publicly identified. “It flies in the face of everything that they have tossed at us.”
Despite the panel’s conclusions, Stone strongly rejected the idea they justified Snowden’s actions in leaking the NSA documents about the phone collection. “Suppose someone decides we need gun control and they go out and kill 15 kids and then a state enacts gun control?” Stone said, using an analogy he acknowledged was “somewhat inflammatory.” What Snowden did, Stone said, was put the country “at risk.”
“My emphatic view,” he said, “is that a person who has access to classified information — the revelation of which could damage national security — should never take it upon himself to reveal that information.”
Stone added, however, that he would not necessarily reject granting an amnesty to Snowden in exchange for the return of all his documents, as was recently suggested by a top NSA official. “It’s a hostage situation,” said Stone. Deciding whether to negotiate with him to get all his documents back was a “pragmatic judgment. I see no principled reason not to do that.”
The conclusions of the panel’s reports were at direct odds with public statements by President Barack Obama and U.S. intelligence officials. “Lives have been saved,” Obama told reporters last June, referring to the bulk collection program and another program that intercepts communications overseas. “We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information.”
White House Jay Carney is pressed Thursday over whether President Barack Obama believes that the NSA surveillance program saved lives.
But in one little-noticed footnote in its report, the White House panel said the telephone records collection program – known as Section 215, based on the provision of the U.S. Patriot Act that provided the legal basis for it – had made “only a modest contribution to the nation’s security.” The report said that “there has been no instance in which NSA could say with confidence that the outcome [of a terror investigation] would have been any different” without the program.
The panel’s findings echoed that of U.S. Judge Richard Leon, who in a ruling this week found the bulk collection program to be unconstitutional. Leon said that government officials were unable to cite “a single instance in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk collection metadata collection actually stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the Government in achieving any objective that was time-sensitive in nature.”
Stone declined to comment on the accuracy of public statements by U.S. intelligence officials about the telephone collection program, but said that when they referred to successes they seemed to be mixing the results of domestic metadata collection with the intelligence derived from the separate, and less controversial, NSA program, known as 702, to intercept communications overseas.
The comparison between 702 overseas interceptions and 215 bulk metadata collection was “night and day,” said Stone. “With 702, the record is very impressive. It’s no doubt the nation is safer and spared potential attacks because of 702. There was nothing like that for 215. We asked the question and they [the NSA] gave us the data. They were very straight about it.”
He also said one reason the telephone records program is not effective is because, contrary to the claims of critics, it actually does not collect a record of every American’s phone call. Although the NSA does collect metadata from major telecommunications carriers such as Verizon and AT&T, there are many smaller carriers from which it collects nothing. Asked if the NSA was collecting the records of 75 percent of phone calls, an estimate that has been used in briefings to Congress , Stone said the real number was classified but “not anything close to that” and far lower.
The heads of top tech companies in the U.S. have ask President Obama to reform government’s surveillance laws and practices. NBC’s Steve Handelsman reports.
When panel members asked NSA officials why they didn’t expand the program to include smaller carriers, the answer they gave was “money,” Stone said. “They were setting financial priorities,” said Stone, and that was “really revealing” about how useful the bulk collection of telephone calls really was.
An NSA spokeswoman declined to comment on any aspect of the panel’s report, saying the agency was deferring to the White House. Asked Wednesday about the surveillance panel’s conclusions about telephone record collection, White House press secretary Jay Carney said that “the president does still believe and knows that this program is an important piece of the overall efforts that we engage in to combat threats against the lives of American citizens and threats to our overall national security.”
By Michael Isikoff
NBC News National Investigative Correspondent
Find this story at 20 December 2013
© 2013 NBCNews.com

Obama administration says NSA data helped make arrests in two important cases – but critics say that simply isn’t true
A new NSA data farm is set to open in the fall in Bluffdale, Utah. A former CIA agent said: ‘[Data-mining] played no role in the Headley case.’ Photograph: George Frey/Getty Images
Lawyers and intelligence experts with direct knowledge of two intercepted terrorist plots that the Obama administration says confirm the value of the NSA’s vast data-mining activities have questioned whether the surveillance sweeps played a significant role, if any, in foiling the attacks.
The defence of the controversial data collection operations, highlighted in a series of Guardian disclosures over the past week, has been led by Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, and her equivalent in the House, Mike Rogers. The two politicians have attempted to justify the NSA’s use of vast data sweeps such as Prism and Boundless Informant by pointing to the arrests and convictions of would-be New York subway bomber Najibullah Zazi in 2009 and David Headley, who is serving a 35-year prison sentence for his role in the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
Rogers told ABC’s This Week that the NSA’s bulk monitoring of phone calls and internet contacts was central to intercepting the plotters. “I can tell you, in the Zazi case in New York, it’s exactly the programme that was used,” he said.
A similar point was made in anonymous briefings by administration officials to the New York Times and Reuters.
