The National Intelligence Service (NIS) is now taking the center stage in the controversy over the Northern Limit Line (NLL) in the West Sea of Korea, as the real the origin of all disputes. As the search for 2007 North-South Summit Minutes at the Presidential Archives finally ended in vain, the full text kept by the NIS has practically become the ‘only copy’ at present.

It means that the sources of current and recent debates must have been exposed by the NIS.
Suspicion seems to be turning into certainty: it seems now almost certain that the NIS leaked the ‘minutes’ material, which has been allegedly used by then-candidate Park Geun-hye’s campaign in the 2012 presidential election. The current situation tells us that the NIS is the one and only source of the information on NLL, which has been shared among and used by the ruling party in its political attacks last year.

Right before the 2012 presidential election, the ruling Saenuri Party strengthened its attacks regarding former President Roh Moo-hyun’s alleged ‘remarks on abandoning the NLL.’ On October 8, 2012, at National Assembly inspection on the Foreign Affairs and Unification Committee, Rep. Chung Moon-hun disclosed that there existed confidential minutes. According to him, “Former President Roh said, ‘The NLL is a trouble for us. It is a line arbitrarily drawn by the United States in its efforts to win more territories뻞ence the South will not claim the NLL in the future.'”

A voice-recording file containing the words by Kwon Young-se, ambassador to China and former chief of campaign operations for Park Geun-hye, was unburied. In this voice-recording on December 10 last year, Kwon said, “It is no problem to get the material [minutes]. The source [of the material] will be either Cheong Wa Dae or the NIS. And we will open [go public with] it once we come to power.”

Rep. Kim Moo-sung, former director of Park’s campaign, made a comment in this regard while canvassing in Busan on December 14: “Former President Roh said, ‘Regarding the NLL issue, there is no evidence in terms of international law; nor is there any logical ground. This is not a constitutional matter, either.'” Rep. Kim’s expressions exactly correspond to the full text revealed by the NIS, to almost every letter and punctuation.

All these circumstances demonstrate the possibility that the minutes leaked before the presidential election last year, to be used by Park’s campaign.

A high level official of the ruling party also gave a statement on what happened prior to 2012: “Cheong Wa Dae under Lee Myung-bak government was reported of the full text of the minutes in 2009 and the excerpts in 2010, by the NIS.”

At the National Assembly inspection on the Office of President conducted on October 25 last year, Chun Young-woo, then-presidential secretary of foreign affairs and national security gave a testimony, which can be summed up as the following: “Two years ago, not long after I was appointed to be the presidential secretary [in October 2010], I have seen [the minutes maintained by the NIS].”

Suspicion gets stronger here: no matter what channel they went through, the minutes managed by the NIS must have been disclosed and then transferred to the presidential election campaign organized by the Saenuri Party.

This is why the opposition parties are looking at the NIS from a new angle, for being behind the leakage of the minutes at the time of 2012 election and behind the ruling party’s consequent political assails.

Rep. Park Ji-won of the opposition Democratic Party had an interview on the SBS radio on July 23 and said, “In the first place, the real problem is that the record in the custody of the NIS has leaked during the presidential election, to be taken advantage of by the Saenuri Party in the campaign.”

Rep. Jung Chung-rae, the opposition secretary in the Special Committee of the National Assembly Inspection, remarked, “We can determine later whether [the minutes kept by the Presidential Archives] is really absent or just evaded our search this time. What became clear now is the fact that the one and only source of leakage is none other than the NIS.” He added, “Nam Jae-joon, director of the NIS also said that the NIS version is the original and authentic copy. What [Reps.] Chung Moon-hun and Kim Moo-sung read must have been revealed to them by the NIS. This issue will be closely examined at the special committee of the national assembly.”

By Kim Jin-woo, Shim Hye-ri
Posted on : 2013-07-24 10:24

Find this story at 24 July 2013

Copyright (C)1996-2014 Kyunghyang Shinmun

During last year’s presidential election, a team of South Korean intelligence agents allegedly flooded the Internet with several thousand political comments, including some describing left-leaning candidates as North Korea sympathizers.

Then, while that scandal has continued to play out, another drama has unfolded, as the spy agency last month declassified a 2007 transcript that showed then-president Roh Moo-hyun, a liberal, pressing to create a peace zone along a maritime border disputed with the North.

Conservative lawmakers say the transcript proves Roh preferred to cooperate with Pyongyang than protect security. Liberal lawmakers say the spy agency, instead, was manufacturing one controversy to distract from the other.

The two events are convoluted, but both have dominated headlines for weeks in the South. They also have a common thread: South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS), which some analysts here say has turned into a political provocateur, using its power to champion conservative causes and widen a partisan divide.

Because of its Stalinist neighbor, the South has long defined itself along Cold War lines, with political ideology here linked in part to one’s sentiment about the North. But in the 2012 election, that had appeared to be changing. On the campaign trail, conservative Park Geun-hye and liberal Moon Jae-in shared similar visions for social spending and tentative engagement with the North. When Park won by 3 percentage points, she vowed to unify the nation.

Silence on spy agency

In the six months since her victory, that hasn’t happened, and Park’s opponents criticise her for staying quiet about the spy agency’s actions, rather than condemning them.

Only in late June did she first discuss the alleged election-meddling – the first parts of which came to light last December – saying she had was neither connected to nor a beneficiary of the agency’s potential misdeeds.

“I don’t think this allegation puts her legitimacy in question,” said Kang Won-Taek, a right-leaning professor of political science at Seoul National University. “How many people’s opinions could have been affected by some Internet postings? But it’s true that it’s not a pretty scene for Park” to deal with.

Her approval rating remains high – above 60 percent, according to most polls. But opposition lawmakers have seized on the election-tampering charges to raise questions about Park’s victory, and small groups of protesters have gathered in recent days in cities across South Korea to demand an investigation and a greater response from Park.

The NIS, South Korea’s version of the CIA, is supposed to remain politically neutral. But prosecutors say its former leader, Won Sei-hoon, indicted last month on charges of election meddling, believed that “leftist followers of North Korea” were trying to regain power in the South.

He ordered his agents to post comments not only criticising Park’s opponents, but also lauding Park, prosecutors say. Won resigned earlier this year, having served under the previous president, Lee Myung-bak. If found guilty, Won would face as long as five years in jail.

“It is grave – a big deal. It’s all about dividing the country into two parts – the patriots, and those who sympathise with North Korea,” said Pyo Chang-won, who hosts a current affairs Internet television show and has spoken at protests. “The NIS is supposed to be politically neutral, but it has used its intelligence force to attack half the nation.”

Left-leaning lawmakers say the problems at the NIS have continued under Won’s successor, Nam Jae-joon, who they say unilaterally released a document that shouldn’t have been made public for decades.

At a closed-door meeting of the National Assembly’s intelligence committee, Nam was grilled about the release, according to South Korean media, and asked whether he had any intention to resign. (He said he didn’t.)

Dubious history

South Korea’s intelligence agency has gone by several names since the Korean War 60 years ago, but it has a dubious history.

Former authoritarian leader Park Chung-hee, who seized power in a 1961 military coup, used the agency as a tool to crack down on student protests. In 1979, Park was assassinated by his own spy chief.

After South Korea’s democratisation in the late-1980s, the agency officially became apolitical. But opponents say the agency is now helping Park Geun-hye in much the way it helped Park Chung-hee, her father. Monday, the Hankyoreh, South Korea’s major liberal newspaper, printed a cartoon showing Park, in a military outfit, surrounded by cronies holding computer keyboards and mouses.

The image was modeled after a photo of Park Chung-hee, flanked by top military officials, after his coup.

Analysts say the alleged election tampering is far more serious than the debate about the 2007 transcript. But that controversy, too, has provided weeks of fodder for South Koreans.

Touchy issue

The transcript showed the conversation between Roh and then-North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Il during a summit meeting in Pyongyang. Interest in the specifics of what Roh told Kim dated back to last year, when some conservative lawmakers suggested that Roh had offered to surrender parts of South Korean maritime territory in an undisciplined effort to make peace with the North. The charge was potent, because the liberal running for president last year, Moon, had once served as Roh’s chief of staff.

According to the transcript, while discussing the maritime border, Roh said that it “should change.” But he also said, presciently, that the issue was touchy. “The problem is that whenever the [maritime border] is mentioned, everyone rises and make noises like a swarm bees,” Roh said.

In the closest she’s come to taking a side on the issue, Park, one day after the transcript’s release, told her cabinet that the South should never forget the “blood and deaths” that occurred in defense of that border.

Published: July 8, 2013 – 11:43AM

Find this story at 8 July 2013

Copyright © 2014 Fairfax Media

In one of the latest revelations based on the leaks of Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency spied on foreign governments before and during the 2009 U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen. An internal NSA document says its analysts and foreign partners briefed U.S. negotiators on other countries’ “preparations and goals,” saying, “signals intelligence will undoubtedly play a significant role in keeping our negotiators as well informed as possible throughout the two-week event.” We speak to Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth.
Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. We’re still joined by Erich Pica of Friends of the Earth USA. Erich, I wanted to ask you about the recent reports that the National Security Agency spied on foreign governments before and during the 2009 U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen. An internal NSA document says its analysts and foreign partners briefed U.S. negotiators on other countries’ preparations and goals, saying, quote, “signals intelligence will undoubtedly play a significant role in keeping our negotiators as well informed as possible throughout the two-week event.” Your response?

ERICH PICA: Shocking, but not surprised, as we hear more and more about what the National Security Agency has been doing. You know, the 2009 climate talks in Copenhagen was supposed to be this convening of the world leaders to take us into the future of climate negotiations and carbon pollution reductions. And, you know, the United States, throughout those negotiations, had a smug reality to their negotiating stance and was—can be blamed for the collapse of those talks. And kind of hearing through the Snowden documents that NSA was spying on the countries and the negotiators kind of explains many things about why those talks collapsed, because it seems that the United States wasn’t really interested in negotiating just like other countries should be. They were just interested in listening to what was going on.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain the significance of those talks. I remember very well in Copenhagen when Friends of the Earth was kicked out.

ERICH PICA: Yeah, no, we were—we were kicked out for protesting within the U.N. confines. And so, those talks, you know, those 2009 talks, were really about how does the world come together to solve this great issue, which is how to reduce our carbon pollution and save the planet and our society from global warming. And, you know, a lot of countries from around the world, and heads of state, more importantly, came to Copenhagen to try to hammer out an agreement that would have taken us into the future over the next 20 years. And unfortunately, the United States led the—you know, several countries, including Canada, who we were just talking about, in basically destroying the goodwill that these talks had created, to the point where we’ve been now in these negotiations over the last four years, which have really gone nowhere.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you expect from the coming talks? We’ve just come out of Warsaw. Then they’re moving on to Lima, and the binding discussion is supposed to take place in Paris, France, in 2015.

ERICH PICA: Yeah, in Paris. Yeah, well, it’s not a good sign when you’re trying to build trust with other negotiators, other countries, and it comes out that, you know, the United States was spying on those negotiations. There’s already been a level of mistrust and distrust between the United States and countries around the world, particularly those developing countries. And so, you know, where we’re going in Paris, who knows? The United States has not been forthcoming with their negotiating stances. They have not been—we have not been aggressive in reducing our climate change emissions and putting out an offer that the rest of the world can accept. And we haven’t been terribly generous with funding to help these less-developed, these poorer countries in adjusting to both adapting and mitigating the climate impacts that are already happening to them.

AMY GOODMAN: Erich Pica—

ERICH PICA: And so the United States has very little trust in these talks.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you for being with us, president of Friends of the Earth USA, as we turn right now to Michigan.

ERICH PICA: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Thank you.

Monday, February 3, 2014

Find this story at 3 February 2014

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The National Security Agency was spying on foreign governments’ communications before and during the 2009 United Nations conference on climate change in Copenhagen, Denmark, a new document released by whistle-blower Edward Snowden reveals.

The Huffington Post, partnering with Danish newspaper Information, has the exclusive:

The document, with portions marked “top secret,” indicates that the NSA was monitoring the communications of other countries ahead of the conference, and intended to continue doing so throughout the meeting. Posted on an internal NSA website on Dec. 7, 2009, the first day of the Copenhagen summit, it states that “analysts here at NSA, as well as our Second Party partners [the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, with which the U.S. has an intelligence-sharing relationship] will continue to provide policymakers with unique, timely, and valuable insights into key countries’ preparations and goals for the conference, as well as the deliberations within countries on climate change policies and negotiation strategies.”

“[L]eaders and negotiating teams from around the world will undoubtedly be engaging in intense last-minute policy formulating; at the same time, they will be holding sidebar discussions with their counterparts — details of which are of great interest to our policymakers,” the document reads. The NSA’s plan, Information adds, was to get the scoop on those private discussions in order to brief U.S. officials and give them an advantage in negotiations of CO2 reductions, which had the potential to harm U.S. (and other nations’) economic interests:

The general theme of the document is a set of risk assessments on various effects of climate change that the entire intelligence community was working on. However, the document suggests that the NSA’s actual focus in relation to climate change was spying on other countries to collect intelligence that would support American interests, rather than preventing future climate catastrophes. It describes the U.S. as being under pressure because of its role as the historically largest carbon emitter. A pressure to which the NSA spies were already responding:

“SIGINT (Signals Intelligence, ed.) has already alerted policymakers to anticipate specific foreign pressure on the United States and has provided insights into planned actions on this issue by key nations and leaders.”
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A National Security Council spokeswoman declined to comment directly on the document, but said in an email that “the U.S. Government has made clear that the United States gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations.”

