Another day, another round of troubling surveillance news. In a twist, though, today’s nugget has less to do with the US or the NSA but rather, France’s central intelligence agency, the DGSE. According to a leak by Edward Snowden to the French paper Le Monde, Orange, the country’s leading telecom, has been willingly sharing all of its call data with the agency. And according to the leaked document — originally belonging to the UK intelligence agency GCHQ — the French government’s records don’t just include metadata, but all the information Orange has on file. As you might expect, the DGSE then shares this information with other countries, including, of course, the UK, which had this incriminating document in the first place.

In a way, this isn’t surprising: the French government owns a 27 percent stake in the company. But until now, Orange has ostensibly been operating as a private firm. What’s more, the leaked document would suggest that the DGSE’s relationship with Orange has been cooperative, with Orange employees creating new tools to collect and interpret the data. If true, then, this arrangement would go beyond the DGSE merely requesting specific cell phone records and getting them. For now, both the French government and the DGSE have declined to comment, according to TechCrunch, while Orange CEO Stéphane Richard told LeMonde that he isn’t aware of what the DGSE is doing, but that Orange has granted access to the DGSE to comply with the law.

BY DANA WOLLMAN @DANAWOLLMAN MARCH 20TH 2014, AT 3:29:00 PM ET 16

Find this story at 20 March 2014

© 2014 AOL Inc.

Selon un document auquel “Le Monde” eu accès, l’opérateur historique France Télécom-Orange est un acteur essentiel du renseignement français.
On apprend souvent davantage de choses sur soi par des gens qui n’appartiennent pas à votre famille. Les Britanniques, un peu malgré eux, viennent de nous éclairer sur les liens hautement confidentiels qui existent entre les services secrets français, la Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure (DGSE) et l’opérateur historique de télécommunication France Télécom, qui a pris le nom d’Orange en février 2012.
Selon un document interne des services secrets techniques britanniques (GCHQ), l’équivalent de l’Agence nationale de sécurité (NSA) américaine, la DGSE entretient une coopération étroite avec « un opérateur de télécommunication français ». L’ancienneté de leurs liens, la description des savoir-faire spécifiques de l’entreprise ainsi que l’enquête du Monde permettent de conclure qu’il s’agit bien de France Télécom-Orange.

Lire les autres éléments de l’enquête Les services secrets britanniques ont accès aux données des clients français d’Orange

Lire les autres éléments de l’enquête Les X-Télécoms, maîtres d’œuvre du renseignement

Lire les autres éléments de l’enquête Surveillance : « Les opérateurs n’ont pas les moyens de résister aux Etats »

Selon le GCHQ, la DGSE et l’opérateur historique français travaillent ensemble pour améliorer les capacités nationales d’interception sur les réseaux de communication et collaborent pour casser les cryptages de données qui circulent dans les réseaux. France Télécom est un acteur important du système de surveillance en France.

COLLECTE DE DONNÉES LIBRE DE TOUT CONTRÔLE

Cette note, extraite des archives de la NSA par son ex-consultant Edward Snowden, assure que la relation entre la DGSE et l’opérateur français constitue un atout majeur par rapport à ses homologues occidentaux. L’une des forces de la DGSE résiderait dans le fait qu’elle ne se contente pas des autorisations accordées par le législateur pour accéder aux données des clients de France Télécom-Orange. Elle dispose surtout, à l’insu de tout contrôle, d’un accès libre et total à ses réseaux et aux flux de données qui y transitent.

Cette collecte libre de tout contrôle, par le biais de l’opérateur français, portant sur des données massives, concerne aussi bien des Français que des étrangers. Elle est utilisée par la DGSE, qui la met à la disposition de l’ensemble des agences de renseignement françaises au titre de la mutualisation du renseignement technique et de sa base de données. Ces données sont également partagées avec des alliés étrangers comme le GCHQ. Enfin, l’opérateur français développe, en partenariat avec la DGSE, des recherches en cryptologie.

Au plus haut niveau de l’Etat, en France, on se refuse à tout commentaire, mais on indique au Monde que, si la puissance publique est devenue minoritaire (27 %) au sein du capital de France Télécom, le plus ancien opérateur français reste considéré comme « un délégataire de service public ». Le savoir-faire de l’entreprise, qui fut en premier lieu une administration, contribue, de manière essentielle, « aujourd’hui comme hier », à la sécurité du territoire et à l’autonomie de décision des dirigeants français.

« Le rapport entre France Télécom et la DGSE n’est pas de même nature que celui révélé dans le programme Prism de la NSA, qui a des liens contractuels avec les géants d’Internet, explique un ancien chef de service de renseignement français. En France, c’est consubstantiel. » Il n’existe pas de formalisation de cette coopération entre la DGSE et France Télécom-Orange. Elle est portée par des personnes habilitées secret-défense, au sein de l’entreprise, et pérennisée, depuis au moins trente ans, par des ingénieurs, qui font la navette entre les deux institutions.

« USAGE INTERNE ET NON OFFICIEL »

Au quotidien, dans l’entreprise, ce lien est géré par un très petit nombre de personnes au sein de trois services. La direction des réseaux, en premier lieu, gère, notamment, les stations dites « d’atterrissement », où accostent les câbles sous-marins France Télécom-Orange touchant la France et par lesquels transitent les flux massifs de données collectées. Un tri préalable peut aisément être réalisé en fonction des pays et des régions d’origine, puis tout est stocké dans des locaux de la DGSE.

« Le transit massif des données est stocké pour un usage interne et non officiel, détaille un cadre attaché à la direction des réseaux. Mais le point névralgique, c’est l’accès au fournisseur d’accès, comme ça, vous croisez la circulation de la donnée et l’identité de ceux qui l’échangent. C’est pour cette raison que la DGSE est en contact avec l’ensemble des opérateurs français. »

La DGSE s’appuie aussi sur la direction internationale de l’opérateur, qui gère les filiales de téléphonie mobile à l’étranger. Orange joue dans certains cas un rôle stratégique. Il a ainsi accompagné les opérations militaires françaises au Mali et en Centrafrique. Enfin, la direction sécurité, chasse gardée des anciens de la direction technique de la DGSE, est le principal interlocuteur des services secrets. Elle veille, avec Orange Business Services, sur les questions de protection de données et de déchiffrement.

Interrogé, le patron d’Orange, Stéphane Richard, a indiqué que « des personnes habilitées secret-défense peuvent avoir à gérer, au sein de l’entreprise, la relation avec les services de l’Etat et notamment leur accès aux réseaux, mais elles n’ont pas à m’en référer. Tout ceci se fait sous la responsabilité des pouvoirs publics dans un cadre légal ». La DGSE s’est refusée à tout commentaire.

LE MONDE | 20.03.2014 à 11h25 • Mis à jour le 26.03.2014 à 16h14 |
Par Jacques Follorou

Find this story at 20 March 2013

© Le Monde.fr

The French intelligence agency in charge of military and electronic spying is massively collecting data and monitoring networks of telecoms giant Orange, Le Monde newspaper reported in its Friday edition.

A picture taken on February 24, 2014 in the French northern city of Lille, shows people walking in front of an Orange store

“The DGSE can read, like an open book, the origin and destination of all communications of Orange customers,” the paper said.

Monitoring operations were being carried out without any external supervision with access “free and total” for spies at the General Directorate for External Security (DGSE).

Le Monde said its report was based on an internal British intelligence document made available by former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.

Contacted by AFP, an Orange spokesman said the company “like all (other) operators has relations with state agencies in charge of the country’s and the French people’s security.”

“These relations strictly comply with the laws and are legal under the responsibility of the State and the control of judges,” he added.

The DGSE and agents with military clearance have been working with Orange, formerly known as France Telecom, “for at least 30 years”, said Le Monde.

The DGSE would not comment on the report.

Snowden, who has been charged in the United States with espionage, lives in exile in Russia.

He said earlier this month he had no regrets over his leaks about mass surveillance programmes by the US National Security Agency (NSA), saying they sparked a needed public debate on spying and data collection.

Published: 21 Mar 2014 at 03.49Online news: World

Find this story at 21 March 2014

© 2014 The Post Publishing PCL

General Paul Aussaresses was an intelligence chief whose revelations of torture and murder in Algeria shocked his country.

Aussaresses, who has died aged 95, scandalised France and disgraced himself when, in 2000, he revealed that he had participated in summary executions and acts of torture during the Algerian War of Independence.

The revelations, made when Aussaresses was 82, could hardly be called confessions, because they were not accompanied by any sign of remorse. On the contrary, Aussaresses noted that if confronted by the same situation again “it would piss me off, but I would do the same”.

For France, however, the news was deeply shocking, throwing into sharp relief long-buried concerns about its forces’ behaviour in its former colony, as well its treatment of Algerian allies afterwards. Aussaresses assured his countrymen that the future President François Mitterrand, then justice minister, had been kept scrupulously informed of every detail of what was happening in Algiers. “He knew,” Aussaresses noted. “Everyone knew.”

Jacques Chirac, president at the time of the publication of Aussaresses’s book, Services Spéciaux: Algérie 1955-57 (2001), declared himself “horrified” by its tales of murder, beatings, electrocution and waterboarding, and called for the “full truth” to come out. But the truth was worse than most people imagined.

Aussaresses described hanging Larbi Ben M’Hidi, a leader of the Algerian militant FLN, then making it look like suicide.

At the time, when such men were written off as terrorists, it seemed Aussaresses – France’s intelligence chief in Algeria – was hardly challenged. But 40 years later, his reflection that torture was an “effective” tool proved out of step with the mood of his country. He found little support, and was hauled before the French courts and stripped of his decorations. Even his family renounced him.