But court documents lodged in the US and UK, as well as interviews with involved parties, suggest that data-mining through Prism and other NSA programmes played a relatively minor role in the interception of the two plots. Conventional surveillance techniques, in both cases including old-fashioned tip-offs from intelligence services in Britain, appear to have initiated the investigations.
In the case of Zazi, an Afghan American who planned to attack the New York subway, the breakthrough appears to have come from Operation Pathway, a British investigation into a suspected terrorism cell in the north-west of England in 2009. That investigation discovered that one of the members of the cell had been in contact with an al-Qaida associate in Pakistan via the email address sana_pakhtana@yahoo.com.
British newspaper reports at the time of Zazi’s arrest said that UK intelligence passed on the email address to the US. The same email address, as Buzzfeed has pointed out, was cited in Zazi’s 2011 trial as a crucial piece of evidence. Zazi, the court heard, wrote to sana_pakhtana@yahoo.com asking in coded language for the precise quantities to use to make up a bomb.
Eric Jurgenson, an FBI agent involved in investigating Zazi once the link to the Pakistani email address was made, told the court: “My office was in receipt – I was notified, I should say. My office was in receipt of several email messages, email communications. Those email communications, several of them resolved to an individual living in Colorado.”
Michael Dowling, a Denver-based attorney who acted as Zazi’s defence counsel, said the full picture remained unclear as Zazi pleaded guilty before all details of the investigation were made public. But the lawyer said he was sceptical that mass data sweeps could explain what led law enforcement to Zazi.
“The government says that it does not monitor content of these communications in its data collection. So I find it hard to believe that this would have uncovered Zazi’s contacts with a known terrorist in Pakistan,” Dowling said.
Further scepticism has been expressed by David Davis, a former British foreign office minister who described the citing of the Zazi case as an example of the merits of data-mining as “misleading” and “an illusion”. Davis pointed out that Operation Pathway was prematurely aborted in April 2009 after Bob Quick, then the UK’s most senior counter-terrorism police officer, was pictured walking into Downing Street with top secret documents containing details of the operation in full view of cameras.
The collapse of the operation, and arrests of suspects that hurriedly followed, came five months before Zazi was arrested in September 2009. “That was the operation that led to the initial data links to Zazi – they put the clues in the database which gave them the connections,” Davis said.
Davis said that the discovery of the sana_pakhtana@yahoo.com email – and in turn the link to Zazi – had been made by traditional investigative work in the UK. He said the clue-driven nature of the inquiry was significant, as it was propelled by detectives operating on the basis of court-issued warrants.
“You can’t make this grand sweeping [data collection] stuff subject to warrants. What judge would give you a warrant if you say you want to comb through vast quantities of data?”
Legal documents lodged with a federal court in New York’s eastern district shortly after Zazi’s arrest show that US counter-intelligence officials had been keeping watch over him under targeted surveillance with the warranted approval of the special intelligence court. During the course of the prosecution, the US served notice that it would be offering evidence “obtained and derived from electronic surveillance and physical search conducted pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (Fisa).”
Feinstein and Rogers have also pointed to the case of David Headley, who in January was sentenced to 35 years in jail for having made multiple scouting missions to Mumbai ahead of the 2008 terrorist attacks that killed 168 people. Yet the evidence in his case also points towards a British tip-off as the inspiration behind the US interception of him.
In July 2009, British intelligence began tracking Headley, a Pakistani American from Chicago, who was then plotting to attack Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in retaliation for its publication of cartoons of the prophet Mohammed. Information was passed to the FBI and he was thereafter, until his arrest that October, kept under targeted US surveillance.
An intelligence expert and former CIA operative, who asked to remain anonymous because he had been directly involved in the Headley case, was derisive about the claim that data-mining sweeps by the NSA were key to the investigation. “That’s nonsense. It played no role at all in the Headley case. That’s not the way it happened at all,” he said.
The intelligence expert said that it was a far more ordinary lead that ensnared Headley. British investigators spotted him when he contacted an informant.
The Headley case is a peculiar choice for the administration to highlight as an example of the virtues of data-mining. The fact that the Mumbai attacks occurred, with such devastating effect, in itself suggests that the NSA’s secret programmes were limited in their value as he was captured only after the event.
Headley was also subject to a plethora of more conventionally obtained intelligence that questions the central role claimed for the NSA’s data sweeps behind his arrest. In a long profile of Headley, the investigative website ProPublica pointed out that he had been an informant working for the Drug Enforcement Administration perhaps as recently as 2005. There are suggestions that he might have then worked in some capacity for the FBI or CIA.
Headley was also, ProPublica found, the subject of several inquiries by agents of the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force. A year before the Mumbai attacks his then wife, Faiza Outalha, reported on him to the US embassy Islamabad, saying he was on a secret mission in India and was a “drug dealer, terrorist and spy”.
Ed Pilkington in New York and Nicholas Watt in London
theguardian.com, Wednesday 12 June 2013 15.51 BST
Find this story at 12 June 2013
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