The ultimate outcome of the Copenhagen talks is mostly seen as a disappointment: an agreement to keep warming below 2 degrees C, but one that was non-binding and that allowed each nation to develop its own plans for doing so. While a number of factors undoubtedly contributed to this, these new revelations signal a bad turn for future efforts to reach an international accord on fighting climate change. As HuffPo puts it, in a bit of an understatement, “The revelation that the NSA was surveilling the communications of leaders during the Copenhagen talks is unlikely to help build the trust of negotiators from other nations in the future.”

Lindsay Abrams is an assistant editor at Salon, focusing on all things sustainable. Follow her on Twitter @readingirl, email labrams@salon.com

Thursday, Jan 30, 2014 03:38 PM +0100

Find this story at 30 January 2014

Copyright © 2014 Salon Media Group, Inc.

WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency monitored the communications of other governments ahead of and during the 2009 United Nations climate negotiations in Copenhagen, Denmark, according to the latest document from whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The document, with portions marked “top secret,” indicates that the NSA was monitoring the communications of other countries ahead of the conference, and intended to continue doing so throughout the meeting. Posted on an internal NSA website on Dec. 7, 2009, the first day of the Copenhagen summit, it states that “analysts here at NSA, as well as our Second Party partners, will continue to provide policymakers with unique, timely, and valuable insights into key countries’ preparations and goals for the conference, as well as the deliberations within countries on climate change policies and negotiation strategies.”

“Second Party partners” refers to the intelligence agencies of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, with which the U.S. has an intelligence-sharing relationship. “While the outcome of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference remains uncertain, signals intelligence will undoubtedly play a significant role in keeping our negotiators as well informed as possible throughout the 2-week event,” the document says.

The Huffington Post published the documents Wednesday night in coordination with the Danish daily newspaper Information, which worked with American journalist Laura Poitras.

The December 2009 meeting in Copenhagen was the 15th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which brings together 195 countries to negotiate measures to address rising greenhouse gas emissions and their impact. The Copenhagen summit was the first big climate meeting after the election of President Barack Obama, and was widely expected to yield a significant breakthrough. Other major developed nations were already part of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which set emissions limits, while the United States — the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases when the protocol went into effect in 2004 — had famously declined to join. The two-week meeting was supposed to produce a successor agreement that would include the U.S., as well as China, India and other countries with rapidly increasing emissions.

The document indicates that the NSA planned to gather information as the leaders and negotiating teams of other countries held private discussions throughout the Copenhagen meeting. “[L]eaders and negotiating teams from around the world will undoubtedly be engaging in intense last-minute policy formulating; at the same time, they will be holding sidebar discussions with their counterparts — details of which are of great interest to our policymakers,” the document states. The information likely would be used to brief U.S. officials, such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Obama, among others, according to the document.

The document does not detail how the agency planned to continue gathering information during the summit, other than noting that it would be capturing signals intelligence such as calls and emails. Previous disclosures have indicated that the NSA has the ability to monitor the mobile phones of heads of state. Other documents that Snowden has released indicate that the U.K.’s intelligence service tapped into delegates’ email and telephone communications at the 2009 G-20 meetings in London. Other previous Snowden disclosures documented the surveillance of the G-8 and G-20 summits in Canada in 2010, and the U.N. climate change conference in Bali in 2007.

The document also refers to some intelligence gathered ahead of the meeting, including a report that “detailed China’s efforts to coordinate its position with India and ensure that the two leaders of the developing world are working towards the same outcome.” It refers to another report that “provided advance details of the Danish proposal and their efforts to launch a ‘rescue plan’ to save COP-15.”

The Danish proposal was a draft agreement that the country’s negotiators had drawn up in the months ahead of the summit in consultation with a small number key of countries. The text was leaked to The Guardian early in the conference, causing some disarray as countries that were not consulted balked that it promoted the interests of developed nations and undermined principles laid out in previous climate negotiations. As Information reports, Danish officials wanted to keep U.S. negotiators from seeing the text in the weeks ahead of the conference, worried that it may dim their ambitions in the negotiations for proposed cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.

The Danes did share the text with the U.S. and other key nations ahead of the meeting. But the NSA document noting this as “advance details” indicates that the U.S. may have already intercepted it. The paragraph referring to the Danish text is marked “SI” in the Snowden document — which most likely means “signals intelligence,” indicating that it came from electronic information intercepted by the NSA, rather than being provided to the U.S. negotiators.

That could be why U.S. negotiators took the positions they did going into the conference, a Danish official told Information. “They simply sat back, just as we had feared they would if they knew about our document,” the official said. “They made no constructive statements. Obviously, if they had known about our plans since the fall of 2009, it was in their interest to simply wait for our draft proposal to be brought to the table at the summit.”

Members of the Danish delegation indicated in interviews with Information that they thought the American and Chinese negotiators seemed “peculiarly well-informed” about discussions that had taken place behind closed doors. “Particularly the Americans,” said one official. “I was often completely taken aback by what they knew.”

Despite high hopes for an agreement at Copenhagen, the negotiations started slowly and there were few signs of progress. Obama and heads of state from more than 100 nations arrived late in the second week in hopes of achieving a breakthrough, but the final day wore on without an outcome. There were few promising signals until late Friday night, when Obama made a surprise announcement that he — along with leaders from China, India, Brazil and South Africa — had come up with the “Copenhagen Accord.”

The three-page document set a goal of keeping the average rise in global temperature to less than 2 degrees Celsius, but allowed countries to write their own plans for cutting emissions — leaving out any legally binding targets or even a path to a formal treaty. Obama called the accord “an unprecedented breakthrough” in a press conference, then took off for home on Air Force One. But other countries balked, pointing out that the accord was merely a political agreement, drafted outside the U.N. process and of uncertain influence for future negotiations.

The climate summits since then have advanced at a glacial pace; a legally binding treaty isn’t currently expected until 2015. And the U.S. Congress, despite assurances made in Copenhagen, never passed new laws cutting planet-warming emissions. (The Environmental Protection Agency is, however, moving forward with regulations on emissions from power plants, but a new law to addressing the issue had been widely considered as preferable.)

The revelation that the NSA was surveilling the communications of leaders during the Copenhagen talks is unlikely to help build the trust of negotiators from other nations in the future.

“It can’t help in the sense that if people think you’re trying to get an unfair advantage or manipulate the process, they’re not going to have much trust in you,” said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists and a seasoned veteran of the U.N. climate negotiations. Meyer said he worried that the disclosure might cause the parties to “start becoming more cautious, more secretive, and less forthcoming” in the negotiations. “That’s not a good dynamic in a process where you’re trying to encourage collaboration, compromise, and working together, as opposed to trying to get a comparative advantage,” he said.

Obama has defended the NSA’s work as important in fighting terrorism at home and abroad. But the latest Snowden document indicates that the agency plays a broader role in protecting U.S. interests internationally.

National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden declined to comment directly on the Snowden document in an email to The Huffington Post, but did say that “the U.S. Government has made clear that the United States gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations.” She noted that Obama’s Jan. 17 speech on the NSA “laid out a series of concrete and substantial reforms the Administration will adopt or seek to codify with Congress” regarding surveillance.

“In particular, he issued a new Presidential Directive that lays out new principles that govern how we conduct signals intelligence collection, and strengthen how we provide executive branch oversight of our signals intelligence activities,” Hayden said. “It will ensure that we take into account our security requirements, but also our alliances; our trade and investment relationships, including the concerns of our companies; and our commitment to privacy and basic liberties. And we will review decisions about intelligence priorities and sensitive targets on an annual basis, so that our actions are regularly scrutinized by the President’s senior national security team.”

Posted: 01/29/2014 9:17 pm EST Updated: 01/30/2014 12:59 pm EST

Find this story at 29 January 2014

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Copyright © 2014 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

‘The policy was devised in secret … within the confines of the Africa Unit. At its heart was François Mitterrand.’ Photograph: Brian Harris/The Independent/REX

The trial this week of a Rwandan genocide suspect in a Paris courtroom is a well-earned victory for the French human rights groups who lobbied so hard and so long for justice. The milestone trial signals the end of France as a safe haven for génocidaries. But more than this, the trial is likely to see intense public scrutiny of one of the great scandals of the past century – the role of France in the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi of Rwanda, which for 20 years journalists and activists have tried so hard to expose.

Pascal Simbikangwa, the defendant in Paris, is said to have been a member of an inner circle of power in Rwanda that devised genocide as a planned political campaign. Developed by Hutu ideologues, it was intended to prevent a power-sharing system of government that was to include the minority Tutsi. The genocide claimed up to a million lives.

A captain in the Rwandan gendarmerie until 1986, when he was paralysed in a car accident, Simbikangwa – a fanatic who hoped to create what was known as “a pure Hutu state” – worked for the security services in the capital Kigali. He was eventually found hiding out in the French department of Mayotte, an island group in the Indian Ocean, with 3,000 forged identity papers – more than enough for the hundreds of Rwandan fugitives still at large. He denies all the charges, and his lawyer says he is a scapegoat.

Until now there has been a complete absence of will in Paris to bring to justice any of the estimated 27 Rwandan genocide fugitives who live on French soil. The country was a staunch ally of the Rwandan government which planned and perpetrated the genocide. The trial may well show the French electorate just how appalling its secret policy towards the central African state really was.

The policy was devised in secret, with no accountability from press or parliament and largely determined within the confines of a special office in the president’s Elysée Palace known as the Africa Unit. It operated through a network of military officers, politicians, diplomats, businessmen and senior intelligence operatives. At its heart was President François Mitterrand, who had operated through senior army officers: General Christian Quesnot, Admiral Jacques Lanxade and General Jean-Pierre Huchon.

The prosecution testimony in the trial will be unprecedented in the detail it will provide about the genocide. The evidence combines the results of investigations into the Simbikangwa case at the international criminal tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and details from investigations carried by Rwandan authorities. Never before, not even in the courtrooms of the ICTR, has such an impressive array of witnesses assembled. It is hoped that their combined testimony will put paid to a campaign of denial waged by defence lawyers at the ICTR who claimed the killing in Rwanda was not the result of a conspiracy but was somehow “spontaneous”.

Simbikangwa’s prosecutors are concentrating on his role during the killing, when he allegedly encouraged the murder of Tutsi by Interahamwe militia on roadblocks and provided them with weapons. The roadblocks and the Interahamwe were an integral part of the planned killing mechanism and ensured the speed and scale of the slaughter.

But the impact of the Simbikangwa trial will be felt far beyond the courtroom. It is hoped that for the French public the nature of the genocide will be laid bare, and that at long last a debate about France and Rwanda will begin. Twenty years too late, a true reckoning may at last be possible.

Linda Melvern
The Guardian, Wednesday 5 February 2014 19.11 GMT

Find this story at 5 February 2014

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

President acknowledges that ‘errors’ were made but stops short of formal apology

President Nicolas Sarkozy admitted yesterday that French “errors” had contributed to the Rwandan genocide which killed an estimated 800,000 people in 1994.

On the first visit by a French leader to Rwanda for 25 years, Mr Sarkozy did not formally apologise. Nor did he accept allegations that France had played an active role in training and arming the Hutu militias and troops who led massacres of Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

But he suggested that the entire international community – and France in particular – should accept that its response had been culpably weak. “What happened here is a defeat for humanity,” Mr Sarkozy said. “What happened here left an indelible stain. What happened here obliges the international community – including France – to reflect on the errors which prevented us from foreseeing, or stopping, this appalling crime.”

Previously France has always insisted that it could not have foreseen the genocide and that the intervention of its troops helped to save many Hutu and Tutsi lives. Mr Sarkozy’s visit to Kigali, and joint press conference with the Rwandan President Paul Kagame, were the most dramatic symbols to date of efforts to repair relations. Diplomatic ties were restored in November, three years after they were severed amid mutual recriminations and allegations.

In 2006, a French investigating judge issued international arrest warrants for eight Tutsi officials close to President Kagame, suggesting that they had deliberately provoked the genocide of their own people by assassinating a moderate Hutu president in May 1994. The accusations brought renewed allegations from Mr Kagame’s Tutsi-dominated government that France had armed and trained Hutu militias and soldiers knowing that genocidal attacks were likely or possible.

In 1998, a French parliamentary investigation rejected these accusations but admitted that the late President François Mitterrand and the then centre-right government in France had been blinded by supposed French interests in the region into siding with radical, and eventually murderous, Hutu groups.

The eight arrest warrants against Kagame aides are still active but the Rwandan government now accepts that they were drawn up by an independent investigating magistrate and not the French government.

Before his press conference with President Kagame, Mr Sarkozy was taken on a tour of Kigali’s genocide museum. On two occasions, the official guide made references to alleged French complicity in the massacres, including a photograph of a French military vehicle driving past armed Hutu civilians. President Sarkozy ignored the remarks.

He later placed a wreath on a memorial to the dead and said that “in the name of the people of France” he “bowed” to “victims of the genocide of the Tutsis”. “Errors of appreciation, political errors, were committed here which had consequences which were absolutely tragic,” Mr Sarkozy said. Although he spoke of the cumulative guilt of the international community, the implication was clear. France was – for the first time – admitting that its own actions had contributed to the calamity.

On his way to Rwanda, Mr Sarkozy visited Gabon and made an unscheduled stop in Mali to greet a French aid worker, Pierre Camatte, released this week after almost three months as the hostage of an extreme Islamist group.