The truth, however, was that far from having collaborated during World War II, Aussaresses had fought behind enemy lines. Had he chosen not to open his mouth in his dotage, it is likely that many French politicians would have queued to pay homage at his funeral.

Paul Aussaresses was born on November 7, 1918, at Saint-Paul-de-Joux, south-west France. He was educated in Bordeaux, excelling in classics, and attended the St Cyr military academy at Aix-en-Provence, where it had relocated after the German invasion of 1940. By the end of his life he was more or less fluent in six languages.

After the war he moved into the French secret services, helping to create the shock unit of counter-intelligence, SDECE agency.

He arrived in Philippeville (now Skikda), Algeria, in autumn 1954, just as full-scale hostilities were about to break out. There he made no bones about his “enhanced” interrogation techniques, and quickly won a reputation for his ability to penetrate FLN cells. Such was his success that, in 1957, he was promoted to chief of intelligence by Gen Jacques Massu, leading what Aussaresses himself described as “the company of death”.

After France withdrew from Algeria, Aussaresses took his counter-insurgency experience to Fort Bragg, where he trained with the US Green Berets and produced a report entitled The American Army against guerrillas forces.

He returned to France in 1966, the year after he was appointed a Commander of the Legion of Honour.

Aussaresses spent much of the early 1970s in Latin America, training up special forces for many of the less salubrious regimes of the era. Little more was heard of him until 2000.

Paul Aussaresses was twice married and had three daughters.

PUBLISHED 07 DECEMBER 2013 09:30 PM

Find this story at 7 December 2013

© Independent.ie

Edward Snowden papers unmask close technical cooperation and loose alliance between British, German, French, Spanish and Swedish spy agencies

The German, French, Spanish and Swedish intelligence services have all developed methods of mass surveillance of internet and phone traffic over the past five years in close partnership with Britain’s GCHQ eavesdropping agency.

The bulk monitoring is carried out through direct taps into fibre optic cables and the development of covert relationships with telecommunications companies. A loose but growing eavesdropping alliance has allowed intelligence agencies from one country to cultivate ties with corporations from another to facilitate the trawling of the web, according to GCHQ documents leaked by the former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.

The files also make clear that GCHQ played a leading role in advising its European counterparts how to work around national laws intended to restrict the surveillance power of intelligence agencies.

The German, French and Spanish governments have reacted angrily to reports based on National Security Agency (NSA) files leaked by Snowden since June, revealing the interception of communications by tens of millions of their citizens each month. US intelligence officials have insisted the mass monitoring was carried out by the security agencies in the countries involved and shared with the US.

The US director of national intelligence, James Clapper, suggested to Congress on Tuesday that European governments’ professed outrage at the reports was at least partly hypocritical. “Some of this reminds me of the classic movie Casablanca: ‘My God, there’s gambling going on here,’ ” he said.

Sweden, which passed a law in 2008 allowing its intelligence agency to monitor cross-border email and phone communications without a court order, has been relatively muted in its response.

The German government, however, has expressed disbelief and fury at the revelations from the Snowden documents, including the fact that the NSA monitored Angela Merkel’s mobile phone calls.

After the Guardian revealed the existence of GCHQ’s Tempora programme, in which the electronic intelligence agency tapped directly into the transatlantic fibre optic cables to carry out bulk surveillance, the German justice minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, said it sounded “like a Hollywood nightmare”, and warned the UK government that free and democratic societies could not flourish when states shielded their actions in “a veil of secrecy”.

‘Huge potential’

However, in a country-by-country survey of its European partners, GCHQ officials expressed admiration for the technical capabilities of German intelligence to do the same thing. The survey in 2008, when Tempora was being tested, said the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), had “huge technological potential and good access to the heart of the internet – they are already seeing some bearers running at 40Gbps and 100Gbps”.

Bearers is the GCHQ term for the fibre optic cables, and gigabits per second (Gbps) measures the speed at which data runs through them. Four years after that report, GCHQ was still only able to monitor 10 Gbps cables, but looked forward to tap new 100 Gbps bearers eventually. Hence the admiration for the BND.

The document also makes clear that British intelligence agencies were helping their German counterparts change or bypass laws that restricted their ability to use their advanced surveillance technology. “We have been assisting the BND (along with SIS [Secret Intelligence Service] and Security Service) in making the case for reform or reinterpretation of the very restrictive interception legislation in Germany,” it says.

The country-by-country survey, which in places reads somewhat like a school report, also hands out high marks to the GCHQ’s French partner, the General Directorate for External Security (DGSE). But in this case it is suggested that the DGSE’s comparative advantage is its relationship with an unnamed telecommunications company, a relationship GCHQ hoped to leverage for its own operations.

“DGSE are a highly motivated, technically competent partner, who have shown great willingness to engage on IP [internet protocol] issues, and to work with GCHQ on a “cooperate and share” basis.”

Noting that the Cheltenham-based electronic intelligence agency had trained DGSE technicians on “multi-disciplinary internet operations”, the document says: “We have made contact with the DGSE’s main industry partner, who has some innovative approaches to some internet challenges, raising the potential for GCHQ to make use of this company in the protocol development arena.”

GCHQ went on to host a major conference with its French partner on joint internet-monitoring initiatives in March 2009 and four months later reported on shared efforts on what had become by then GCHQ’s biggest challenge – continuing to carry out bulk surveillance, despite the spread of commercial online encryption, by breaking that encryption.

“Very friendly crypt meeting with DGSE in July,” British officials reported. The French were “clearly very keen to provide presentations on their work which included cipher detection in high-speed bearers. [GCHQ’s] challenge is to ensure that we have enough UK capability to support a longer term crypt relationship.”

Fresh opportunities

In the case of the Spanish intelligence agency, the National Intelligence Centre (CNI), the key to mass internet surveillance, at least back in 2008, was the Spaniards’ ties to a British telecommunications company (again unnamed. Corporate relations are among the most strictly guarded secrets in the intelligence community). That was giving them “fresh opportunities and uncovering some surprising results.

“GCHQ has not yet engaged with CNI formally on IP exploitation, but the CNI have been making great strides through their relationship with a UK commercial partner. GCHQ and the commercial partner have been able to coordinate their approach. The commercial partner has provided the CNI some equipment whilst keeping us informed, enabling us to invite the CNI across for IP-focused discussions this autumn,” the report said. It concluded that GCHQ “have found a very capable counterpart in CNI, particularly in the field of Covert Internet Ops”.

GCHQ was clearly delighted in 2008 when the Swedish parliament passed a bitterly contested law allowing the country’s National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA) to conduct Tempora-like operations on fibre optic cables. The British agency also claimed some credit for the success.

“FRA have obtained a … probe to use as a test-bed and we expect them to make rapid progress in IP exploitation following the law change,” the country assessment said. “GCHQ has already provided a lot of advice and guidance on these issues and we are standing by to assist the FRA further once they have developed a plan for taking the work forwards.”

The following year, GCHQ held a conference with its Swedish counterpart “for discussions on the implications of the new legislation being rolled out” and hailed as “a success in Sweden” the news that FRA “have finally found a pragmatic solution to enable release of intelligence to SAEPO [the internal Swedish security service.]”

GCHQ also maintains strong relations with the two main Dutch intelligence agencies, the external MIVD and the internal security service, the AIVD.

“Both agencies are small, by UK standards, but are technically competent and highly motivated,” British officials reported. Once again, GCHQ was on hand in 2008 for help in dealing with legal constraints. “The AIVD have just completed a review of how they intend to tackle the challenges posed by the internet – GCHQ has provided input and advice to this report,” the country assessment said.

“The Dutch have some legislative issues that they need to work through before their legal environment would allow them to operate in the way that GCHQ does. We are providing legal advice on how we have tackled some of these issues to Dutch lawyers.”

European allies

In the score-card of European allies, it appears to be the Italians who come off the worse. GCHQ expresses frustration with the internal friction between Italian agencies and the legal limits on their activities.

“GCHQ has had some CT [counter-terrorism] and internet-focused discussions with both the foreign intelligence agency (AISE) and the security service (AISI), but has found the Italian intelligence community to be fractured and unable/unwilling to cooperate with one another,” the report said.

A follow-up bulletin six months later noted that GCHQ was “awaiting a response from AISI on a recent proposal for cooperation – the Italians had seemed keen, but legal obstacles may have been hindering their ability to commit.”

It is clear from the Snowden documents that GCHQ has become Europe’s intelligence hub in the internet age, and not just because of its success in creating a legally permissive environment for its operations. Britain’s location as the European gateway for many transatlantic cables, and its privileged relationship with the NSA has made GCHQ an essential partner for European agencies. The documents show British officials frequently lobbying the NSA on sharing of data with the Europeans and haggling over its security classification so it can be more widely disseminated. In the intelligence world, far more than it managed in diplomacy, Britain has made itself an indispensable bridge between America and Europe’s spies.

Julian Borger
The Guardian, Friday 1 November 2013 17.02 GMT

Find this story at 1 November 2013

© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Spain and France’s intelligence agencies carried out collection of phone records and shared them with NSA, agency says

European intelligence agencies and not American spies were responsible for the mass collection of phone records which sparked outrage in France and Spain, the US has claimed.
General Keith Alexander, the head of the National Security Agency, said reports that the US had collected millions of Spanish and French phone records were “absolutely false”.
“To be perfectly clear, this is not information that we collected on European citizens,” Gen Alexander said when asked about the reports, which were based on classified documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor.
Shortly before the NSA chief appeared before a Congressional committee, US officials briefed the Wall Street Journal that in fact Spain and France’s own intelligence agencies had carried out the surveillance and then shared their findings with the NSA.
The anonymous officials claimed that the monitored calls were not even made within Spanish and French borders and could be surveillance carried on outside of Europe.