By John Lichfield in Paris
Friday, 26 February 2010

Find this story at 26 February 2010

© independent.co.uk

Is the defendant’s dock at the International Criminal Court reserved for leaders of small and poor countries that defy the West? Not if Rwanda has its way. It wants to charge some of France’s most celebrated leaders of the 1990s as collaborators in genocide.

Last week the government of Rwanda issued a damning 500-page report documenting France’s participation in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. This marks a remarkable turnaround in the deeply politicized world of human rights reporting. Usually, such reporting takes the form of governments or human rights groups based in the West condemning poor countries for having political or social systems that do not meet Western standards.

Now a wretched African country has turned the table.

All who study the Rwandan genocide, as I did while researching a book about that ill-fated country, come away stunned by what they learn about French support of mass murder. France was so eager to defend a client regime against English-speaking rebels that, as the new report asserts, it gave that regime “political, military, diplomatic and logistic support” and “directly assisted” its genocidal campaign.

The report names 33 present and former French politicians and military officers as conspirators, among them the late President François Mitterrand and other well-known figures like former foreign minister Alan Juppé and former prime minister Dominique de Villepin.

The report, commissioned by the government and prepared by a panel that heard from more than 150 witnesses, is not only a devastating account of France’s eager participation in mass murder. It is also the most provocative example in modern history of a victimized nation pointing a credible finger of blame at the supposedly virtuous West.

France armed Rwanda’s murderous regime, sent soldiers to support it as the genocide was unfolding, and accepted some of its most heinous perpetrators as “refugees” after rebels forced them from power. Later, France helped the genocidaires regroup in the Congo and launch a savage cross-border campaign aimed at retaking power so they could complete their murderous work.

Even as the genocide was unfolding, reports of France’s support for it began appearing in French newspapers. French soldiers who arrived in Rwanda believing that they had come to protect victims soon realized that they were, in fact, protecting killers, and several communicated their disgust to French journalists.

In 1995, President Jacques Chirac of France made a remarkably honest confession of his nation’s guilt. “France … delivered protected people to their horrors. These dark hours have sullied our history forever and are an insult to our past and our traditions.”

Unfortunately Chirac was not speaking about Rwanda, but about France’s delivery of French Jews to the Nazi murder machine during World War II. His statement suggests that it takes nations at least half a century before they can apologize for their misdeeds. Doctors Without Borders declared in 1998 that it was “high time the French government broke its traditional silence on its shameful role in the genocide.”

Foreign Minister Juppé responded indignantly that no one could question the “good intentions of our humanitarian intervention of that era,” and that the government would not consent to “investigating an action we should be proud of.”

Parliament eventually did convene an investigation, but it predictably absolved France of all guilt.

France, though, has never forgiven the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, for deposing a French-backed regime and pulling Rwanda out of the Francophonie. In 2006 a French judge charged Kagame with assassinating his predecessor; Rwanda responded by breaking diplomatic relations with France.

The report last week is another volley in what has become one of the world’s most bitter diplomatic battles.

A spokesman for the French Foreign Ministry rejected the Rwandan report as “unacceptable.” That was a mistake. The report should be an occasion for French leaders to reflect on their country’s history in ways Western nations seldom do. Perhaps they could even break with the longstanding pattern of denial that has shaped so much of modern history.

Like all countries, France is built on national myths. If it can admit the evil that has pervaded its role in Africa, perhaps other countries could follow by confronting the sins of their past. That would be an admission that people who, in Joseph Conrad’s words, “have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves” are not the only ones guilty of the 20th century’s great crimes.

Stephen Kinzer is author of “A Thousand Hills: Rwanda’s Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It.”

By Stephen Kinzer

Find this story at 15 August 2008

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Rwanda has accused France of playing an active role in the genocide of 1994, in which about 800,000 people were killed.

An independent Rwandan commission said France was aware of preparations for the genocide and helped train the ethnic Hutu militia perpetrators.

The report also accused French troops of direct involvement in the killings.

It named 33 senior French military and political figures that it said should be prosecuted. France has previously denied any such responsibility.

Among those named in the report were the late former President, Francois Mitterrand, and the then Prime Minister Edouard Balladur.

Two men who went on to become prime minister were also named – Alain Juppe, the foreign minister at the time, and his then chief aide, Dominique de Villepin.

The French foreign ministry told the BBC it would only respond to the fresh allegations after reading the report, which was released on Tuesday afternoon.

Checkpoints

Earlier this year France’s Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner denied French responsibility in connection with the genocide, but said political errors had been made.
The Rwandan government has urged the relevant authorities to bring the accused French politicians and military officials to justice

Rwandan justice ministry

Report raises issue of motive

Some 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered by Hutu militias in just 100 days in 1994.

The report says France backed Rwanda’s Hutu government with political, military, diplomatic and logistical support.

It accuses France of training Hutu militias responsible for the slaughter, helping plan the genocide, and participating in the killings.

“French forces directly assassinated Tutsis and Hutus accused of hiding Tutsis… French forces committed several rapes on Tutsi survivors,” said a statement from the justice ministry cited by AFP news agency.

“Considering the seriousness of the alleged crimes, the Rwandan government has urged the relevant authorities to bring the accused French politicians and military officials to justice,” the statement said.

It further alleged that French forces did nothing to challenge checkpoints used by Hutu forces in the genocide.

“They clearly requested that the Interahamwes continue to man those checkpoints and kill Tutsis attempting to flee,” it said.

Testimonies

The BBC’s Geoffrey Mutagoma in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, says the commission spent nearly two years investigating France’s alleged role in the genocide.

It heard testimonies from genocide survivors, researchers, writers and reporters.

The 500-page document was presented to the Rwanda’s government last November, but was not made public until now.

Rwanda has repeatedly accused France of arming and training the Hutu militias that perpetrated the genocide, and of dragging its feet in co-operating with the investigations that followed.

France has maintained that its forces helped protect civilians during a UN-sanctioned mission in Rwanda at the time.

The two countries have had a frosty relationship since 2006 when a French judge implicated Rwandan President Paul Kagame in the downing in 1994 of then-President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane – an event widely seen as triggering the killings.

President Kagame has always denied the charge.

He says Mr Habyarimana, a Hutu, was killed by Hutu extremists who then blamed the incident on Tutsi rebels to provide the pretext for the genocide.

Page last updated at 17:25 GMT, Tuesday, 5 August 2008 18:25 UK

Find this story at 5 August 2008

BBC © 2013

Het boek True Believer, over de jacht op een Amerikaanse die twintig jaar lang voor Cuba spioneerde, toont tevens het failliet van geheime diensten aan.

In de discussie rond het massaal afluisteren van internet en telecommunicatie door de Amerikaanse National Security Agency (NSA) lijkt het niet om de effectiviteit te gaan, maar om de grootschaligheid. Nu was die digitale verzamelwoede al tientallen jaren bekend, al waren er nog geen documenten beschikbaar die dit ook onderschreven. Data verzamelen en die ook zinvol toepassen, zijn echter twee verschillende dingen.

In de Amerikaanse senaat zijn grote twijfels gerezen over de effectiviteit van de digitale hooiberg die de NSA aanlegt. Of deze informatie aanslagen voorkomen heeft, is volstrekt onduidelijk. De Cubanen kunnen zich geen miljarden verslindende digitale stofzuiger veroorloven en leggen zich vooral toe op Humint, menselijke bronnen. (lees: infiltranten en informanten.) Hiermee lijkt het straatarme Caribische eiland de Amerikanen te slim af.

artikel als pdf

On issues from domestic inequality to foreign policy, President Obama delivered his fifth State of the Union with a vow to take action on his own should Congress stonewall progress on his agenda. But will Obama’s policies go far enough? We host a roundtable with three guests: Jeremy Scahill, producer and writer of the Oscar-nominated documentary “Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield” and senior investigative reporter at First Look Media, which will launch in the coming months; Bob Herbert, distinguished senior fellow with Demos; and Lorella Praeli, director of advocacy and policy at the United We Dream coalition.
Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: Our guests are Jeremy Scahill—his film, Dirty Wars, has just been nominated for an Oscar; Bob Herbert with us, former New York Times columnist, now with Demos; and Lorella Praeli with the United We Dream coalition. Nermeen?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We’re continuing our coverage of President Obama’s State of the Union address. During Tuesday’s speech, he announced an executive action to raise the minimum wage for some federal contract workers from $7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: In the coming weeks, I will issue an executive order requiring federal contractors to pay their federally funded employees a fair wage of at least $10.10 an hour, because if you cook our troops’ meals or wash their dishes, you should not have to live in poverty.

Of course, to reach millions more, Congress does need to get on board. Today, the federal minimum wage is worth about 20 percent less than it was when Ronald Reagan first stood here. And Tom Harkin and George Miller have a bill to fix that by lifting the minimum wage to $10.10. It’s easy to remember, 10-10. This will help families. It will give businesses customers with more money to spend. It does not involve any new bureaucratic program. So join the rest of the country. Say yes. Give America a raise.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Bob Herbert, can you respond to that, the significance of this raise for some federal workers?

BOB HERBERT: Sure. I think it’s symbolically significant. So, it’s not going to take effect until new contracts come up, so federal contract workers will have to be paid at least a minimum of $10.10 an hour. The reason I think it’s symbolically significant is because it keeps a spotlight on the issue of the minimum wage, on the issue of employment going forward.

You know, to Jeremy’s point about the State of the Union essentially being a propaganda speech, which is absolutely true, what you didn’t hear there was really what the state of the economy is for ordinary Americans, for working people in this country. You didn’t hear anything about poverty, for example. So, for years now, the American people have made it clear, in poll after poll and in other ways, that employment is their top priority. I mean, people need jobs. But neither party, presidents from either party and Congress, whether it’s in the control of the Republicans or the Democrats, have had a sustained, effective job creation program in this country. And the United States is never going to get out of its morass until it’s able to put people back to work.

We now have nearly 50 million people who are officially poor in the United States, according to federal guidelines. Another 50 million people are just a notch or two above the official poverty rate. That’s nearly a third of the entire population that’s poor or near poor. One out of every three black children in the United States is poor. If you just walk a few blocks from this studio, every day you will see enormous lines wrapped around the corner for soup kitchens and that sort of thing. And that’s the case in places across this country. None of that was addressed. And none of the initiatives that the president has offered, and nothing that the Republicans have offered in years, would begin to address this state of distress among American working people and among the poor.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Just to give us an idea, Bob Herbert, how many employees does the federal government have through contractors?

BOB HERBERT: Well, it’s interesting. It was actually Demos that—it was a Demos initiative that put the spotlight on this $10.10 initiative, because Demos was the first organization to point out that the federal government, through its contractors, employs nearly two million low-wage workers, which is more than Wal-Mart and McDonald’s combined. So, if you could get this initiative expanded to cover all of the workers who are contracted to work for the federal government, then you would help an enormous number of people.

AMY GOODMAN: Mention of unions? I saw Richard Trumka in the audience.

BOB HERBERT: You know, get me started on unions. One of the reasons American workers are in such a deep state of distress is because they have no clout in the workplace. They are not organized, and they are not represented, so they cannot fight for their own interests. Corporations are organized every which way from sundown, and they have tremendous amounts of money. They have a lot a political clout and that sort of thing.

Workers go to work. You know, it’s just one man or one woman, you know, against an employer in a terrible job market. So you’re afraid to even ask for a raise, even if you deserve a raise, because you think the employer is going to say to you, “Take a hike.” And then you go out there in this terrible job market, and there’s no jobs to be had. If workers were organized, then they would be able to have clout. You’d be able to bring pressure not just on employers, not just on corporations, but also on the federal government to get legislation passed that would be beneficial to workers.

And one of the most important things you could do is to just enforce the laws that are on the books that have to do with labor organizing. I mean, so, if you’re in an organization, a corporation, a plant, that sort of thing, where workers are not organized, do not belong to a labor union, they want to organize—the majority of the workers want to organize—the corporations fight you every step of the way. And they use a tremendous number—amount of unfair tactics. That’s illegal, but the federal government has not enforced the laws.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about international trade policy and how that relates. In his State of the Union, President Obama also sought fast-track authority to give lawmakers an up-or-down vote on the trade deals such as TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: When 98 percent of our exporters are small businesses, new trade partnerships with Europe and the Asia-Pacific will help them create even more jobs. We need to work together on tools like bipartisan trade promotion authority to protect our workers, protect our environment, and open new markets to new goods stamped “Made in the U.S.A.” Listen, China and Europe aren’t standing on the sidelines. And neither should we.

AMY GOODMAN: That was President Obama in his fifth State of the Union address. We just returned from Japan, Bob Herbert. There, there’s a huge discussion about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Here, most people, if you asked them, they wouldn’t even know what it is.

BOB HERBERT: Well, one of the things that’s a problem in this country is because the economic situation has been so stagnant for most people for so long and because the government has been—the government in Washington has been so dysfunctional, that Americans have really tuned out. And also, I don’t think that the press has done a good job at all on trade agreements, if you go all the way back to NAFTA in the 1990s. So people essentially don’t even understand these agreements. But what they do understand is that they have not been helpful to the vast majority of workers over all these years. So…

JEREMY SCAHILL: Can I just make a comment?

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill.

JEREMY SCAHILL: I mean, you know, what Obama was doing there—in his last major address that he gave, he—at the United Nations General Assembly, he laid out this sort of forceful defense of American empire, and even went so far as to say that the U.S. will use its military might to continue to secure energy resources. In this speech, it was a pretty forceful defense of a neoliberal economic agenda. And, you know, what Bob is saying about corporations resonates on a foreign policy level, as well.