In an aggressive rebuttal of the reports in the French paper Le Monde and the Spanish El Mundo, Gen Alexander said “they and the person who stole the classified data [Mr Snowden] do not understand what they were looking at” when they published slides from an NSA document.
The US push back came as President Barack Obama was said to be on the verge of ordering a halt to spying on the heads of allied governments.
The White House said it was looking at all US spy activities in the wake of leaks by Mr Snowden but was putting a “special emphasis on whether we have the appropriate posture when it comes to heads of state”.
Mr Obama was reported to have already halted eavesdropping at UN’s headquarters in New York.
German officials said that while the White House’s public statements had become more conciliatory there remained deep wariness and that little progress had been made behind closed doors in formalising an American commitment to curb spying.
“An agreement that you feel might be broken at any time is not worth very much,” one diplomat told The Telegraph.
“We need to re-establish trust and then come to some kind of understanding comparable to the [no spy agreement] the US has with other English speaking countries.”
Despite the relatively close US-German relations, the White House is reluctant to be drawn into any formal agreement and especially resistant to demands that a no-spy deal be expanded to cover all 28 EU member states.
Viviane Reding, vice-president of the European Commission and EU justice commissioner, warned that the spying row could spill over and damage talks on a free-trade agreement between the EU and US.
“Friends and partners do not spy on each other,” she said in a speech in Washington. “For ambitious and complex negotiations to succeed there needs to be trust among the negotiating partners. It is urgent and essential that our US partners take clear action to rebuild trust.”
A spokesman for the US trade negotiators said it would be “unfortunate to let these issues – however important – distract us” from reaching a deal vital to freeing up transatlantic trade worth $3.3 billion dollars (£2bn) a day.
James Clapper, America’s top national intelligence, told a Congressional hearing yesterday the US does not “spy indiscriminately on the citizens of any country”.
“We do not spy on anyone except for valid foreign intelligence purposes, and we only work within the law,” Mr Clapper said. “To be sure on occasions we’ve made mistakes, some quite significant, but these are usually caused by human error or technical problems.”
Pressure from European leaders was added to as some of the US intelligence community’s key Congressional allies balked at the scale of surveillance on friendly governments.
Dianne Feinstein, the chair of powerful Senate intelligence committee, said she was “totally opposed” to tapping allied leaders and called for a wide-ranging Senate review of the activities of US spy agencies.
“I do not believe the United States should be collecting phone calls or emails of friendly presidents and prime ministers,” she said.
John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the house and a traditional hawk on national security, said US spy policy was “imbalanced” and backed calls for a review.
Mr Boehner has previously been a staunch advocate of the NSA and faced down a July rebellion by libertarian Republicans who tried to pass a law significantly curbing the agency’s power.

By Raf Sanchez, Peter Foster in Washington8:35PM GMT 29 Oct 2013 Comments15 Comments

Find this story at 29 October 2013

© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2014

U.S. officials are alerting some foreign intelligence services that documents detailing their secret cooperation with the United States have been obtained by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, according to government officials.

Snowden, U.S. officials said, took tens of thousands of military intelligence documents, some of which contain sensitive material about collection programs against adversaries such as Iran, Russia and China. Some refer to operations that in some cases involve countries not publicly allied with the United States.

The process of informing officials in capital after capital about the risk of disclosure is delicate. In some cases, one part of the cooperating government may know about the collaboration while others — such as the foreign ministry — may not, the officials said. The documents, if disclosed, could compromise operations, officials said.

The notifications come as the Obama administration is scrambling to placate allies after allegations that the NSA has spied on foreign leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The reports have forced the administration to play down operations targeting friends while also attempting to preserve other programs that depend on provisional partners. In either case, trust in the United States may be compromised.

“It is certainly a concern, just as much as the U.S. collection [of information on European allies] being put in the news, if not more, because not only does it mean we have the potential of losing collection, but also of harming relationships,” a congressional aide said.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is handling the job of informing the other intelligence services, the officials said. ODNI declined to comment.

In one case, for instance, the files contain information about a program run from a NATO country against Russia that provides valuable intelligence for the U.S. Air Force and Navy, said one U.S. official, who requested anonymity to discuss an ongoing criminal investigation. Snowden faces theft and espionage charges.

“If the Russians knew about it, it wouldn’t be hard for them to take appropriate measures to put a stop to it,” the official said.

Snowden lifted the documents from a top-secret network run by the Defense Intelligence Agency and used by intelligence arms of the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines, according to sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

Snowden took 30,000 documents that involve the intelligence work of one of the services, the official said. He gained access to the documents through the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, or JWICS, for top-secret/sensitive compartmented information, the sources said.

The material in question does not deal with NSA surveillance but primarily with standard intelligence about other countries’ military capabilities, including weapons systems — missiles, ships and jets, the officials say.

Although Snowden obtained a large volume of documents, he is not believed to have shared all of them with journalists, sources say. Moreover, he has stressed to those he has given documents that he does not want harm to result.

“He’s made it quite clear that he was not going to compromise legitimate national intelligence and national security operations,” said Thomas Drake, a former NSA executive who visited Snowden in Moscow this month. Snowden separately told Drake and a New York Times reporter that he did not take any documents with him to Russia. “There’s a zero percent chance the Russians or Chinese have received any documents,” Snowden told the Times in an online interview last week.

Indeed, Drake said, Snowden made clear in their conversation that he had learned the lessons of prior disclosures, including those by an Army private who passed hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables to the anti-
secrecy organization WikiLeaks, which posted them in bulk online. “It’s telling,” Drake said, “that he did not give anything to WikiLeaks.”

Nonetheless, the military intelligence agencies remain fearful, officials said. The NSA in recent months has provided them with an accounting of the documents it believes Snowden obtained.

Intelligence officials said that they could discern no pattern to the military intelligence documents taken and that Snowden appeared to have harvested them at random. “It didn’t seem like he was targeting something specific,” the U.S. official said.

The notifications are reminiscent of what the State Department had to do in late 2010 in anticipation of the release of hundreds of thousands of sensitive diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks. The department feared that embarrassing details in some of the cables would lead to tension in relations between the United States and other countries.

In the case of WikiLeaks, the State Department had a number of months to assess the potential impact of the cables’ release and devise a strategy, former State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said.

“I’m not sure there were that many startling surprises in the cables,” he said. But there was damage on a country-by-country basis, he said.

For instance, some of the cables reflected unfavorably on ­then-Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi, alleging that he feared flying over water and almost never traveled without his “voluptuous blonde” Ukrainian nurse. “All of a sudden we found there were some unsavory guys following” then-U.S. Ambassador to Libya Gene Cretz, Crowley said. “We brought him home for consultations and did not send him back.”

“But broadly speaking,” Crowley said, “relationships are guided by interests, rather than personalities, and, over time, interests carry the day.”

The fundamental issue is one of trust, officials said. “We depend to a very great extent on intelligence-sharing relationships with foreign partners, mostly governments — or, in some cases, organizations within governments,” a second U.S. official said. “If they tell us something, we will keep it secret. We expect the same of them. [If that trust is undermined,] these countries, at a minimum, will be thinking twice if they’re going to share something with us or not.”

Snowden has instructed the reporters with whom he has shared records to use their judgment to avoid publishing anything that would cause harm. “I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest,” he told the Guardian newspaper. “There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over, because harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.”

It is those documents that may not be subject to journalistic vetting or may be breached by hackers that worry some intelligence officials. Snowden is known to have given documents in any quantity to only three journalists: The Post’s Barton Gellman, independent filmmaker Laura Poitras and former Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald.

So far, Drake said, no such documents have been released. Snowden’s disclosures about the NSA have prompted a global debate about the proper scope and purpose of U.S. espionage — against its own and other countries’ citizens.

“I consider that a good thing,” Drake said.

By Ellen Nakashima, Published: October 24

Find this story at 24 October 2013

© The Washington Post Company

Espionage by the US on France has already strained relations between the two countries, threatening a trans-Atlantic trade agreement. Now a document seen by SPIEGEL reveals that the NSA also spied on the French Foreign Ministry.

America’s National Security Agency (NSA) targeted France’s Foreign Ministry for surveillance, according to an internal document seen by SPIEGEL.

Dated June 2010, the “top secret” NSA document reveals that the intelligence agency was particularly interested in the diplomats’ computer network. All of the country’s embassies and consulates are connected with the Paris headquarters via a virtual private network (VPN), technology that is generally considered to be secure.

Accessing the Foreign Ministry’s network was considered a “success story,” and there were a number of incidents of “sensitive access,” the document states.

An overview lists different web addresses tapped into by the NSA, among them “diplomatie.gouv.fr,” which was run from the Foreign Ministry’s server. A list from September 2010 says that French diplomatic offices in Washington and at the United Nations in New York were also targeted, and given the codenames “Wabash” and “Blackfoot,” respectively. NSA technicians installed bugs in both locations and conducted a “collection of computer screens” at the one at the UN.

A priority list also names France as an official target for the intelligence agency. In particular, the NSA was interested in the country’s foreign policy objectives, especially the weapons trade, and economic stability.

US-French relations are being strained by such espionage activities. In early July, French President François Hollande threatened to suspend negotiations for a trans-Atlantic free trade agreement, demanding a guarantee from the US that it would cease spying after it was revealed that the French embassy in Washington had been targeted by the NSA.

“There can be no negotiations or transactions in all areas until we have obtained these guarantees, for France but also for all of the European Union, for all partners of the United States,” he said at the time.

The NSA declined to comment to SPIEGEL on the matter. As details about the scope of the agency’s international spying operations continue to emerge, Washington has come under increasing pressure from its trans-Atlantic partners. Officials in Europe have expressed concern that negotiations for the trade agreement would be poisoned by a lack of trust.

09/01/2013 09:32 AM

Find this story at 1 September 2013

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2013

The company that runs Paris’s electric car sharing scheme has filed an industrial espionage complaint against BMW, after employees alleged the German car giant sent “spies” to check out their electric cars.

Another Franco-German automobile row appears to have kicked off this week.
As the bust-up between between Mercedes and the French government rumbles on, another Franco-German automobile row appears to have kicked off this week with French company Autolib accusing BMW of “spying”.

The affair began on August 21st, when Autolib maintenance staff spotted two men they said were German, at a recharging station in Paris, fiddling with computer equipment in one of the electric vehicles, called “Blue cars”.

Later that day, the same men reportedly passed themselves off as “maintenance staff” and pretended to carry out work on one of the cars in the city’s 9th arrondissement, before slipping away.
Their suspicions raised, one of the Autolib ambassadors made a note of the license plate of one of the cars rented by the German men, cross-referenced it with rental times, and discovered that a “P3-group.com” email suffix was used to sign up online for the Autolib scheme.

P3 is an engineering firm contracted by none other than BMW to lay the groundwork for its upcoming I3 electric car model.

The following day, the alleged spies were once again seen at an Autolib station, this time in the city’s second arrondissement.

According to reports in French daily Le Figaro, when questioned by staff, the two men said they worked for BMW, before quickly leaving the scene.

This time, management at Autolib, which is run by French company Bolloré, notified the DCRI, France’s intelligence services, and told its entire staff to be on the look-out for phoney “maintenance staff”.
They were not seen again until September 5th, when they were spotted on Rue Jouffroy-d’Abbans in the seventh arrondissement.

Staff immediately called in the police, who came and arrested the two suspects.
They were questioned by BEFTI, the police’s electronic fraud division, before being released the next day.

Autolib management promptly filed a police complaint, accusing the two men of “abuse of trust,” “intrusion into a system of automated data,” and property damage, according to Le Figaro.
BMW reportedly took the step of writing to Bolloré’s CEO, Vincent Bolloré, reportedly recognizing it had dispatched staff to conduct “compatibility tests,” and apologizing for not seeking advanced permission from Bolloré.

However, in a statement released on Tuesday, BMW France denied all allegations of industrial espionage.
“In the context of the upcoming launch of the BMW I3, BMW Group is conducting routine tests across Europe, to check the compatibility of charging stations on public streets,” said the statement.
“The sole purpose of these tests is to identify networks of charging stations that electric BMW vehicles could use.”
The company confirmed it had conducted tests of this kind on August 21st, 22nd and 26th in Paris, but significantly denied it had done so on September 5th, the day the two alleged spies were arrested.
A representative from the P3 Group was not immediately available for comment when contacted by The Local on Tuesday.
Autolib, an all-electric car-sharing scheme based on the French capital’s successful bike-sharing project Velib, launched in October 2011.
Users can rent and return one of the more than 4,000 Bluecars for as little as €9 for half an hour, or as much as €120 for an annual subscription of unlimited journeys of up to 30 minutes.
Since launching in Paris, the scheme has come to the eastern city of Lyon, and is slated to arrive in Bordeaux, south-western France in November.
After that, plans are afoot to bring the all-electric car-sharing scheme to the US city of Indianapolis in 2014.

Published: 10 Sep 2013 14:25 GMT+02:00

Find this story at 10 September 2013

Copyright The Local Europe GmbH

Paris prosecutor Jean-Claude Marin on Jan. 14 began an inquiry into allegations of commercial espionage carried out against French carmaker Renault. The allegations first became public when Renault suspended three of its employees on Jan. 3 after an internal investigation that began in August 2010. Within days, citing an anonymous French government source, Reuters reported that French intelligence services were looking into the possibility that China played a role in the Renault espionage case. While the French government refused to officially confirm this accusation, speculation has run wild that Chinese state-sponsored spies were stealing electric-vehicle technology from Renault.

The Chinese are well-known perpetrators of industrial espionage and have been caught before in France, but the details that have emerged so far about the Renault operation differ from the usual Chinese method of operation. And much has been learned about this MO just in the last two years across the Atlantic, where the United States has been increasingly aggressive in investigating and prosecuting cases of Chinese espionage. If Chinese intelligence services were indeed responsible for espionage at Renault it would be one of only a few known cases involving non-Chinese nationals and would have involved the largest amount of money since the case of the legendary Larry Wu-Tai Chin, China’s most successful spy.

STRATFOR has previously detailed the Chinese intelligence services and the workings of espionage with Chinese characteristics. A look back at Chinese espionage activities uncovered in the United States in 2010, since our latest report was compiled, can provide more context and detail about current Chinese intelligence operations.

Chinese Espionage in the U.S.

We chose to focus on operations in the United States for two reasons. First, the United States is a major target for Chinese industrial espionage. This is because it is a leader in technology development, particularly in military hardware desired by China’s expanding military, and a potential adversary at the forefront of Chinese defense thinking. Second, while it is not the only country developing major new technologies in which China would be interested, the United States has been the most aggressive in prosecuting espionage cases against Chinese agents, thereby producing available data for us to work with. Since 2008, at least seven cases have been prosecuted each year in the United States against individuals spying for China. Five were prosecuted in 2007. Going back to about 2000, from one to three cases were prosecuted annually, and before that, less than one was prosecuted per year.

Most of the cases involved charges of violating export restrictions or stealing trade secrets rather than the capital crime of stealing state secrets. As the premier agency leading such investigations, the FBI has clearly made a policy decision to refocus on counterintelligence after an overwhelming focus on counterterrorism following 9/11, and its capability to conduct such investigations has grown. In 2010, 11 Chinese espionage cases were prosecuted in the United States, the highest number yet, and they featured a wide range of espionage targets.

Ten of the 11 cases involved technology acquisition, and five were overt attempts to purchase and illegally export encryption devices, mobile-phone components, high-end analog-to-digital converters, microchips designed for aerospace applications and radiation-hardened semiconductors. These technologies can be used in a wide range of Chinese industries. While the mobile-phone technology would be limited to Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) such as China Mobile, the aerospace-related microchips could be used in anything from rockets to fighter jets. Xian Hongwei and someone known as “Li Li” were arrested in September 2010 for allegedly attempting to purchase those aerospace-related microchips from BAE Systems, which is one of the companies involved in the development of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Similar espionage may have played a role in China’s development of the new J-20 fifth-generation fighter, but that is only speculation.

(click here to enlarge image)

Five other cases in 2010 involved stealing trade secrets. These included organic light-emitting diode processes from Dupont, hybrid vehicle technology from GM, insecticide formulas from the Dow Chemical Co., paint formulas from Valspar and various vehicle design specifications from Ford. These types of Chinese cases, while often encouraged by state officials, are more similar to industrial espionage conducted by corporations. Since many of the major car companies in China are state-run, these technologies benefit both industry and the state.

But that does not mean these efforts are directed from Beijing. History shows that such espionage activities are not well coordinated. Various Chinese company executives (who are also Communist Party officials) have different requirements for their industrial espionage. In cases where two SOEs are competing to sell similar products, they may both try to recruit agents to steal the same technology. There are also a growing number of private Chinese companies getting involved in espionage. One notable example was when Du Shanshan and Qin Yu passed on technology from GM to Chery Automobile, a private, rather than state-run, manufacturer. In the five trade-secret cases in 2010, most of the suspects were caught because of poor tradecraft. They stored data on their hard drives, sent e-mails on company computers and had obvious communications with companies in China. This is not the kind of tradecraft we would expect from trained intelligence officers. Most of these cases probably involved ad hoc agents, some of whom were likely recruited while working in the United States and offered jobs back in China when they were found to have access to important technology.

These cases show how Chinese state-run companies can have an interest in espionage in order to improve their own products, both for the success of their companies and in the national interest of China. The U.S. Department of Justice has not provided specific details on how the stolen defense-related technologies were intended to be used in China, so it is hard to tell whether they would have enhanced China’s military capability.

First-generation Chinese carried out 10 of the 11 publicized cases in the United States last year. Some were living or working temporarily in the United States, others had become naturalized American citizens (with the exception of Xian and Li, who were caught in Hungary). The Chinese intelligence services rely on ethnic Chinese agents because the services do not generally trust outsiders. When recruiting, they also use threats against family members or the individuals themselves. Second- and third-generation Chinese who have assimilated in a new culture are rarely willing to spy, and the Chinese government has much less leverage over this segment of the ethnic-Chinese population living overseas.

In the 11 cases in 2010, it is not clear what payments, if any, the agents might have received. In some cases, such as those involving the trade secrets from Valspar and Ford, the information likely helped the agents land better jobs and/or receive promotions back in China. Cash does not typically rule the effectiveness of newly recruited Chinese spies, as it might with Western recruits. Instead, new Chinese agents are usually motivated by intelligence-service coercion or ideological affinity for China.

The outlier in 2010 was Glenn Duffie Shriver, an American student with no Chinese heritage who applied to work at both the U.S. State Department and the CIA. His was the first publicized case of the Chinese trying to develop an agent in place in the United States since Larry Chin. Shriver studied in China in 2002 and 2003. The recruitment process began when he returned to China in 2004 to seek employment and improve his language capabilities. After responding to an ad for someone with an English-language background to write a political paper, Shriver was paid $120 for producing an article on U.S.-Chinese relations regarding Taiwan and North Korea.

The woman who hired him then introduced him to two Chinese intelligence officers named Wu and Tang. They paid Shriver a total of $70,000 in three payments while he tried to land a job with the U.S. government. Shriver failed the exams to become a foreign service officer and began pursuing a career with the CIA. He was accused of lying on his CIA application by not mentioning at least one trip to China and at least 20 meetings with Chinese intelligence officers. It is not clear how he was exposed, but customs records and passport stamps would have easily revealed any trips to China that he did not report in his CIA application. On Oct. 22, 2010, Shriver pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide national defense information to intelligence officers of the People’s Republic of China and was sentenced to 48 months in prison in accordance with his plea agreement.