What is widely being considered to be the most moving part of last night was when this U.S. Army Ranger was addressed in the crowd and who was severely wounded and had done 10 tours. Think about that for a moment—10 tours in these war zones. You know, this young American spent his entire adult life in these combat zones. And, you know, the issue of how veterans are treated in this country is one thing, but at the end of the day, did he benefit from these wars? Does the average American benefit from the continuation of these wars? No. Who benefits? That’s the most important question we all have to ask. It’s corporations.

BOB HERBERT: Exactly.

JEREMY SCAHILL: War corporations, the Halliburtons of the world, the Boeings. John Kerry, yesterday it was announced, is giving these awards for corporate excellence around the world. He’s giving them to Citibank, to Apache, to Boeing, to Coca-Cola. And so you have this neoliberal economic agenda, which is sort of the hidden hand, in many ways, of the U.S. empire, and then you have this iron fist of U.S. militarism that is being sold to the American public, and increasingly to the world, as national security policy.

And so, you know, when I see that Army Ranger who’s wounded like that, the first thing that just occurs to me is: Who has benefited from all of this? When corporations control our political process in this country through a legalized form of corruption that’s called campaign finance, what does that say about the state of our democracy? In a way, there already has been a coup in this country, but it’s been a silent coup. And it reminds me of that famous line from the great movie The Usual Suspects. At the end of it, Kevin Spacey’s character says the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. In many ways, a coup has happened, and the brilliance of it is that it’s not sparking major uprisings because we’ve been pacified and taught to just accept this as how things work. We have two parties in this country, the minimum wage is going to be the minimum wage, and corporations are in control, and these wars are fought in our name, but without our consent.

BOB HERBERT: And the flipside of who benefits is the suffering that is so tremendous out there among the warriors who have been sent over to fight these wars since late 2001. And so, you just have hundreds of thousands of people who have—men and women, who have come back from the combat zones, who have terrible, disabling injuries, who are going to have to be cared for—we have an obligation to care for them—in many cases, for the rest of their lives. We have to pay, as a society, to care for these folks. You know, it’s probably—Joe Stiglitz has estimated that now these wars are probably going cost cumulatively $4 trillion or more. None of this has been really explored clearly or properly explained to the American public.

JEREMY SCAHILL: You know, just a small sort of side point on this, you know, when we talk about the U.S. withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan, the conventional military, a story that very seldom gets attention is the connection between a paramilitarization of law enforcement inside of the United States and increasing use of what they call counterterrorism tactics on SWAT-style operations in the U.S. The military is donating a lot of its equipment to local police agencies and other so-called law enforcement agencies, and the communities that are most at risk here are communities of color and poor communities. Everything is about war—the war on drugs, the war on crime.

BOB HERBERT: Right.

JEREMY SCAHILL: And war requires some kind of a militarized response. And that’s what we’re seeing. This is deeply connected to the wars abroad, the wars at home, as well.

BOB HERBERT: And this is actually going into our public schools, where you have that type of militarized behavior going on actually in public schools. That’s how you get the school-to-prison pipeline that people are talking about.

AMY GOODMAN: On Afghanistan, President Obama said, “If the Afghan government signs a security agreement that we have negotiated, a small force of Americans could remain in Afghanistan with NATO allies.” But the latest news says the Pentagon has proposed up to 10,000 troops remaining behind, Jeremy.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, and if you look at what sort of various senior anonymous military officials have been saying for several years now, they’ve known that the withdrawal is not really going to be a withdrawal. Yes, we’re going to see the Marines pull out. We’re going to have this thing where journalists can ride on the tanks, like they did out of Iraq. But at the end of the day, this is an Afghanization of a U.S. policy. So, what’s going to happen is that you’re going to have these advise-and-assist squads of highly trained U.S. special ops and CIA personnel accompanying Afghan units, and they’re going to try to have the Afghans do the fighting and dying and killing on behalf of U.S. policy. But what I think should be of greater concern to the American public is that you are going to have these strike forces in place. It’s taken as conventional wisdom now that the U.S. is out of Iraq. Actually, the U.S. has a massive paramilitary presence inside of Iraq and is going to continue to have one inside of Afghanistan. So, these wars are going to continue on for at least another generation, albeit on a sort of covert, hidden-hand manner of doing it.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: But what’s the justification, Jeremy, for keeping troops in Afghanistan?

JEREMY SCAHILL: I mean, there is no counterterrorism mission in Afghanistan anymore. I mean, no one wants to talk about this, because you’re going to be accused of being sympathetic to the Taliban. The Taliban is not a terrorist organization with global aspirations. The Taliban has a constituency, has a greater constituency than the U.S., arguably than Hamid Karzai, who the U.S. recognizes as the president. And I think the Taliban is a morally reprehensible group of individuals, but they do have indigenous support. And the reason that they’re fighting right now is because the U.S. and NATO are in their country. And so, to sort of imply that what we’re doing there is countering terrorists, when in the first months of the Obama administration his own national security adviser said there are less than a hundred al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan, we should be asking that question that John Kerry asked in 1971: Who wants to be the last to die for this failed war? What do they tell the families of the soldiers who die from here until they pull out the conventional military?

AMY GOODMAN: Now, the significance of that, for people who don’t remember, John Kerry, who is the secretary of state and formerly senator, was—fought in Vietnam, and when he came home, he was strongly opposed to the war in Vietnam, and he testified before Congress asking that question.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, I’d love to see 1971 John Kerry questioning, you know, 2014 John Kerry at a hearing about all these policies that he’s having to sell as secretary of state around the world.

Find this story at 29 January 2014

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Bit by bit, with deep and understandable reluctance, the CIA has been opening its archives. Only fragments of its view of the Falklands War are currently available, but they are still worth close study.

Intelligence material often plays a large part in the formulation of foreign policy, sometimes a decisive one, but it is almost always held back far longer than other government information, creating a structural weakness in our understanding of the recent past.
the cia’s declassified files: the crest database

CIA Director’s angry memo to almost everyone re: the leaks that caused Argentina to change its cypher, 9 Jun 1982

Around 40 CIA documents on the war have been released through the agency’s “CIA Records Search Tool” database (CREST). These are items more than 25 years old that the agency has been obliged to release by a Clinton-era Executive Order (EO 12958/13256), rather than responses to Freedom of Information Act requests, which probably gives this mini-collection a little more coherence and completeness than it might otherwise have. One of the great problems with relying on FOI to produce historical information is that the selection of things released is dependent on the interests of the persons or organisations who made the original request, and their interests probably won’t be the same as yours, indeed are likely to be different – and might be completely crazy. You generally won’t know why one document has been released and not another, since the terms of the original requests are not themselves released alongside each document.

Even so, there is much about this CIA collection that is obscure. While you can sometimes work out in Presidential Library files what part of the whole has been released and what not, and roughly why, in the case of these CIA documents that is all but impossible. What we are looking at here might be a fifth of the whole, or a fiftieth. It might contain much of what they knew about the Falklands, or the merest fraction. It might be representative, it might be completely the reverse. One obvious element is definitely missing: there is no signals intelligence here. But we know that the US had broken Argentinian military codes, until leaks in the US press caused the Argentinians to change their cypher, of and it would be a surprise if it wasn’t reading diplomatic traffic as well.

Some of the CREST documents are so heavily redacted that they resemble a kind of two-dimensional Swiss cheese. Redacting becomes so compulsive an activity that even unclassified documents get redacted sometimes. Generally though the Falklands documents have been released without too much of this kind of semi-shredding. Unhelpfully, you need to visit in person to use this database, which is stored at National Archives II in College Park, Maryland, and print out what you find. They give you free paper at least. The team at margaretthatcher.org has done the work and now uploaded the Falklands material. There is more useful information available in the library section of the CIA’s excellent website, including a number of additional Falklands documents, and we have added in a handful also from the official-sounding but resolutely independent “National Security Archive”, based at George Washington University in Washington D.C.

This CIA material includes twice-daily situation reports at the very beginning of the war, some satellite image interpretations, as well as high-level internal papers updating the Director and Deputy Director. It includes too a number of the “National Intelligence Daily” (NID) intelligence summaries circulated only to senior officials in the White House and Cabinet Members, the CIA’s ‘newspaper’, printed in tabloid form and some “Monthly Warning Assessments” (MWA).

Given the fragmentary picture these documents provide of the agency’s knowledge and outlook, conclusions are best presented as a series of points rather than a connected story, with suitable warning that they are incomplete and that possession of the full record would require them to be amended.

The earliest document is a memo from CIA Director William Casey to Secretary of State Al Haig, copied to the White House, providing a “Quick Intelligence Assessment on Falkland Affairs (April 2, 1982)”. This helpfully reminds one how useless intelligence reports can sometimes be. Forced to make snap judgments without much hard information, the interpretation inevitably tended towards the bland. The British, Casey solemnly suggested, would be hoping to use the UN Security Council “to put Argentina in the dock as an ‘aggressor'”. He explained that “British economic options are limited” and suspected that the Argentinians would be likely reinforce the islands before the British Task Force arrived. And so on: there are pages of this. Any averagely well-informed reader would have been tempted to skip large chunks of it in the hope of finding something seriously useful further on. More interesting was the point that many of the ships in the Argentinian fleet were 40 years old – i.e, dated from WW2 – and would need to be withdrawn as soon as possible from the wintry southern seas. “We also do not believe they would fare well in a full-scale naval engagement with the British”. How Argentina’s actions had been received in Latin America is nowhere touched on in the document, but must surely be in the redacted sections. The memo wraps up with Cold War aspects – Cuba likely to make trouble if it thought Argentina might win, though only rhetorically, the Soviets likely to supply surveillance information on the British Task Force to the Argentinians as part of a general strategy of ingratiating themselves with Buenos Aires, but no more. Almost the most telling point in the memo is the reminder that the post-Afghanistan US grain embargo on the Soviet Union, 1980-81, had created a big new trade between Argentina and the USSR, the former supplying no less than 10 per cent of the latter’s imports, though this was hardly classified information. The CIA was wrong, however, in thinking that Moscow would work with Argentina to block British attempts to persuade the UN Security Council to condemn the invasion by Resolution, “threatening to veto it”. This might have seemed a safe bet, but in fact there was no Soviet veto, to Argentinian disappointment and general surprise, UNSCR 502 passing easily on 5 April. This early success anchored the British diplomatic position from the beginning of the conflict, because almost no one could be found to defend Argentina’s first use of force.

The Argentinians understood, of course, the centrality of the Cold War to US perceptions and were themselves playing the Soviet card with Washington from the beginning of the war – warning the US that the Soviets were watching and waiting (CIA sitrep, 3 Apr). Later they threatened to turn to them for arms supplies (MWA, 28 May). Of course, this was a familiar move in third world diplomacy. It is not clear how seriously the CIA took it in early April, but by the time the junta faced defeat – indeed “military humiliation”, in the agency’s eyes (MWA, 26 May) – they were watching closely. On 28 May Deputy Director for Intelligence Robert Gates told the CIA Director, William Casey, that a special memo had been prepared for the White House on Cuban assistance to Argentina and Casey himself was specially briefed on Soviet responses prior to a meeting with Haig. The movement of the Soviet ELINT satellite into orbit above the South Atlantic is noted in the 30 Apr 1982 NSC meeting on the previous page. But anxieties settled after the war. An Interagency survey of the “Prospects for Soviet Arms Deliveries to Argentina” in July 1983 concluded that: “Only as a last resort would the Argentines move to major purchases that would involve a long time arms relationship with the Soviets”.

The CIA debated the possibility that the Galtieri junta might be replaced by a “highly nationalistic military regime” (MWA, 30 Apr) – as if it wasn’t one, or not much of one. One has the sense that Galtieri was their preferred strongman, a caudillo in the making maybe, and that change was thought unlikely to be an improvement from a US perspective.
apr – jun 1982: the military campaign

The agency saw major difficulties for a British assault on the islands and thought at one point we were underestimating Argentine forces (NID 19 May), but consistently, and from early on, it believed a British victory was ‘likely’ (eg, MWA 30 Apr). Several times they revert to Casey’s initial point that much of the Argentine navy was clapped out.

British attacks on the mainland of Argentina were thought a real possibility, though one that diminished significantly once troops were landed safely on the islands (which happened on 21 May). It was believed that British submarines might attack the Argentine navy, particularly its carrier (the former HMS Venerable), even within the country’s coastal waters (ie, 12 mile limit), if there were big losses during landing of forces. If the troopship Canberra was hit, the agency believed landings would have to be aborted.

After the landings the agency judged (NID 24 May) the British were planning a speedy campaign and were willing to tolerate high casualties to wrap things up quickly, warning that “serious reverses” would create big political pressures at home and perhaps open the way to a Pym government. If on the other hand the campaign was quickly successful, “chances would increase dramatically for an election as early as next spring, with a major Tory victory likely”. That Goose Green would be attacked ahead of Port Stanley, rather than bypassed, was correctly predicted.

There were believed to be 17 US citizens on the Falklands at the outbreak of the war. Efforts were made through the Argentine occupying forces to persuade them to leave before the Total Exclusion Zone was declared (29 Apr – TEZ was the following day).

Judging from the junta’s efforts to acquire new equipment and supplies even as its forces faced defeat on the Falklands, the CIA thought it was planning to fight a campaign of long-term resistance (MWA 28 May) and that the Argentine government regarded its Falklands garrison as ‘expendable’ (Watch Committee 26 May).