A few Americans have been accused of being Chinese agents before, such as former Defense Department official James Fondren, who was caught and convicted in 2009. These cases are rare, though they may increase as Beijing tries to reach higher levels of infiltration. It is also possible that the FBI has been reaching only for low-hanging fruit and that Chinese espionage involving Americans at higher levels is going undetected. If this were the case, it would not be consistent with the general Chinese espionage MO.

China takes a mosaic approach to intelligence, which is a wholly different paradigm than that of the West. Instead of recruiting a few high-level sources, the Chinese recruit as many low-level operatives as possible who are charged with vacuuming up all available open-source information and compiling and analyzing the innumerable bits of intelligence to assemble a complete picture. This method fits well with Chinese demographics, which are characterized by countless thousands of capable and industrious people working overseas as well as thousands more analyzing various pieces of the mosaic back home.

Another case in 2010 was an alleged China-based cyberattack against Google, in which servers were hacked and customer account information was accessed. Last year, more than 30 other major companies reported similar infiltration attempts occurring in 2009, though we do not know how widespread the effort really is. China’s cyber-espionage capabilities are well known and no doubt will continue to provide more valuable information for China’s intelligence services.

The Renault Case

Few details have been released about the Renault case, which will likely remain confidential until French prosecutors finish their investigation. But enough information has trickled in to give us some idea of the kind of operation that would have targeted Renault’s electric-vehicle program. Three Renault managers were accused: Matthieu Tenenbaum, who was deputy director of Renault’s electric-vehicle program; Michel Balthazard, who was a member of the Renault management board; and Bertrand Rochette, a subordinate of Balthazard who was responsible for pilot projects. Various media reports — mostly from Le Figaro — claim that the State Grid Corporation of China opened bank accounts for two of the three managers (it is unknown which two). Money was allegedly wired through Malta, and Renault’s investigators found deposits of 500,000 euros (about $665,000) and 130,000 euros (about $175,000) respectively in Swiss and Liechtenstein bank accounts.

Assuming this is true, it is still unclear what the money was for. Given that the three executives had positions close to the electric-vehicle program, it seems that some related technology was the target. Patrick Pelata, Renault’s chief operating officer, said that “not the smallest nugget of technical or strategic information on the innovation plan has filtered out of the enterprise.” In other words, Renault uncovered the operation before any technology was leaked — or it is intentionally trying to downplay the damage done in order to reassure investors and protect stock prices. But Pelata also called the operation “a system organized to collect economic, technological and strategic information to serve interests abroad.”

Renault is convinced a foreign entity was involved in a sophisticated intelligence operation against the company. The question is, what foreign entity? On Jan. 13, Renault filed an official complaint with French authorities, saying it was the victim of organized industrial espionage, among other things, committed by “persons unknown.” French Industry Minister Eric Besson clarified Jan. 14 that there was no information to suggest Chinese involvement in the case, though he previously said France was facing “economic war,” presuming that the culprits came from outside France. The source for the original rumors of Chinese involvement is unclear, but the French clearly backed away from the accusation, especially after Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei called the accusation “baseless and irresponsible” on Jan. 11 (of course, even if the Chinese were the culprits they would certainly not admit it).

The Chinese have definitely targeted energy-efficient motor vehicle technology in the past, in addition to the Ford and GM cases, and Renault itself is no stranger to industrial espionage activities. In 2007, Li Li Whuang was charged with breach of trust and fraudulent access to a computer system while working as a trainee at Valeo, a French automotive components manufacturer, in 2005. The 24-year-old was studying in Paris when she was offered the trainee position at Valeo. Investigators found files on her computer related to a project with BMW and another with Renault.

The new Renault case, however, is very different from most Chinese espionage cases. First, it involved recruiting three French nationals with no ethnic ties to China, rather than first-generation Chinese. Second, the alleged payments to two of three Renault employees were much larger than Chinese agents usually receive, even those who are not ethnic Chinese. The one notable exception is the case of Larry Chin, who is believed to have received more than $1 million in the 30 years he spied for China as a translator for U.S. intelligence services. Renault executives would also be paid as much or more in salaries than what was found in these bank accounts, though we don’t know if more money was transferred in and out of the accounts. This may not be unprecedented, however; STRATFOR sources have reported being offered many millions of dollars to work for the Chinese government.

Another problem is the alleged use of a Chinese state-owned company to funnel payments to the Renault executives. Using a company traceable not only to China but to the government itself is a huge error in tradecraft. This is not likely a mistake that the Chinese intelligence services would make. In Chin’s case, all payments were made in cash and were exchanged in careful meetings outside the United States, in places where there was no surveillance.

Thus, STRATFOR doubts that the Renault theft was perpetrated by the Chinese. The leak suggesting otherwise was likely an assumption based on China’s frequent involvement in industrial espionage. Still, it could be a sign of new methods in Chinese spycraft.

Higher-level Recruitment?

The Shriver and Renault cases could suggest that some Chinese intelligence operations are so sophisticated that counterintelligence officers are unaware of their activities. They could mean that the Chinese are recruiting higher-level sources and offering them large sums of money. Chin, who got his start working for the U.S. Army during the Korean War, remained undetected until 1985, when a defector exposed him. There may be others who are just as well hidden. However, according to STRATFOR sources, including current and former counterintelligence officers, the vast majority of Chinese espionage operations are perpetrated at low levels by untrained agents.

There is little indication that the Chinese have switched from the high-quantity, low-quality mosaic intelligence method, and cyber-espionage activities such as hacking Google demonstrate that the mosaic method is only growing. The Internet allows China to recruit from its large base of capable computer users to find valuable information in the national interest. It provides even more opportunities to vacuum up information for intelligence analysis. Indeed, cyber-espionage is being used as another form of “insurance,” a way to ensure that the information collected by the intelligence services from other sources is accurate.

If China is responsible for the Renault penetration, the case would represent a change in the Chinese espionage MO, one aiming at a higher level and willing to spend more money, even though most of the cases prosecuted in the United States pointed to a continuation of the mosaic paradigm. Nevertheless, counterintelligence officers are likely watching carefully for higher-level recruits, fearing that others like Chin and Shriver may have remained undetected for years. These cases may be an indication of new resources made available to Western counterintelligence agencies and not new efforts by the Chinese.

One thing is certain: Chinese espionage activities will continue apace in 2011, and it will be interesting to see what targets are picked.

Security Weekly
THURSDAY, JANUARY 20, 2011 – 03:53 Print Text Size
By Sean Noonan

Find this story at 20 January 2011

Copyright © 2014 Stratfor

The French president has asked the intelligence service to investigate suspected industrial spying at Renault.

The French carmaker has suspended three senior managers after an investigation into the possible leaking of electric vehicle secrets to rivals.

The firm has said industrial espionage poses a serious threat to its “strategic assets”.

The French industry minister has described the case of Renault, which is 15% state-owned, as “economic warfare”.

The right-leaning Le Figaro newspaper reported that, according to several sources, the information passed on relates to the technology in the battery and the engine of electrical vehicles that will be rolled out after 2012.

Advanced technology

The three executives suspended are alleged to have sold new patents not yet registered to one or several intermediaries specialising in economic intelligence.

One of the three – who have all been given the opportunity to respond to the charges made against them, before any sanctions are imposed – is a member of the carmaker’s management committee.

Continue reading the main story
Analysis

image of Mark Gregory
Mark Gregory
BBC News
The incident comes at a time of rising concern in Europe and America about protecting intellectual property rights.

The picture emerging from French media reports is that the three suspended executives may have leaked details of battery and engine technologies developed for Renault’s new generation of electric cars.

Whether or not the allegations are true, they have touched a raw nerve. Western firms are worried about rivals in emerging economies grabbing their best ideas without paying for them.

The issue is becoming more serious as China and other new industrial powers become more sophisticated in what they produce.

Stories about stolen industrial secrets will probably become more frequent as competition between old industrial powers and new ones intensifies.

The BBC’s Christian Fraser, in Paris, says that it is a mark of how seriously the French government is taking this breach of trust that it has asked the intelligence service to investigate.

Car manufacturing is an important part of the French economy, and a major employer, our correspondent says.

One of the biggest advantages that Western carmakers have is their advanced technology, which enables them to compete against cheaper labour costs outside Europe.

According to sources within Renault it is suspected the final recipient of this information was likely to have been a Chinese rival.

“We cannot accept that an innovation financed by the French taxpayer ends up in the hands of the Chinese,” one, anonymous industry ministry source told Agence France Presse.

The carmaker, alongside its partner Nissan, has invested heavily in electric vehicle technology.

Both plan to launch a number of new electric vehicles over the next two years.

7 January 2011

Find this story at 7 January 2011

BBC © 2014

(Reuters) – As Western states enter a new era of potential confrontation with Moscow, they face an awkward reality.

A quarter-century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the level of expertise on Russia in intelligence agencies, armed forces and governments has diminished drastically.

Rising concern over Russian government espionage – including increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks and computer spyware – had sparked some modest renewed interest in recent years, primarily in counterintelligence.

But the way Washington and its allies were so blindsided by President Vladimir Putin’s military seizure and annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, is seen demonstrating a dramatic need for renewed focus.

The bottom line, current and former officials say, is that with the post-September 11, 2001 focus on Islamist militancy and the Middle East and later the rise of China, the former Soviet Union was simply not seen a career enhancing speciality.

Compared to the Cold War era, when most of Russian territory was off-limits to Westerners, regional specialists say there is no shortage of expertise among academics and in the business community today. But it has so far gone untapped.

“There is a good supply of Russia experts out there – people who have lived there with lots of good experience – but the demand has just not been there from government,” says Fiona Hill, U.S. national intelligence officer for Russia in 2006-9 and now director for the Centre for the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution.

“The Pentagon in particular has lost a lot of its Russia expertise, as has the White House.”

More of those outside experts are now likely to find work in defence ministries and intelligence agencies, current and former officials say. But in an era of constrained budgets, focusing on Russia is likely to mean redeploying resources from elsewhere.

Until the Ukraine crisis that did not seem a natural choice, people with knowledge of internal discussions say.

“The main problem is one of capacity at a time when counterterrorism, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Arab awakening have taken up so much energy,” said one former Western intelligence officer on condition of anonymity.

Russia is primarily a threat to its immediate neighbourhood only, officials and analysts say, but still one requiring greater vigilance that over the last two decades.

“THOSE WHO KNOW MOST WORRY”

Capacity alone is far from everything. The West’s legions of Soviet specialists, with few exceptions, missed the warning signs of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.

Still, officials and analysts say there is a growing feeling that the West should have done more to increase its Russia focus particularly as Moscow’s defence spending rose some 30 percent after its 2008 war with Georgia.

“The people who know the most about Russia’s defence capability have tended to take it the most seriously,” says former Pentagon official Elbridge Colby, now a senior fellow at the Centre for a New American Security.

Some central and east European and Nordic states have long focused much if not all of their intelligence and defence resources on Russia. Poland and Sweden in particular are seen leading the pack. Others are now catching up.

One reason Washington and its allies were so surprised by events in Crimea was that during Russia’s military build-up in the region, there was little or no signals chatter indicating an imminent takeover, intelligence sources say.

Still, Moscow had very publicly mobilised its forces several days earlier ostensibly for an exercise. That such obvious clues were missed, some say, suggests analysts had lost their edge in assessing and predicting the actions of the Russian leadership.

While U.S. officials are now monitoring closely a Russian troop build-up along Ukraine’s eastern border, Western experts differ over whether Putin plans to invade the region.

SPY RING, SPYWARE

For the United States, two espionage incidents in the last decade helped draw counterintelligence attention back to Moscow’s suspected activities.

The first was the 2008 discovery of sophisticated spy software dubbed Agent BTZ that infected Department of Defence computers after apparently entering from a USB drive later found in the car park of a U.S. military base in the Middle East.

Pentagon officials spent months cleaning systems and the attack is still seen one of the most serious breaches of U.S. government IT security. Although Washington never officially laid blame for the intrusion, several US officials told Reuters on condition of anonymity that Moscow was the prime suspect.

Much higher profile was the 2010 arrest and expulsion of 10 “deep cover” spies in the United States including Anna Chapman, who became a Russian television presenter and celebrity. That followed information from a Russian defector and a major FBI investigation. There is little evidence the spies were hugely successful.

In Britain, security agencies began paying more attention to Russia after the 2007 death of Putin opponent Alexander Litvinenko from radioactive poisoning.

Until recently, however, military intelligence specialists were simply too busy with operations in the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Russia’s Crimea annexation may revive military specialisms such as tank and submarine warfare neglected during the decade-long campaign in mountainous, landlocked Afghanistan.

“Antisubmarine warfare is something that has been far too sidelined for the simple reason that the Taliban do not have submarines,” said one former senior European officer.

Some of the problems in understanding Russia, however, may be societal rather than military.

“For a country that is so patriotic, we can be highly intolerant of others’ patriotism,” former Pentagon official Colby said of the United States. “We just don’t see their patriotism as particularly legitimate.”

BY PETER APPS
LONDON Mon Apr 7, 2014 1:35pm BST
(Reporting by Peter Apps; Editing by Paul Taylor)

Find this story at 7 April 2014

Copyright Thomson Reuters

One afternoon in September 1987, Secretary of State George Shultz settled in a chair across the table from Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze in a New York conference room. Both were in the city for the United Nations General Assembly.

As he habitually did at the start of such meetings , Shultz handed Shevardnadze a list of reported human rights abuses in the Soviet Union. Shevardnadze’s predecessor, Andrei Gromyko, had always received such lists grudgingly and would lecture us for interfering in Soviet internal affairs.

This time, though, Shevardnadze looked Shultz in the eye and said through his interpreter: “George, I will check this out, and if your information is correct, I will do what I can to correct the problem. But I want you to know one thing: I am not doing this because you ask me to; I am doing it because it is what my country needs to do.”

Shultz replied: “Eduard, that’s the only reason either of us should do something. Let me assure you that I will never ask you to do something that I believe is not in your country’s interest.”

They stood and shook hands. As I watched the scene, with as much emotion as amazement, it dawned on me that the Cold War was over. The job of American ambassador in Moscow was going to be a lot easier for me than it had been for my predecessors.

I thought back to that moment as talks between Secretary of State John Kerry and Russia’s top diplomat this past week failed to resolve the crisis in Ukraine. It’s striking that the language being used publicly now is so much more strident than our language, public or private, was then. “It can get ugly fast if the wrong choices are made,” Kerry declared Wednesday, threatening sanctions.

I don’t believe that we are witnessing a renewal of the Cold War. The tensions between Russia and the West are based more on misunderstandings, misrepresentations and posturing for domestic audiences than on any real clash of ideologies or national interests. And the issues are far fewer and much less dangerous than those we dealt with during the Cold War.

But a failure to appreciate how the Cold War ended has had a profound impact on Russian and Western attitudes — and helps explain what we are seeing now.

The common assumption that the West forced the collapse of the Soviet Union and thus won the Cold War is wrong . The fact is that the Cold War ended by negotiation to the advantage of both sides.

At the December 1989 Malta summit, Mikhail Gorbachev and President George H.W. Bush confirmed that the ideological basis for the war was gone, stating that the two nations no longer regarded each other as enemies . Over the next two years, we worked more closely with the Soviets than with even some of our allies. Together, we halted the arms race, banned chemical weapons and agreed to drastically reduce nuclear weapons. I also witnessed the raising of the Iron Curtain, the liberation of Eastern Europe and the voluntary abandonment of communist ideology by the Soviet leader. Without an arms race ruining the Soviet economy and perpetuating totalitarianism, Gorbachev was freed to focus on internal reforms.

Because the collapse of the Soviet Union happened so soon afterward, people often confuse it with the end of the Cold War. But they were separate events, and the former was not an inevitable outcome of the latter.

Moreover, the breakup of the U.S.S.R. into 15 separate countries was not something the United States caused or wanted. We hoped that Gorbachev would forge a voluntary union of Soviet republics, minus the three Baltic countries. Bush made this clear in August 1991 when he urged the non-Russian Soviet republics to adopt the union treaty Gorbachev had proposed and warned against “suicidal nationalism.” Russians who regret the collapse of the Soviet Union should remember that it was the elected leader of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, who conspired with his Ukrainian and Belarusian counterparts to replace the U.S.S.R. with a loose and powerless “commonwealth.”

Even after the U.S.S.R. ceased to exist, Gorbachev maintained that “the end of the Cold War is our common victory.” Yet the United States insisted on treating Russia as the loser.

“By the grace of God, America won the Cold War,” Bush said during his 1992 State of the Union address. That rhetoric would not have been particularly damaging on its own. But it was reinforced by actions taken under the next three presidents.

President Bill Clinton supported NATO’s bombing of Serbia without U.N. Security Council approval and the expansion of NATO to include former Warsaw Pact countries. Those moves seemed to violate the understanding that the United States would not take advantage of the Soviet retreat from Eastern Europe. The effect on Russians’ trust in the United States was devastating. In 1991, polls indicated that about 80 percent of Russian citizens had a favorable view of the United States; in 1999, nearly the same percentage had an unfavorable view.

Vladi­mir Putin was elected in 2000 and initially followed a pro-Western orientation. When terrorists attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, he was the first foreign leader to call and offer support. He cooperated with the United States when it invaded Afghanistan, and he voluntarily removed Russian bases from Cuba and Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam.

What did he get in return? Some meaningless praise from President George W. Bush, who then delivered the diplomatic equivalent of swift kicks to the groin: further expansion of NATO in the Baltics and the Balkans, and plans for American bases there; withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; invasion of Iraq without U.N. Security Council approval; overt participation in the “color revolutions” in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan; and then, probing some of the firmest red lines any Russian leader would draw, talk of taking Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. Americans, heritors of the Monroe Doctrine, should have understood that Russia would be hypersensitive to foreign-dominated military alliances approaching or touching its borders.

President Obama famously attempted a “reset” of relations with Russia, with some success: The New START treaty was an important achievement, and there was increased quiet cooperation on a number of regional issues. But then Congress’s penchant for minding other people’s business when it cannot cope with its own began to take its toll. The Magnitsky Act , which singled out Russia for human rights violations as if there were none of comparable gravity elsewhere, infuriated Russia’s rulers and confirmed with the broader public the image of the United States as an implacable enemy.

The sad fact is that the cycle of dismissive actions by the United States met by overreactions by Russia has so poisoned the relationship that the sort of quiet diplomacy used to end the Cold War was impossible when the crisis in Ukraine burst upon the world’s consciousness. It’s why 43 percent of Russians are ready to believe that Western actions are behind the crisis and that Russia is under siege.

Putin’s military occupation of Crimea has exacerbated the situation. If it leads to the incorporation of Crimea in the Russian Federation , it may well result in a period of mutual recrimination and economic sanctions reminiscent of the Cold War. In that scenario, there would be no winners, only losers: most of all Ukraine itself, which may not survive in its present form, and Russia, which would become more isolated. Russia may also see a rise in terrorist acts from anti-Russian extremists on its periphery and more resistance from neighboring governments to membership in the economic union it is promoting.