There is limited military analysis in the CREST documents and there is a dearth of material from the Department of Defense on the Falklands War. The CIA predicted an outright British assault on Port Stanley led by Scorpion light tanks, but of course the Argentinians surrendered following a series of small battles in high ground outside the town so no assault on the town itself was needed. The analysts noted the effectiveness of Argentine air force attacks after the landing at San Carlos, but were unaware apparently of the failure of some of their bombs to explode. They doubted the Argentines could keep up their rate of air attacks, and questioned also whether Britain was being truthful about the number of Harriers it had lost (NID 29 May). The role of EXOCET missiles was discussed, but a redaction obtrudes, perhaps touching on Argentine efforts to buy more of these effective missiles.

The CIA Director, William Casey, sent a sharp memorandum to Cabinet Officers and a wide range of agency heads (but not the White House) regarding “Unauthorized Disclosures on the Falklands Situation” (9 Jun). He warned of the “seriousness of leaks compromising sensitive collection sources and methods” and urged investigations to determine whether leaks should be referred to the Attorney-General – i.e., considered for criminal prosecution. The 30 Apr meeting above noted that press stories had caused the Argentines to realise the US was reading their military codes and to change their cipher, locking the US out (for a time at least). ABC Nightline had broken the story on 14 Apr, but the 15 Apr New York Times article mentioned on the previous page pops up in the CREST database when you search for ‘Falklands’: plainly, it drew the agency’s special attention.

The US had no satellite over the South Atlantic at the outbreak of the war and took some time to reposition one. Observation conditions were less than perfect, with the southern hemisphere moving into winter, so the CIA analyses of 28 May of images over Port Stanley and southern Argentina may be the earliest they got. Even then they note problems with cloud cover. These photographs showed increased defensive preparations around Port Stanley, while a series of images of mainland military installations in north and south of the country showed the Argentine navy safely tied up in port, aircraft carrier, submarines and all. Given that signals intelligence was available, apparently in some abundance, it is unlikely on this showing that satellite intelligence played anything like as significant a role in the war. Many, of course, thought otherwise at the time. A State Department telegram of 4 May shows that the Embassy in Buenos Aires was unable to kill the story that a US satellite had given the British the position of the General Belgrano, whereas the British Official History of the Falklands War, by Lawrence Freedman (vol.2, p285) credibly explains that it was an intercepted and decrypted signal from Admiral Lombardo late on 1 May that showed the British that the Argentine navy was planning a coordinated strike against the Task Force the following day, information that led directly to the decision to sink the ship, which had first been found when the British nuclear submarine south of the islands got a sonar trace of the Argentine tanker sent to refuel it. One cannot safely assume that the signals intelligence came from the US side to the British either: we had our own formidable listening and decrypting capability, and it was only the day before the crucial signal that Inman was telling his colleagures that the US had been locked out.

News of the Argentine surrender was circulated as a “CIA late item” in the National Intelligence Daily deriving the information straight from MT’s office (NID 15 Jun).
jun 1982 – jul 1983: after effects – damage to U.S. Interests in south america judged ‘manageable’

Almost immediately the war was over Casey requested briefing on the impact of the war on global high technology transfers (Gates memo, 18 Jun).

The agency pointed out internal divisions in the Argentinian army resulting from recriminations over the war and saw in them a potent threat to the successor regime of General Reynaldo Bignone (NID 29 Jul). Returning soldiers from the garrison were expected to have unhappy stories to tell, with possibly radicalising results.

Long-term fallout from the war in the form of anti-US sentiment in Latin America was a genuine concern for the US, but swiftly diminished. This was apparent even at the most difficult moment, days after the Argentine surrender on 14 June.
The CIA prepared a lengthy intelligence appreciation for the President and other senior figures on 18 June, “Short-Term Prospects for Central America”. This commented: “The circumstances of the Falklands war will doubtless reduce the readiness of some Latin American states to support US initiatives concerning Central America. The direct adverse impact in Central America, however, is not likely to be substantial”.
The State Department took a longer look later in the year, as part of an inter-agency review of “US Policy Towards South America in the Wake of the Falklands Crisis”. This study concluded: “Aside from Argentina, crisis-induced damage to U.S.-Latin American relations has varied widely from country to country and appears manageable on most matters”. Actions to “restore and assert US influence in South America” included a resumption of arms sales to Argentina (and Chile) by end 1982 – much upsetting MT, but the President was firm – and a decision to maintain “its diplomatic position on the fundamental Falklands issues as it was before the crisis: U.S. neutrality on the question of sovereignty over the islands and support for negotiations or other peaceful efforts to resolve this dispute”. An important distinction was drawn between US opposition to Argentine first use of force, “which was widely accepted in Latin America”, a region of many territorial disputes and small countries scared of bigger ones, and US support for the British military campaign “which was just as widely resented”. “Fortunately for us, Argentina’s reputation for arrogance, and the collapse of its forces on the ground, helped to cushion reactions”. Argentina’s nuclear weapons programme was the region’s most sophisticated and attracted a wary intelligence eye.
Amongst the handful of Pentagon documents on the war is a characteristically clear-eyed assessment of the “Military Lessons from the Falklands” from Caspar Weinberger, written for the President on 19 July. “In the final analysis, the battle for the Falklands appears to have been a closer call than many of us would believe. The British won primarily because their forces, inferior in numbers at first, were superior in training, leadership and equipment”. “But luck also played a significant part”. Unlike the CIA he was well-aware that Argentinian bombs had failed to explode.
Assessment of the war was an early task at the NSC for Marine Colonel Oliver North, who served there from 1981-86. This role perhaps explains an event a few years later, on the eve of MT’s visit to Camp David in December 1984, when the then National Security Adviser, Bud McFarlane, suggested to the President that he sound her out on “steps they could take to assist the Nicaraguan resistance. Through intermediaries we have been advised that the Chilean government is prepared to provide up to 48 BLOWPIPE surface-to-air missiles to the freedom fighters”. These British missiles had been “staged in Chile during the Falklands War”.
The probability of a long-term Argentinian tilt towards Moscow was judged low, as already noted above from the Interagency Study of 1 July 1983.

Find this story at January 2014

Copyright © Margaret Thatcher Foundation 2014

Paddy Ashdown raised fears in 1984 about clandestine approaches made by US agents but allegations were dismissed

Margaret Thatcher told Paddy Ashdown there was no need for an inquiry and no evidence of improper activity. Photograph: Barbra Walton/Associated Press

Margaret Thatcher was warned that the CIA did not always give sufficient advance notice when it carried out operations in Britain, a secret file released on Friday shows.

Paddy Ashdown, a Liberal MP, complained to Thatcher about the US intelligence organisation’s activities in the UK in November 1984.

Ashdown was worried about clandestine approaches made by US agents to British computer firms in this country and abroad to prevent eastern bloc countries obtaining western computer secrets by stealth.

“My subsequent investigations have led me to conclude that the CIA got the information on the UK companies in the course of an operation which, it seems, is still continuing,” he told Thatcher.

The prime minister sent back a letter dismissing his allegations. “There is no evidence of improper activity by the CIA or that the law has been broken,” she wrote. “As you are aware, there is close co-operation between the British and American authorities on the enforcement of multilateraly agreed exports controls, which is in the national interest.” She said there was no need for an inquiry, but would expect police to investigate if there were any evidence of the law being broken.

The files now make clear that this was not the whole picture. The Foreign Office subsequently asked MI5 to investigate Ashdown’s complaints. Their report back to Downing Street said: “The security service are as confident as they can can be that the CIA are not involved in activities in the UK as alleged by Mr Ashdown.

“There is an agreement between the British and American agencies that neither will undertake clandestine activies in the country of the other without specific agreement.”

But, the FCO note, continued: “The security service have told us that there was a small number of isolated cases in 1983 when the CIA approached British individuals with a view to seeking information about cases in which hostile intelligence services were involved in attempts to acquire illegally western technology, without adequate consultation in advance with the British authorities.

“These cases were brought to the attention of the CIA (and FBI) and the security service are satisfied that such cases are not recurring. They emphasise, however, that such incidents are not relevant to the allegations being made by Mr Ashdown which relate to pressure being put on British companies to divulge information about their trading activies.”

MI5, the FCO added, “do not believe that the CIA are involved in clandestine activities in this field and have no cause for complaint”. But just to be sure, the last letter in the file notes, the CIA had given a specific assurance that they were not involved in in the UK as Ashdown had suggested.

The documents do not make clear what the difference was between the small number of isolated cases identified in 1983 and Ashdown’s concerns.

Owen Bowcott
theguardian.com, Friday 3 January 2014 00.01 GMT

Find this story at 3 January 2014

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

On 2 Apr 1982 Argentina invaded the Falklands. This wholly unexpected event, the seizure by force of British people and territory, generated a crisis of great intensity in the UK, one almost existential in character.

margaretthatcher.org has already published many documents relating to the war from a range of sources, particularly the US, and we continue that process with the most significant to date: the newly-released record of the National Security Council meeting on 30 Apr 1982 that terminated the ‘Haig shuttle’ – explicit US mediation between the two sides – and decided on a ’tilt’ in US policy towards the UK

The key British files on the war are due for release at the end of 2012
STUCK IN THE MIDDLE WITH YOU: THE U.S. RESPONSE TO THE ARGENTINE INVASION

Minutes of 30 Apr 1982 NSC meeting

The US Government was as surprised by the invasion as anyone else. But even though it had for years taken a position of neutrality on the question of Falklands sovereignty, it had neither the option nor the inclination to play the bystander.

For one thing it had long-standing and exceptionally close military, intelligence and political ties to the UK, a front-line ally in the Cold War. On the other, the new Administation had cultivated good relations with the Galtieri junta in Argentina, hoping it might prove an important friend in the battle against Soviet influence in central America – a major concern for the new administration from the very first – and fearing that its fall might bring the return of a left-wing, Peronist government. The US also had significant interests in Argentina, financial and personal. As much as one fifth of US banking capital was exposed if Argentina defaulted on its debt and there were as many as 16,000 Americans resident in the country. And there was considerable US sensitivity to Latin American charges of “Yankee imperialism”, on right as well as left. Indeed during Ronald Reagan’s first meeting with MT as President he had talked of pursuing “a new approach to bring the [North and South American] continents together” and of fixing the southern perception of the US as “the Colossus of the north”. This stress seems to have surprised his visitors. The British Ambassador, Nico Henderson, professed not to understand what he meant and for once even MT was a little under-prepared: when it became apparent the President wanted to talk in detail about El Salvador more briefing had to be sent her. At this stage US policy in the region must have seemed rather remote from British interests.

On the flip side, US Embassy telegrams from London, available on this site, show no great understanding of the depth of the crisis the invasion had provoked in Britain. Symbolically enough the US Ambassador to Britain, J.J. Louis, was on a golfing holiday in Florida at the time of the invasion and saw no reason to return early. Preliminary analysis from the State Department assumed Britain’s imperial legacy lay at the heart of the issue. Although Secretary of State Al Haig swiftly grasped that the British saw the self-determination of the islanders as a make-or-break principle, he was quietly sceptical that this really applied in the case of the Falklands. In a closed session briefing to Congressmen, he said that while the principle was “very laudable and supportable, they [the British] have created conditions on the Islands which make free choice by the population less than balanced”. The Falklands were a ‘cocoon’, he said, because “the Argentinians cannot get in”, leaving the islands perpetually “the land of the Brits”. And he made a nasty joke about the islanders, which drew a laugh from his audience, but was particularly tasteless in the circumstances. (It is along the lines of, “too few women, too many sheep”.) It is hard to believe he felt much sympathy for their plight.

Many in Britain at the time and since have argued that there was a significant pro-Argentinian bias on the part of some in the Administration. The evidence does not really bear this out. Despite the above, such a charge can hardly be made against Haig, who was understandably exasperated by the junta and concluded that they were incapable of reaching a decision on any of the peace plans he put to them. His purpose throughout the Falklands crisis seems to have been to avoid an unnecessary war, as he saw it, and also to demonstrate his effectiveness as Secretary of State, something increasingly questioned, not least by the White House. In truth, his time was almost played out: less than a fortnight after the Argentinian defeat he had resigned and George Shultz had taken his place.

The charge of bias could be made with far greater justice against Mrs Kirkpatrick, the US Ambassador to the UN and a Cabinet Member, but the salient point is that she was an isolated figure within the Administration. It is true that she was close to the President, who rated her highly and several times thought of her as a possible National Security Adviser. But she was blocked decisively by his powerful kitchen cabinet, who distrusted her influence and pegged her down; for that reason it is not quite clear how much she had the President’s ear, in the sense of ready access. Over the Falklands she was completely at odds with the Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, and scarcely less so with the CIA. And her relationship with the State Department was very poor. Although her name is often linked to that Tom Enders, the Assistant Secretary of State, as if they constituted a kind of Argentinian faction in the Administration, this is far from convincing. Enders was responsible for “Inter-American Affairs” and to that degree shared her concerns, but the two fell well short of a shared outlook. Indeed, Kirkpatrick’s relationship was Enders was so bad that he was summarily dismissed by the President the following year for undermining her on a visit to Central America. The State Department’s complaint against her was one of amateurism as much as anything else. During the war itself Al Haig seems to have demanded that she be fired for making public statements at odds with declared policy, raising the issue again in his final interview with the President when he resigned on 25 June. Perhaps the most notorious of her off-beam statements was made on CBS’s Face the Nation when she appeared to question that the Argentine invasion constituted “armed aggression”:

The Argentines, of course, have claimed for two hundred years that they own these islands. Now, if the Argentines own the islands, then moving troops into them is not armed aggression.

Although the President refused Haig’s demand that Kirkpatrick should go, it is entirely plain that he did not share her views on this point, which bordered on the bizarre and might almost be called definitively un-Reaganite. He knew armed aggression when he saw it, publicly and unequivocally describing the invasion in those terms himself, most notably on 30 April:

we must remember that the aggression was on the part of Argentina in this dispute over the sovereignty of that little ice-cold bunch of land down there, and they finally just resorted to armed aggression, and there was bloodshed. And I think the principle that all of us must abide by is, armed aggression of that kind must not be allowed to succeed.

It is perhaps a measure of heightened British sensitivities at the time that this statement is remembered in the UK for the “little ice-cold bunch of land” reference – unfairly treated as an attempt to belittle the issue – rather than the point of substance, which could hardly have been more forcefully or helpfully put by the President.

That said, it mattered that anyone in the Administration spoke as Mrs Kirkpatrick did, particularly in Argentine eyes. A key question here is how Buenos Aires analysed the US position in advance of the war. It is certainly plausible that US neutrality as to sovereignty, along with who-knows-what friendly remarks in private from Mrs Kirkpatrick and lesser figures, led the junta to think a swift military takeover of the islands would not trouble Washington too much. At the very beginning of the crisis, on the eve of the invasion, the President wrote to MT saying that he had had no success in persuading Galtieri to hold off. Comfortingly he continued: “While we have a policy of neutrality on the sovereignty issue, we will not be neutral on the issue involving Argentine use of military force”.

But there was a problem: the Argentinians seem not to have got that message. Wishful thinkers can be hard of hearing. Would there have been an invasion if Washington had spoken louder, or at least with a single voice?
7-29 Apr 1982: the haig shuttle & its failure

The Administration decided at a hurried White House meeting on 7 April that Haig would make an attempt at mediation between the two sides. The “Haig shuttle” occupied the diplomatic space for the following three weeks while the British Task Force sailed south, in which respect if nothing else it was probably helpful from the British point of view, since far less attractive mediators would surely have emerged if the US had not already been in the frame. But in almost every other way London found it an uncomfortable experience.

Haig’s proposals went through many variations, but essentially focussed on three things:
arrangements for Argentine withdrawal and a winding down of the military presence, British included
the creation of some form of international “interim administration” for the islands following Argentine withdrawal, to operate while
long-term sovereignty was negotiated.

The inner nature of the proposals was always obscure, deliberately so. Who would end up owning the islands? The British side contended that self-determination should apply. The Argentinians of course rejected it. Haig and his people crafted clever and complicated bridging formulas, designed to save honour and face.

Haig diligently shuttled back and forth between London, Buenos Aires and Washington, selling his scheme in best Kissinger-style, but never achieved a solid commitment from the Argentinian side to any part of it, the junta developing a habit of withdrawing concessions at the last moment and generally operating in a chaotic way. Haig put it neatly himself: “A charade … a f***ing charade, these guys are diddling me”. Even second level commanders had an effective veto, it seemed, meaning as many as 40 or 50 senior officers needed to be squared.

Had the Argentinians been prepared to accept Haig’s proposals in some form, Britain would have been under huge pressure from the US and others to do so as well, no matter how large the concessions required of us. One of the messages Haig sent to President Reagan during his long shuttle referred to a “possible personal intervention by you with Mrs Thatcher”, as if it had been agreed between them in advance that Haig could trigger one if he felt the need. That would surely have been the mechanism.

Such an event was a great threat to MT’s political survival: had the concessions been large enough, she might well have resigned rather than put her name to them. Some more tractable figure would perhaps have emerged as Prime Minister to do the deed. But that point never came. The junta wouldn’t – probably couldn’t – agree to anything.
30 APR 1982: THE NSC MEETING

Haig’s mission was finally terminated on 29 April. The President wrote to MT:

I am sure you agree that it is essential now to make clear to the world that every effort was made to achieve a fair and peaceful solution, and that the Argentine Government was offered a choice between such a solution and further hostilities. We will therefore make public a general account of the efforts we have made. While we will describe the US proposal in broad terms, we will not release it because of the difficulty that might cause you. I recognize that while you see fundamental difficulties in the proposal, you have not rejected it. We will leave no doubt that Her Majesty’s Government worked with us in good faith and was left with no choice but to proceed with military action based on the right of self-defence.

He had been privately doubtful about the shuttle for some time. In his diary for 19 April, after noting that the junta couldn’t make up its collective mind on Haig’s proposals, he wrote: “I don’t think Margaret Thatcher should be asked to concede any more”.

A meeting of the NSC was called for 30 April to hear a report from Haig and to make decisions based on a paper from the State Department, “Next Steps on Falklands”, which we publish alongside the minutes. The paper set out a range of possible actions the US might take to sanction Argentina, all designed to “make clear our support for the UK”, but also (pointing the other way) to “preserve our ability to mediate”, “provide for the security of official and private Americans in Argentina” and “minimize adverse impact on our interests in Latin America”. It was acknowledged that none of the proposed steps – the main one was a suspension of arms sales – would have “significant material effect on Argentina”. In truth the most tangible element was the public declaration of a US ’tilt’, to be blamed on Argentinian intransigence. Some “high cost, high risk options” were also included – serious economic sanctions, movement of naval forces into the area – but plainly for form’s sake only.

The meeting itself was opened by the deputy National Security Adviser, Bud McFarlane, the President always preferring to listen and observe debate among his principals, intervening to elucidate when needed and then to announce his decision. On McFarlane’s invitation the deputy director of the CIA, Admiral Bobby Inman, opened with a review of the military position, correctly predicting early action by the British in an attempt to close the runway at Port Stanley. Inman had sparred with Kirkpatrick at the earlier meeting on 7 April that authorised the Haig mediation: he was out of sympathy with the whole approach and thought ties of language, alliance, tradition, and strategic interest should side the US overwhelmingly with the UK. But on this occasion he was not in contentious mode. Policy was going his way. He drily described US intelligence that the Soviets had moved a spy satellite into an orbit which gave them the capacity tracking the Task Force, supplementing TU-95 reconnaissance aircraft based in Angola. The Cold War was never entirely out of the picture in the Reagan White House and hovered at the edge of the Falklands, potentially a decisive consideration if it obtruded significantly. There are some handwritten notes of the meeting alongside the typed minute in the file. In these Inman concludes his downbeat assessment with the words: “no happy news”.

Haig then told the story of his mission. This was a meeting designed to tilt US policy towards the British, but he opened with an analogy that implied equivalence between Britain and Argentina – an equivalence in futulity – which anticipates Borges’s later remark that the Falklands War was like “a fight between two bald men over a comb”. It would have appalled the British had they heard it:

He began by describing the situation as tragic with both sides, similar to a demented man on a ledge ready to jump, reaching for help but unable to grab our hand.

Haig went on to explain the plan he had evolved in terms he could never have used in public or in the hearing of the British. If the Argentinians had accepted it, their flag would now be flying on the Malvinas. It is as simple as that:

He then described the elements of the American plan which in effect would give ultimate sovereignty to Argentina but under evolutionary conditions which the Islanders could ultimately accept. Unfortunately, the Argentine government which is, in fact, made up of many moving and conflicting parts could not agree to the plan.

How the islanders would be brought to accept such a transfer is not explained, but presumably because they had no alternative. We have seen already that he had no real use for the notion of Falklands self-determination. Haig characterises his plan even more frankly a little later:

Our proposals, in fact, are a camouflaged transfer of sovereignty, and the Argentine foreign minister knows this, but the junta will not accept it.

Here, of course, one comes up against a big problem. How could a “camouflaged transfer of sovereignty” be consistent with the President’s principled response to the invasion: “armed aggression of that kind must not be allowed to succeed?” Wouldn’t the transfer of sovereignty have been a success for aggression, a big success, camouflaged or not? Some in the room certainly felt that way, but there is no trace of an angry post mortem on the Haig proposals, very likely because from the critics’ point of view the outcome was the one they wanted. Haig, and the junta, had been given every chance.

The disfunctionality and irrationality of the Argentine government shines through at this point (if such things can be said to shine). It was a government too divided and disorganized to recognize or accept what it was being given – almost, but not quite, its own worst enemy.

Haig concluded:

Argentina is the opposite of a pluralistic, democratic government where the lowest common denominator is consensus; in the Argentine case the lowest common denominator is extremism. The Navy holds the veto and is even more intransigent after losing South Georgia, whose Argentine garrison surrendered without firing a shot – a fact known to the Argentine government, but not to the Argentine people.

Discussion then turned to the possibility that US nationals would need to be evacuated from Argentina. This might seem a far-fetched contingency, but in the aftermath of the Tehran embassy seizure it was taken seriously. Defense Secretary Weinberger took the lead role here. No one in the Administration was more favourable to the British than him, the President included. This was a man who had tried to join the RAF in 1940 when recruiters quietly turned up at a San Francisco hotel, only to be told he lacked depth perception. He attended Margaret Thatcher’s 80th birthday party in London in a wheelchair. Like Inman, he was content to let the meeting reach its preordained conclusion. Asked about British requests for military aid, he replied in low-key style: he thought “nothing was pending, but believed more fuel would be requested at Ascension”, surely an understatement. Later accounts of the war – for example by Nico Henderson – laid heavy stress on the helpfulness of the Pentagon. Interestingly the State Department likewise played down the British need for assistance in their covering paper for the meeting.

The President made a contribution on this topic. He “interjected that he had no objection to giving materiel support but wondered it that would not significantly undercut any future role for the U.S. as a mediator”. In the typed minute Haig responds: “the Argentines have been told what we would do if they refused this offer”. In the handwritten notes a frustrated tone comes through: “Argentines have been told & told & told”.

Inman had a further intervention to make. These newly-published minutes confirm something suspected since the war itself: the US had broken Argentine codes and was reading their military traffic. The press had leaked the fact, with inevitable results:

Admiral Inman emphasized that one sour note had come out of recent developments, namely, press leaks about the US ability to read Argentine military communications, which in turn have led to a changing of the Argentine cipher. Admiral Inman hoped we would soon be able to regain our capability in that area, but the leaks had been damaging.

Without admitting that the US had broken Argentine codes, Haig’s memoirs mention an unhelpful item on ABC Nightline which he had tried to stop (Caveat, p285) when Carl Bernstein had reported. A declassified CIA document points a finger in another direction: it includes an article from the New York Times from 15 April: “US Providing British a Wide Range of Intelligence”.

Kirkpatrick also spoke, sketching the situation at the UN, to which diplomatic attention would now turn, and hazarding a characteristically out-of-step opinion as to the ultimate outcome. There would be no fighting she thought, a fix of some sort would undoubtedly be found. “The Argentines will find a way to avoid war through a face-saving device in some forum perhaps by the weekend”. Haig immediately contradicted her: “Unless Argentina softens on sovereignty, the British will go ahead and do some damage”. He proved the better judge. Thousands of miles to the south the Argentine cruiser, General Belgrano – in earlier years the USS Phoenix, a veteran of Pearl Harbor – was already in the sights of the British nuclear submarine, HMS Conqueror. Quite possibly Inman and Weinberger knew it.

And with that the President wrapped up the meeting, approving the measures proposed and making a wry comment: “it would be nice if, after all these years, the U.N. could do accomplish something as constructive as averting war between the U.K. and Argentina”. His firm words on the subject of Argentinian armed aggression against the Falklands were delivered at a prescheduled event in the State Dining Room a couple of hours later.

Find this story at January 2014

Copyright © Margaret Thatcher Foundation 2014

Watch Part 2 of our extended discussion with three of the antiwar activists who broke into an FBI office in 1971 in Media, Pennsylvania. The burglars, John Raines, Bonnie Raines and Keith Forsyth, are speaking out this week for the first time following the publication of Betty Medsger’s book, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI.

Click here to watch Part 1 of this interview.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh, as we bring you part two of this fascinating discussion, the solving of a mystery during the Vietnam War era that wasn’t solved ’til this week. Nermeen?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So we continue our discussion looking at how activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, in 1971 and disclosed secrets about the FBI’s COINTELPRO program—that is, Counterintelligence Program.

AMY GOODMAN: Until this week, their identities were not known. Joining us are two of the people who broke into the FBI’s offices, John and Bonnie Raines. John and Bonnie hosted many of the planning meetings for the burglaries at their home, where they were raising three children. Bonnie worked as a daycare director. She helped case the FBI office by posing as a college student interested in becoming an FBI agent. John Raines was a veteran of the Freedom Rides movement, a professor at Temple University. He used a Xerox machine at the school to photocopy many of the stolen documents.

We’re also joined by Betty Medsger. She is author of the new book, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI. She first reported on the stolen documents while working at The Washington Post. The activists mailed the documents to her. She was the first to reveal them; The Washington Post, the first paper to agree to publish the information in these documents. She uncovered the identities of most of the burglars in her new book. So, 40 years ago, she broke the story, and now she’s breaking the story of the identities.

And we’re joined by David Kairys, who has worked as an attorney for the activists for over four decades, a civil rights attorney and law professor at Temple University, as well.

In the first part of our discussion, we talked about how March 8th, 1971, went down, the night of the Joe Frazier-Muhammad Ali fight, using that as a cover because it would be a lot of noise and the belief that the guards would be watching this in the Media offices. But there was criticism leveled—or you feared there would be, John and Bonnie Raines—of why you did this, because you could have gone to jail for many, many years. You had three kids under 10. Professor John Raines, what was your thinking process leading up to this?