Meanwhile, the United States and Europe would lose to the extent that a resentful Russia would make it even more difficult to address global and regional issues such as the Iranian nuclear program, North Korea and the Syrian civil war, to name a few. Russian policy in these areas has not always been all the United States desired, but it has been more helpful than many Americans realize. And encouraging a more obstructive Russia is not in anyone’s interest.

By Jack F. Matlock Jr.,

Jack F. Matlock Jr., ambassador to the U.S.S.R. from 1987 to 1991, is the author of “Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended.”

Find this story at 14 March 2014

© The Washington Post Company

The standoff over Ukraine and the fate of Crimea has sparked the worst East-West crisis since the end of the Cold War. The U.S. has imposed sanctions on top Russian officials while announcing new military exercises in Baltic states. Meanwhile in Moscow, the Russian government says it is considering changing its stance on Iran’s nuclear talks in response to newly imposed U.S. sanctions. As tensions rise, we are joined by Jack Matlock, who served as the last U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. Matlock argues that Russian President Vladimir Putin is acting in response to years of perceived hostility from the U.S., from the eastward expansion of NATO to the bombing of Serbia to the expansion of American military bases in eastern Europe.

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

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The Ukrainian government has announced plans to abandon its military bases in Crimea and evacuate its forces following Russia’s decision to annex the region. Earlier today, Russian forces reportedly released the commander of the Ukrainian Navy, who has been seized in his own headquarters in Crimea. At the United Nations, ambassadors sparred over the situation in Crimea. Yuriy Sergeyev is the Ukrainian ambassador to the U.N.

YURIY SERGEYEV: The declaration of independence by the Crimean Republic is a direct consequence of the application of the use of force and threats against Ukraine by the Russian Federation, and, in view of Russian nuclear power status, has a particularly dangerous character for Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity, as well as for international peace and security in general. Accordingly, I assert that on the basis of customary norms and international law, that the international community is obliged not to recognize Crimea as a subject of international law or any situation, treaty or agreement that may be arise or be achieved by this territory.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, defended Moscow’s move to annex Crimea.

VITALY CHURKIN: [translated] A historic injustice has been righted, which resulted from the arbitrary actions of the leader of the U.S.S.R. at the time, Nikita Khrushchev, who, with the stroke of a pen in 1954, in violation of the constitutional norms, transferred the Russian region of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which was part of the same state then. And he did this without informing the population of Crimea and, of course, without their consent. And nobody cared about the views of the Crimeans.
AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, on Wednesday, the U.S. Navy warship, the Truxtun, a U.S. guided-missile destroyer, conducted a one-day military exercise in the Black Sea with the Bulgarian and Romanian navies. And Vice President Joe Biden has been meeting this week with the heads of states of Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, promising Washington would protect them from any Russian aggression. On Wednesday, President Obama addressed the crisis during an interview with NBC 7 San Diego.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We are not going to be getting into a military excursion in Ukraine. What we are going to do is mobilize all of our diplomatic resources to make sure that we’ve got a strong international coalition that sends a clear message, which is: The Ukraine should decide their own destiny. Russia, right now, is violating international law and the sovereignty of another country. You know, might doesn’t make right. And, you know, we are going to continue to ratchet up the pressure on Russia as it continues down its current course.
AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about the growing crisis in Ukraine, we’re joined by Ambassador Jack Matlock. He served as U.S. ambassador to Moscow from 1987 to 1991. He’s the author of several books, including Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended. He recently wrote a column for The Washington Post headlined “The U.S. Has Treated Russia Like a Loser Since the End of the Cold War.”

Ambassador Matlock, welcome to Democracy Now! Talk about the situation right now, what has just taken place, Ukraine now pulling out of Crimea.

JACK MATLOCK JR.: Well, I think that what we have seen is a reaction, in many respects, to a long history of what the Russian government, the Russian president and many of the Russian people—most of them—feel has been a pattern of American activity that has been hostile to Russia and has simply disregarded their national interests. They feel that having thrown off communism, having dispensed with the Soviet Empire, that the U.S. systematically, from the time it started expanding NATO to the east, without them, and then using NATO to carry out what they consider offensive actions about an—against another country—in this case, Serbia—a country which had not attacked any NATO member, and then detached territory from it—this is very relevant now to what we’re seeing happening in Crimea—and then continued to place bases in these countries, to move closer and closer to borders, and then to talk of taking Ukraine, most of whose people didn’t want to be a member of NATO, into NATO, and Georgia. Now, this began an intrusion into an area which the Russians are very sensitive. Now, how would Americans feel if some Russian or Chinese or even West European started putting bases in Mexico or in the Caribbean, or trying to form governments that were hostile to us? You know, we saw how we virtually went ballistic over Cuba. And I think that we have not been very attentive to what it takes to have a harmonious relationship with Russia.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Ambassador Matlock, Americans often look at these crises in isolation, and some of the press coverage deals with them that way. But from your perspective, you argued that we should see the continuum of events that have happened from the Russian point of view—for instance, the Orange Revolution, the pronouncements of some of our leaders several years back, the crisis in Georgia a few years ago, and how the Russians are seeing the original good feeling that most Russians had toward the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Union compared to now.

JACK MATLOCK JR.: Yes, that’s absolutely true. You see, in the Orange Revolution in Kiev, foreigners, including Americans, were very active in organizing people and inspiring them. Now, you know, I have to ask Americans: How would Occupy Wall Street have looked if you had foreigners out there leading them? Do you think that would have helped them get their point across? I don’t think so. And I think we have to understand that when we start directly interfering, particularly our government officials, in the internal makeup of other governments, we’re really asking for trouble.

And, you know, we were pretty careful not to do that in my day. And I recall, for example, when I was being consulted by the newly elected leaders of what was still Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania. They were still in the Soviet Union, and they would come to us. We were, of course, sympathetic to their independence; we had never even recognized that they were legally part of the Soviet Union. But I had to tell them, “Keep it peaceful. If you are suppressed, there’s nothing we can do about it. We cannot come and help you. We’re not going to start a nuclear war.” Well, they kept it peaceful, despite provocations.

Now, what have we been telling the Ukrainians, the Georgians—at least some of us, officials? “Just hold on. You can join NATO, and that will solve your problems for you.” You know, and yet, it is that very prospect, that the United States and its European allies were trying to surround Russia with hostile bases, that has raised the emotional temperature of all these things. And that was a huge mistake. As George Kennan wrote back in the ’90s when this question came up, the decision to expand NATO the way it was done was one of the most fateful and bad decisions of the late 20th century.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to Vice President Joe Biden, who criticized Russia recently during his trip to Lithuania Wednesday.

VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I want to make it clear: We stand resolutely with our Baltic allies in support of Ukrainian people and against Russian aggression. As long as Russia continues on this dark path, they will face increasing political and economic isolation. There are those who say that this action shows the old rules still apply. But Russia cannot escape the fact that the world is changing and rejecting outright their behavior.
AMY GOODMAN: And in a speech Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin blasted what he called Western hypocrisy on Crimea, saying that the U.S. selectively applies international law according to its political interests.

PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN: [translated] Our Western partners, headed by the United States of America, prefer in their practical policy to be guided not by international law, but by the right of the strong. They started to believe that they have been chosen and they are unique, that they are allowed to decide the fate of the world, that only they could always be right. They do whatever they want
AMY GOODMAN: Ambassador Jack Matlock, if you could respond to both Biden and Putin?

JACK MATLOCK JR.: Well, I think that this rhetoric on both sides is being very unhelpful. The fact is, Russia now has returned Crimea to Russia. It has been, most of its recent history, in the last couple of centuries, been Russian. The majority of the people are Russian. They clearly would prefer to be in Russia. And the bottom line is, we can argue ’til doomsday over who did what and why and who was the legal and who was not—I’m sure historians generations from now will still be arguing it—but the fact is, Russia now is not going to give up Crimea. The fact also is, if you really look at it dispassionately, Ukraine is better off without Crimea, because Ukraine is divided enough as it is. Their big problem is internal, in putting together disparate people who have been put together in that country. The distraction of Crimea, where most of the people did not want to be in Ukraine and ended up in Ukraine as a result of really almost a bureaucratic whim, is—was, I think, a real liability for Ukraine.

Now, the—we should be concentrating now on how we put Ukraine back together—not we, but the Ukrainians, with the help of the Europeans, with the help of the Russians, and with at least a benign view from the United States. Now, the American president and vice president directly challenging the Russian president and threatening them with isolation is going to bring the opposite effect. All of this has actually increased President Putin’s popularity among Russians. Now, you know, most politicians, they like to do things that make them more popular at home. And, you know, the idea that we are acting, you know, contrary to what Russians would consider their very natural interests—that is, in bringing an area which had been Russian and traditionally Russian for a long time back into Russia—they look at that as a good thing. It’s going to be very costly to Russia, they’re going to find out, in many ways. But to continue all of this rhetoric, I would ask, well, how is it going to end? What is your objective? Because it isn’t going to free up Crimea again or give it back to Ukraine.

I think it would be most helpful to encourage the Ukrainians to form a united government that can begin reforms. The proposals before, both by the EU and by Russia, would not have solved their problems. And they are not going to solve the problems by taking a government that basically represents one half of the country and making it work on the whole country. And all of this interference, both by Russia and by the West, including the United States, has tended to split Ukraine. Now, that is the big issue there. And we need to turn our attention more to it. And I just hope everyone can calm down and look at realities and stop trying to start sort of a new Cold War over this. As compared to the issues of the Cold War, this is quite minor. It has many of the characteristics of a family dispute. And when outsiders get into a family dispute, they’re usually not very helpful.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Ambassador Matlock, what would you, if you were counseling the president, urge him to do at this stage? Because obviously there are these pretty weak sanctions that have so far been announced. What would your advice be?