JOHN RAINES: Sure, that’s a great question. We were the only ones, out of the eight, who were not only husband and wife, but father and mother of three children under 10. And we were not into the being a martyr. We were not into jeopardizing the future of our children. We were pretty sure—if we weren’t pretty sure, we wouldn’t have, in fact, gone into that office and taken out those files. So we were pretty sure we could get away with it.

But the second thing that’s important to know is that we routinely ask, as a society, mothers and fathers to take on as part of their work highly dangerous kinds of activities. We ask that of all policemen. We ask that of everybody that works for the fire department. We ask that of mothers and fathers who are stationed overseas, sent overseas to defend our freedoms in the Army and Navy. We routinely ask of people to take on jobs that risk their families. Now, we were faced back in 1971 with nobody in Washington was going to do what had to be done if we were going to reveal what J. Edgar Hoover was doing with his FBI. We were the last line of defense. So, as citizens, we stepped forward and did what we had to do because nobody in Washington would do what they should have done. Then, after we did what we did, people in Washington, with the help of Betty’s revealing stories in the Post, then they began, finally, to oversee J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, and things changed.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And you spoke to family members. In the event that you were caught and imprisoned, you spoke to some of your family members and asked them to care for your children. What exactly did you tell them you were about to do?

BONNIE RAINES: Well, we didn’t tell them exactly what we had planned. We did have to let them know the high level of jeopardy and that we were doing this after much careful thought and involved with other people who we thought were responsible and careful. And we asked them, if the worst happened and we were convicted and sent to prison, if they would care for our children. So we had that conversation with John’s older brother Bob and with my mother and father.

AMY GOODMAN: When did you tell your children?

BONNIE RAINES: It was later, when they were old enough, as teenagers, to put it in perspective. We’ve always been a political family and involved our children in political activities of various kinds. But we needed to wait until it could fit into what I describe as kind of the family lore. And it was very easy and very natural to tell them about it. And they were a little bit shocked, but also quite proud, I have to say.

AMY GOODMAN: How did you tell them? Can you describe the scene? Did you actually sit them down together?

BONNIE RAINES: Can you remember that?

JOHN RAINES: I’m not sure. Do you remember it? We waited until they were, I think, teenagers, so that they could understand kind of the larger political context.

AMY GOODMAN: But this makes it even more amazing that this secret has been kept for so long.

BONNIE RAINES: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

JOHN RAINES: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: You had four children—

BONNIE RAINES: By that time.

AMY GOODMAN: —that you told.

BONNIE RAINES: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: And you’re just two of the eight. There was also a ninth person. And if you could tell us about him, because he pulled out before the action took place, and you had further interactions with him.

JOHN RAINES: I did. He—I won’t name him, but he showed up on our front door, the door of our house in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. And he said, “I need to talk with you, John.” I said, “Well, come on in.” And we went in, and he looked me in the eye, and he said, “I think I’m going to have to turn you in.”

AMY GOODMAN: When was this?

JOHN RAINES: Oh, it was the two or three weeks after, after the break-in. So, I, you know—and he knew all the names. I mean, if he had turned us in, we were going to jail.

AMY GOODMAN: He was in on all the planning meetings.

JOHN RAINES: He was.

AMY GOODMAN: He had pulled out just at the last second.

JOHN RAINES: That’s right. That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: And what did he say when he pulled out, by the way?

JOHN RAINES: Well, he said, “I’ve been told by my girlfriend that there are files that you still have that are highly dangerous files in terms of threatening national security, that name various missile sites, anti-missile sites, around Philadelphia and so on.” And I said, “No, no, no, there’s nothing like that in these files.” Then I said to him, “Well, why did you think there was?” And he said, “Well, my girlfriend,” and so on. I said, “Have you ever thought that maybe your girlfriend works for the FBI?” And, you know, his face went like that. And then he—he left. And he kept the secret to himself.

AMY GOODMAN: And that’s because then it’s not only him; it’s also his girlfriend who knew. We’re talking about 40 years of keeping this secret.

JOHN RAINES: Yeah.

BONNIE RAINES: Mm-hmm.

JOHN RAINES: His girlfriend, I think, didn’t know who we were. I don’t think he said that. I think he simply—she gave him the information that was false information. It was fed, I think, by the FBI to him that there were these very dangerous files.

AMY GOODMAN: J. Edgar Hoover was desperate to get you.

JOHN RAINES: Oh—

AMY GOODMAN: He had over a hundred agents.

JOHN RAINES: Two hundred.

BONNIE RAINES: Two hundred agents.

AMY GOODMAN: Two hundred agents. It was your Xerox machine—

JOHN RAINES: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —that they were—well, tell us about the Xerox machine at Temple University that you used to make Xerox—sounds a little like Dan Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, when he xeroxed the Pentagon Papers.

JOHN RAINES: Well, back then, nobody knew—or not many people knew—that every Xerox machine leaves its own fingerprint from the drum. Every drum on every Xerox machine has its own separate fingerprint. And therefore, anything that is xeroxed on that machine can be traced back exactly to that machine. Now, when we found that out, I very quickly, you know, phoned David—phoned—

BONNIE RAINES: Bill.

JOHN RAINES: Bill Davidon.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, Bill Davidon, meanwhile, is being tapped, for other reasons, or—

JOHN RAINES: He’s being tapped.

AMY GOODMAN: —for very similar reasons.

JOHN RAINES: But he’s also using the Xerox machine at Haverford College. And I said, “Hey, hey, hey, Bill.” So he went and he scratched the surface of the drum at Haverford. And—

DAVID KAIRYS: You know, the main reason—

AMY GOODMAN: David Kairys.

DAVID KAIRYS: —they didn’t get caught—I mean, you’re right. There’s all these possibilities. Life is so contingent, and things could be so different than they turn out to be. But the main thing is the FBI used a typical American law enforcement approach. It was, instead of looking for who did it and investigating a range of people, the glommed onto one person, who they were sure, for whatever reasons, did it. And he was a leader of the Catholic Left, John Peter Grady. He had raided a lot of draft boards. They were sure he did it.

AMY GOODMAN: He was Camden, New Jersey.

DAVID KAIRYS: He also did Camden.

BETTY MEDSGER: He was a lot of things.

DAVID KAIRYS: Yeah, he did a lot of these.

AMY GOODMAN: From Camden.

DAVID KAIRYS: Yeah. And they thought that he did it, so they had 200 agents, but they’re all looking for the wrong thing. You see, they’re all misdirected and not—they thought there was a locksmith, so they investigated all the locksmiths in the Philadelphia area. They didn’t know all you needed was Keith.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to bring Keith Forsyth back in a minute.

DAVID KAIRYS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: But he just learned it in a course on—I can’t say online—

JOHN RAINES: Yeah.

DAVID KAIRYS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —because you didn’t have the Internet at the time, right?

BONNIE RAINES: Correspondence.

BETTY MEDSGER: Yes, library.

AMY GOODMAN: Correspondence course.

DAVID KAIRYS: And he made his own tools rather than go to a store and buy them, which would be a record of that. So, see, they were extremely careful. And the FBI just let itself be completely misdirected.

BETTY MEDSGER: I’d also like to add that in addition—

AMY GOODMAN: Betty Medsger.

BETTY MEDSGER: In addition to focusing on John Peter Grady, they also focused on the ninth burglar. And they put him under 24-hour surveillance within 24 hours of the burglary and continued to monitor him for weeks.

AMY GOODMAN: The one who didn’t do it.

DAVID KAIRYS: Right.

BETTY MEDSGER: The one who didn’t do it.

DAVID KAIRYS: Who John just spoke of.

BETTY MEDSGER: Yes, yes. There were three main people that they targeted immediately: John Peter Grady—they thought he was the leader of the group—

AMY GOODMAN: And just very quickly, explain who he is. His children are well-known as activists today, especially—

DAVID KAIRYS: Yes.

BETTY MEDSGER: That’s right. That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: —upstate New York, taking on issues of drones.

BETTY MEDSGER: That’s right. Well, he was a—he was a leader, very prominent within the Catholic peace movement. He was the person in the Catholic peace movement who moved it from the Catonsville 9 method of going in in broad daylight and walking out and waiting for arrest.

AMY GOODMAN: That was the Catonsville 9 in Catonsville, Maryland, led by Dan—Fathers Dan and Phil Berrigan, who burned draft records, using napalm, that they had pulled out of the Catonsville draft office.

BETTY MEDSGER: Right. And John Grady was the leader of the part of the Catholic peace movement that then took things to another level, which was: Do these actions, but do them in order to actually do damage to the ability of the draft boards, so that they can’t operate and bring people into the service, and get away with it so you can go on and raid more draft boards. He was the key person in the Catholic peace movement who believed that that was needed, that things needed to be done that way. So, the FBI had not been successful in arresting many of the people. There were, you know, 350 draft board raids and hundreds of people involved in them. And they had not been very successful at finding these people. And he was somebody that they assumed was involved in many of them, and they immediately, for that reason, I think, assumed that he had led this group. So they focused on him, they focused on the ninth burglar, and they also focused on Bonnie. But they never knew Bonnie’s name.

DAVID KAIRYS: Never knew who she was.

BETTY MEDSGER: They knew her face, and they had that image, that art sketch that had been drawn based on the memories of the men in the office who saw her.

AMY GOODMAN: We touched on this in part one, but—of our discussion, but, Bonnie Raines, can you describe what you did before March 8th, the day that you all broke into the Media office? Talk about your experience.

BONNIE RAINES: Well, many of the planning meetings and the scheduling of what we called casing the building at night took place from our house. So I was involved in much of that, but not really one of the prominent members of the group, until we realized that we needed to have someone get inside the offices to look at the possibility that there would be security measures, burglar alarms over the doors, whether the file cabinets were locked. So I was elected to do that. And I was to pose as a Swarthmore College student and disguise myself, as much as I possibly could, and make an appointment to go in and interview the head of the office about opportunities for women in the FBI. And they were very cordial. They spent enough time with me to allow me to really look around to see everything, to gather all the information.

JOHN RAINES: They didn’t notice that you kept your gloves on.

BONNIE RAINES: I kept my gloves on the whole time I was taking those—

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And they never asked you your name, right?

BONNIE RAINES: No.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: You never gave a name.

BONNIE RAINES: No. No, they never did. I think, in the course of conversation, I was asked where I was from. And I said, I think, “Hartford, Connecticut,” or something. But the good news was that I was able to get that last important piece of information about the inside of the office, and then that allowed us to make a decision to actually plan to go ahead with it on March 8th.

AMY GOODMAN: So, they—it was from that that they got the description of you with these fake glasses and—

BONNIE RAINES: Yes, yes, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —a hat on.

BONNIE RAINES: I had long hair, and I tucked my hair all up inside—it was February, so I had a winter hat and looked a little shabby, like I might have been a student on a scholarship at Swarthmore. But I was very polite, and they were very cordial, and it went very, very well. And they never noticed that I never took my gloves off the whole time I was taking notes.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And the night of the burglary, what did you actually do on the night, March 8th?

BONNIE RAINES: My role—we each had an assigned role, and my role was to be in a car on a side street at the building, so that if a police patrol came along on that street and would then turn around to be at the front of the building and might see our four fellow companions leaving the building, I was to pretend that my car had broken down and block the street so that they couldn’t come around to the front of the building. I didn’t have to do that, as it turned out.

AMY GOODMAN: And the other people involved, Betty Medsger, some have decided to come forward, and some haven’t. Bill Davidon, who wanted to come forward, has just recently died. He had Parkinson’s. Talk—since you spoke with him a lot—and, of course, all of you knew him, a professor at Haverford—I was actually wondering if you can tell us the story of his meeting with Henry Kissinger. This is astounding. Five days—I was talking to his daughter last night, and she said he sort of had a to-do list. You know, meet with Henry Kissinger at the White House, break into the Media offices and steal the FBI documents—that was his to-do list for the week.

JOHN RAINES: Yeah, that’s quite short.

AMY GOODMAN: But how did he end up meeting with the national security adviser, Henry Kissinger?

BETTY MEDSGER: Yeah, it’s an amazing thing to think about, that just two days before the burglary there’s the leader of the burglary in the Situation Room of the White House. Well, Bill never missed an opportunity to make the case against the war. And he really didn’t want to go to the White House that morning, particularly, but it’s—an interesting person had set it up. Brian McDonald was a young Quaker from Philadelphia who the previous—immediately after Nixon announced that we were invading Cambodia, at the end of April in 1970, Brian came to Washington and sat on the street—sidewalk in front of the White House and was fasting and—in protest of what Nixon had done. And he was there for quite some time. And during that time, I remember Shirley MacLaine came to know him, and some other people, and they quietly introduced Kissinger to Brian. And a strange combination, but they actually became real friends, a friendship that lasted until Brian died about a decade ago. But it was Brian who knew all parties involved, the three people who came to that meeting, including Bill and Kissinger. And so, he asked Kissinger to be willing to meet with them to talk about the war. And Kissinger said—because he liked Brian so much, agreed that he would.

So, the three people were Bill and two other people, Tom Davidson and Sister Beverly Bell. All three of them were unindicted co-conspirators in an indictment that had just come down that January that involved J. Edgar Hoover. It was an indictment that charged Phil Berrigan, Elizabeth McAlister and a few other people. They were indicted, and then there was a series of people, including Bill Davidon, who were unindicted co-conspirators in a conspiracy to kidnap Henry Kissinger and to bomb tunnels under federal buildings in Washington.