JACK MATLOCK JR.: Well, I think, first of all, we should start keeping our voice down and sort of let things work out. You know, to ship in military equipment and so on is just going to be a further provocation. Obviously, this is not something that’s going to be solved by military confrontations. So, I think if we can find a way to speak less in public, to use more quiet diplomacy—and right now, frankly, the relationships between our presidents are so poisonous, they really should have representatives who can quietly go and, you know, work with counterparts elsewhere.

But fundamentally, it’s going to be the Ukrainians who have to put their society back together. It is seriously broken now. And it seems to me they could take a leaf from the Finns, who have been very successful ever since World War II in putting together a country with both Finns and Swedes, by treating them equally, by being very respectful and careful about their relations with Russia, never getting into—anymore into military struggles or allowing foreign bases on their land. And they’ve been extremely successful. Why can’t the Ukrainians follow a policy of that sort? I think, for them, it would work, too. But first, they have to find a way to unite the disparate elements in Ukraine; otherwise, these pressures from Russia, on the one hand, and the West, on the other, is going to simply tear them apart. Now—

AMY GOODMAN: Ambassador, on Wednesday—

JACK MATLOCK JR.: —in the final analysis, if the—

AMY GOODMAN: On Wednesday, the head of Ukraine’s First National TV was attacked in his office by members of the far-right Svoboda party, including at least one member of Parliament who serves on the parliamentary committee on freedom of speech. The attackers accused the station of working for the Russian authorities, after it aired a live broadcast of the signing of the agreement between President Putin and the de facto Crimean authorities. In a video posted online, the attackers are seen forcing the head of the channel to write a resignation letter. Heather McGill of Amnesty International condemned the attack, saying, quote, “The acting Ukrainian authorities must waste no time in demonstrating that basic human rights are protected in Ukraine and that nobody will face discrimination because of their political views or ethnic origin.” Ambassador Matlock, can you talk about this attack and the role of these far-right-wing parties in the new Ukrainian government?

JACK MATLOCK JR.: Well, I’m not intimately informed about all of the details, but—and I would say that I think Russian media have exaggerated that right-wing threat. On the other hand, those who have ignored it, I think, are making a big mistake. We do have to understand that a significant part of the violence at the Maidan, the demonstrations in Kiev, were done by these extreme right-wing, sort of neo-fascist groups. And they do—some of their leaders do occupy prominent positions in the security forces of the new government. And I think—I think the Russians and others are quite legitimately concerned about that. Therefore, you know, many of these things are not nearly as black and white, when we begin to look at them, as is implied in much of the rhetoric that we’re hearing. And I do think that everybody needs now to take a quiet breath to really look at where we are and to see if we can’t find ways, by keeping our voices down, to help the Ukrainians in present-day Ukraine to get to a road to greater unity and reform that will make them a viable state.

AMY GOODMAN: Jack Matlock, we want to thank—

JACK MATLOCK JR.: And I would argue that—

AMY GOODMAN: We want to—

JACK MATLOCK JR.: —they are better off without Crimea.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you very much for being with us. Ambassador Matlock served as the U.S. ambassador—

JACK MATLOCK JR.: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: —to Moscow from 1987 to 1991 under both President Reagan and President George H.W. Bush, and he’s the author of a number of books, including Superpower Illusions and Autopsy on an Empire: The American Ambassador’s Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended.

When we come back, we’ll be joined by Raphael Warnock, the minister of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King’s church. He was among 39 people arrested this week in Atlanta. Stay with us.

Creative Commons License The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

THURSDAY, MARCH 20, 2014

Find this story at 20 March 2014

Washington’s role in the fascist putsch against an elected government in Ukraine will surprise only those who watch the news and ignore the historical record. Since 1945, dozens of governments, many of them democracies, have met a similar fate, usually with bloodshed.

Nicaragua is one of the poorest countries on earth with fewer people than Wales, yet under the reformist Sandinistas in the 1980s it was regarded in Washington as a “strategic threat”. The logic was simple; if the weakest slipped the leash, setting an example, who else would try their luck?

The great game of dominance offers no immunity for even the most loyal US “ally”. This is demonstrated by perhaps the least known of Washington’s coups – in Australia. The story of this forgotten coup is a salutary lesson for those governments that believe a “Ukraine” or a “Chile” could never happen to them.

Australia’s deference to the United States makes Britain, by comparison, seem a renegade. During the American invasion of Vietnam – which Australia had pleaded to join – an official in Canberra voiced a rare complaint to Washington that the British knew more about US objectives in that war than its antipodean comrade-in-arms. The response was swift: “We have to keep the Brits informed to keep them happy. You are with us come what may.”

This dictum was rudely set aside in 1972 with the election of the reformist Labor government of Gough Whitlam. Although not regarded as of the left, Whitlam – now in his 98th year – was a maverick social democrat of principle, pride, propriety and extraordinary political imagination. He believed that a foreign power should not control his country’s resources and dictate its economic and foreign policies. He proposed to “buy back the farm” and speak as a voice independent of London and Washington.

On the day after his election, Whitlam ordered that his staff should not be “vetted or harassed” by the Australian security organisation, ASIO – then, as now, beholden to Anglo-American intelligence. When his ministers publicly condemned the Nixon/Kissinger administration as “corrupt and barbaric”, Frank Snepp, a CIA officer stationed in Saigon at the time, said later: “We were told the Australians might as well be regarded as North Vietnamese collaborators.”

Whitlam demanded to know if and why the CIA was running a spy base at Pine Gap near Alice Springs, ostensibly a joint Australian/US “facility”. Pine Gap is a giant vacuum cleaner which, as the whistleblower Edward Snowden recently revealed, allows the US to spy on everyone. In the 1970s, most Australians had no idea that this secretive foreign enclave placed their country on the front line of a potential nuclear war with the Soviet Union.  Whitlam clearly knew the personal risk he was taking – as the minutes of a meeting with the US ambassador demonstrate. “Try to screw us or bounce us,” he warned, “[and Pine Gap] will become a matter of contention”.

Victor Marchetti, the CIA officer who had helped set up Pine Gap, later told me, “This threat to close Pine Gap caused apoplexy in the White House. Consequences were inevitable… a kind of Chile was set in motion.”

The CIA had just helped General Pinochet to crush the democratic government of another reformer, Salvador Allende, in Chile.

In 1974, the White House sent the Marshall Green to Canberra as ambassador. Green was an imperious, very senior and sinister figure in the State Department who worked in the shadows of America’s “deep state”. Known as the “coupmaster”, he had played a played a central role in the 1965 coup against President Sukarno in Indonesia – which cost up to a million lives. One of his first speeches in Australia was to the Australian Institute of Directors – described by an alarmed member of the audience as “an incitement to the country’s business leaders to  rise against the government”.

Pine Gap’s top-secret messages were de-coded in California by a CIA contractor, TRW. One of the de-coders was a young Christopher Boyce, an idealist who, troubled by the “deception and betrayal of an ally”, became a whistleblower. Boyce revealed that the CIA had infiltrated the Australian political and trade union elite and referred to the Governor-General of Australia, Sir John Kerr, as “our man Kerr”.

In his black top hat and medal-laden mourning suit, Kerr was the embodiment of imperium. He was the Queen of England’s Australian viceroy in a country that still recognised her as head of state. His duties were ceremonial; yet Whitlam – who appointed him – was unaware of or chose to ignore Kerr’s long-standing ties to Anglo-American intelligence.

The Governor-General was an enthusiastic member of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, described by the Jonathan Kwitny of the Wall Street Journal in his book, ‘The Crimes of Patriots’, as, “an elite, invitation-only group… exposed in Congress as being founded, funded and generally run by the CIA”. The CIA “paid for Kerr’s travel, built his prestige… Kerr continued to go to the CIA for money”.

In 1975, Whitlam discovered that Britain’s MI6 had long been operating against his government. “The Brits were actually de-coding secret messages coming into my foreign affairs office,” he said later. One of his ministers, Clyde Cameron, told me, “We knew MI6 was bugging Cabinet meetings for the Americans.” In interviews in the 1980s with the American investigative journalist Joseph Trento, executive officers of the CIA disclosed that the “Whitlam problem” had been discussed “with urgency” by the CIA’s director, William Colby, and the head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield, and that “arrangements” were made. A deputy director of the CIA told Trento: “Kerr did what he was told to do.”

In 1975, Whitlam learned of a secret list of CIA personnel in Australia held by the Permanent Head of the Australian Defence Department, Sir Arthur Tange – a deeply conservative mandarin with unprecedented territorial power in Canberra. Whitlam demanded to see the list. On it was the name, Richard Stallings who, under cover, had set up Pine Gap as a provocative CIA installation. Whitlam now had the proof he was looking for.

On 10 November, 1975, he was shown a top secret telex message sent by ASIO in Washington. This was later sourced to Theodore Shackley, head of the CIA’s East Asia Division and one of the most notorious figures spawned by the Agency. Shackley had been head of the CIA’s Miami-based operation to assassinate Fidel Castro and Station Chief in Laos and Vietnam. He had recently worked on the “Allende problem”.

Shackley’s message was read to Whitlam. Incredibly, it said that the prime minister of Australia was a security risk in his own country.

The day before, Kerr had visited the headquarters of the Defence Signals Directorate, Australia’s NSA whose ties to Washington were, and reman binding. He was briefed on the “security crisis”. He had then asked for a secure line and spent 20 minutes in hushed conversation.

On 11 November – the day Whitlam was to inform Parliament about the secret CIA presence in Australia – he was summoned by Kerr. Invoking archaic vice-regal “reserve powers”, Kerr sacked the democratically elected prime minister. The problem was solved.

John Pilger
16 March 2014

Find this story at 16 March 2014

© John Pilger 2010 – 2014