Now, the Hoover involvement comes the previous November, when Hoover, against the advice of his officials, who hardly ever spoke up to urge him to not do something, Hoover went before a committee of two people, and then—on the Hill, a congressional committee, and then immediately distributed his statement to as many press as they could get it to afterwards. And in that statement, he announced that these people were conducting this conspiracy. And it was his typical method of trying to convince members of Congress to give him more money, which always happened. But this was a very alarming thing, the idea that these people—priests and nuns and their colleagues—were—who were known for being nonviolent activists, were planning this violent thing. And the Justice Department and the FBI had investigated this, and the FBI people had decided that there was no plan, there was no real plan, and that the case should be abandoned. And Hoover knew that, but nevertheless made that public accusation. And that was enormous news at the time.

And then, the Justice Department—again, knowing that there was no such plan—in order to save Hoover’s face, went forward with a grand jury and designed it in such a way, eventually, in a superseding indictment, that people could be found guilty if they had participated in plans not only to kidnap Kissinger or to bomb tunnels under Washington, but to raid draft boards—if they had done any one of those things. Well, they all had raided draft boards. But the impact of it all, of course, on the public was: They wanted to kidnap Kissinger or set off bombs. By the way, the case, two years later, failed, and there was no conviction. But at this time, when Bill goes to the White House with two of the other unindicted co-conspirators, they are sitting there with the person that they’re supposedly planning to kidnap. So that seemed—made it even more strange.

And what they—they had a discussion for about an hour in the Situation Room, where many aspects of the Vietnam War had been planned, and something that they were quite aware of. And it was in the—ultimately, it was a frustrating meeting, where they felt that they were meeting with a—having a civil conversation with a friendly enemy, who at that time was responsible for more bombing. But—

AMY GOODMAN: Interestingly, Kissinger felt he was being smeared, is that right?

BETTY MEDSGER: Felt he was what?

AMY GOODMAN: Being smeared in the academic community.

BETTY MEDSGER: Oh, you mean not by them, but elsewhere.

AMY GOODMAN: Right.

BETTY MEDSGER: Yes, yes, that’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: And part of why he wanted to meet with another professor, with Bill Davidon, to change the alienation he felt from the academic community that he valued.

BETTY MEDSGER: Yes, I think that’s true, although I—reading from Kissinger’s biography, I think he looked at this primarily as meeting with religious people, as he spoke of their high ideals and being in a spiritual world, whereas he was in the real world, and that they couldn’t really do anything, but he had to do something, whereas in fact they did not think of it as a religious confrontation or issue with him. They, too, were very much of the real world and wanted to see negotiations taking place and to stop the war, rather than the direction that he was taking it.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And after the break-in on March 8th, 1971, Bill Davidon, whose idea it actually was, was in fact never questioned by the FBI, is that correct?

BETTY MEDSGER: Yes, and that relates to the case that I was just talking about. The FBI was prepared to go after Bill Davidon very, very seriously. And the Justice—when the Justice Department found out about this, they put out an order that he should not be questioned—no questioning of Bill Davidon—which was quite amazing, given his situation and the fact that he was the leader of the group. And that went into effect. And for the entire length of the investigation, Bill was never questioned by the FBI.

AMY GOODMAN: Why did they put this out?

BETTY MEDSGER: Oh, I’m sorry, I meant to explain it. Because—they prohibited the FBI from questioning him because they were so intent on building a successful case in the Harrisburg indictment, and they didn’t want to bring any more confusion into the situation.

AMY GOODMAN: And the Harrisburg indictment was?

BETTY MEDSGER: And that—yes, the Harrisburg indictment was the case of the conspiracy—

AMY GOODMAN: Of the—to kidnap Henry Kissinger.

BETTY MEDSGER: —the alleged conspiracy to kidnap.

DAVID KAIRYS: And it was a big national publicity. And Hoover was being criticized for indicting people for a conspiracy that was just ridiculous.

BETTY MEDSGER: And this would have brought more attention that they did not want brought to that.

AMY GOODMAN: Before we bring Keith Forsyth back in to join his other co-conspirators here at the table, I wanted to ask you, David Kairys, about the legality of all of this.

DAVID KAIRYS: Sure.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, of course, they had broken the law by breaking into the Media, Pennsylvania, FBI offices. Now, the statute of limitations is over. But can the authorities get around that, say, “New evidence has been presented: We now know their names”?

DAVID KAIRYS: That wouldn’t—that wouldn’t be a legitimate ground. There are things they could try, that, given the way they’ve been interpreted in law, would just not work. There’s really nothing they could do. Now, they do have discretion and a lot of power to put people through criminal trials even though they’re not going to win—the government. So, they could—and this is something you have to weigh in a situation like this—they could bring charges and just make you get lawyers and prepare a defense and disrupt your life, try to hold you on bail. There’s all those things they could do. But—and we would be arguing that it’s not being done in good faith, because there’s—the statute of limitations has run. So, I think, ultimately, it would work out that they are not convicted of anything, because of the statute of limitations, but you can’t—you can’t be sure that the government might not make you go through—

AMY GOODMAN: The FBI’s response today?

DAVID KAIRYS: Yesterday’s statement, I thought, was very positive. I actually had anticipated that they would say something like, “We’re looking into it. We’ll have to get back to you.” Instead of that, they seemed—they almost claimed credit for it. It’s like: Things happened that caused reforms, and we like these reforms. So, they’re—you know, they’re just reformers.

AMY GOODMAN: That could bode well for Edward Snowden.

DAVID KAIRYS: You’re—instead of FBI informers, you’re FBI reformers.

BETTY MEDSGER: They also said, I understand, to one reporter, “We didn’t have very good security.”

AMY GOODMAN: This is amazing. I mean, the actual quote of Michael Kortan, FBI spokesperson, “A number of events during that era, including the burglary, contributed to changes in how the FBI identified and addressed domestic security threats, leading to reform of the FBI’s intelligence policies and practices, including the creation of investigative guidelines by the Department of Justice.” I mean, this is very significant for Edward Snowden, because it’s saying—

DAVID KAIRYS: Oh, I think it is.

AMY GOODMAN: —if what you did led to reforms, then the good outweighed what they would consider the bad of the burglary.

DAVID KAIRYS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: What does this mean for Edward Snowden? The response has been enormous in terms of calls, not only in this country, but around the world, for reform.

DAVID KAIRYS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: David, if you would like to weigh in on that—John, if you would like to weigh in on that, John Raines?

JOHN RAINES: Well, yeah, I think that what we were trying to do back in 1971, Snowden is trying to do right now. And that is to give the information that citizens need to decide, as citizens, what their government should do and should not do. And I think that we faced an FBI with a director called J. Edgar Hoover that was furious at us, and thank goodness we got away with it. Snowden faces governments, especially CIA and NSA, who want to make decisions about this massive kind of surveillance that they have. They vacuum up all our personal information, all of our emails, all of our correspondence. They say that they’re not listening to the emails. Well, they’ve got the technology to listen. Are we supposed to believe that they’re not listening to—you know, reading what we’re saying on our emails? That’s a—anyway, Snowden is facing the same kind of retribution of people of power, and he doesn’t deserve that. I see him as a public servant who, as a public servant, did serve the public, giving us the information we have a right to know, so that we can instruct the people in Washington what we, the people, think they should do and not do.

DAVID KAIRYS: The basic similarity in Snowden and the Media burglars, I think, for those of us who would have never had the courage to do such things, either one of them—and I include myself—they took this enormous risk, a really unbelievable personal risk, so that the rest of us could find out, in this case, what our FBI was doing or to expose wrongdoing. It’s the best American tradition. I mean, to go back to a group that’s got a different meaning these days, the original Tea Party was an illegal act. They didn’t stand there and say, “Arrest me for it.” They wanted to get away.

BETTY MEDSGER: And the Underground Railroad.

DAVID KAIRYS: Underground Railroad, the violations of the Fugitive Slave Acts. The Revolution itself, the American Revolution itself, was illegal under existing law. And I still—after 40 years of knowing these folks well, it still amazes me that they took the personal risk that they did. And this is something that, to me, should be praised.

AMY GOODMAN: On that note, we’re going to reunite those who were involved in the burglary that night. Some might talk about the liberation of these documents; others, the stealing of these documents. David Kairys, thanks for joining us.

DAVID KAIRYS: Sure.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to be joined now by Keith Forsyth, in addition to John and Bonnie Raines, and Betty Medsger, the author of The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI. She is revealing this week, in this book, the names, the identities, of most of those involved with the burglary that night, March 8th, 1971. They called themselves—they, with five others—the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. And on March 8th, 1971, they broke into the offices of the FBI in Media, Pennsylvania, and got—how many documents, ultimately?

JOHN RAINES: About a thousand.

AMY GOODMAN: About a thousand documents. Did you go through them, John Raines, before you sent them off to Betty Medsger at The Washington Post and Tom Wicker—

JOHN RAINES: Oh, yes. Oh, yes, we were very careful about that.

AMY GOODMAN: —of The New York Times and Jack Nelson?

JOHN RAINES: We separated the files into what were clearly legitimate files, from our point of view—that is, they involved crime. And we didn’t want to release those files, because it had names of witnesses and things like that. That was about 40 percent of those files. Sixty percent of the files were clearly political in intent, and those were the ones we began to sort through. And we began to find—even on the morning, early morning, of the night, we began to find documents that were quite exciting.

AMY GOODMAN: Like?

JOHN RAINES: Well, like the one that said, “Let’s increase the paranoia and have these folks be persuaded that there’s a FBI agent behind every mailbox.” I mean, that is—that’s not surveillance; that’s obviously intimidation. All right? Intimidation is a political act; it’s not an act of an investigative organization like the FBI.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Betty Medsger, when—one of the most damning programs that was revealed in these documents was COINTELPRO, but when you first received the documents, you had no idea what that program was. So how long after you got the documents did you find out what this program was and what it entailed?

BETTY MEDSGER: Yeah, the document that had COINTELPRO on it was just a routing slip. “COINTELPRO–New Left” was a label at the top. We had no idea what it was. None of us who received it had any idea what it was. The FBI was watching to see if that would ever be released. And because I wrote about something that was in that document, they knew, as of that day, that it had been released, and went into high gear. Hoover said, “We’ll stop this program.” And what he meant was, as he explained to agents, was, “We no longer use that name.” The program continued, but without that name. We had no idea what it was until, thanks to Carl Stern, by the end—at the end of 1973—

AMY GOODMAN: Of NBC.

BETTY MEDSGER: Carl Stern was the NBC reporter who covered the Department of Justice at that time. And he was in an office of the Senate committee, and they said, “Have you ever seen this?” And Carl had not seen it. And he was intrigued by the fact that at the bottom of the cover—of this routing slip were instructions for FBI agents to give the attached article on the need for control of students on campuses who were protesting the war—there was a note asking FBI agents to write anonymous letters and deliver this or mail it to unfriendly administrators, or to just hand it to friendly administrators. And Carl thought, “This is very strange.” And so, within a matter of days, he asked the FBI to tell him what COINTELPRO was and provide documentation of what it was. And they turned him down.

He went through attorney generals, various attorney generals at that time, because they were changing as a result of Watergate. And then, finally, he sued, under the Freedom of Information Act. Until then, Hoover had always instructed officials to ignore any applications under the Freedom of Information Act. But Carl pursued this through the courts and won, became the first person to succeed under the Freedom of Information Act in getting anything out of the FBI.

And what he received were the documents that immediately became news and explained that these dirty tricks operations had been going on since 1956. They were harassment. They were kind of activities that would seem to have nothing to do with law enforcement or intelligence gathering. Instead, they were secret harassment, sometimes quite violent and destroying people’s reputation.

AMY GOODMAN: Give us examples. And again, COINTELPRO means Counterintelligence Program.

BETTY MEDSGER: Counterintel. One example is what they did to actress Jean Seberg.

JOHN RAINES: Oh, yeah.

BETTY MEDSGER: Jean Seberg, at that time, was a very popular actress. And she had made a contribution to the Black Panthers in Los Angeles, something that—and because the Panthers were under great surveillance, the FBI knew that. And she was pregnant. And a way COINTELPRO operated, agents were invited to submit proposals for these dirty tricks operations, and then the proposal would go back to Washington. And Hoover would read them and decide whether or not they should be carried out. And the proposal was to plant a rumor that the baby she was carrying, that the father of the baby was a Black Panther in Los Angeles. And Hoover was so happy with this proposal, and he wrote a response saying that he thought it was terrific. But he thought that they should wait until she was more noticeably pregnant, wait a few months, so that it would have a greater impact. The plan was to plant the rumor with a gossip columnist. And the people in Los Angeles were so eager to carry it forward that they didn’t wait until she was more noticeably pregnant. And what a freelance reporter, Allan Jallon, later revealed in the Los Angeles Times was that the FBI actually planted that rumor with editors of the Los Angeles Times, who then gave it to a gossip columnist.

AMY GOODMAN: And they knew they were getting this from an FBI source.

BETTY MEDSGER: They knew they were getting it from an FBI source. And they planted—they gave it to a gossip columnist. She wasn’t named, but the description was so obvious that people, especially in Los Angeles, knew, and she knew, that they would—I mean, Jean Seberg knew that it was she who everyone realized was the object of this. And the result was quite tragic. She was so upset when this was published in the Los Angeles Times that she gave birth very soon to a premature baby, who died very soon after birth, a white baby girl. And then, years later, on the anniversary of the birth of that dead child, Jean Seberg committed suicide. And at that time, Director Webster put out a statement that said, “We are out of this business forever. No more COINTELPRO.” But it is a dramatic illustration of how extreme many of the COINTELPRO operations were. And they were all kinds of people, not everyone well known.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: I want to turn to Noam Chomsky, world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author. He’s Institute Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2011, Chomsky spoke to Democracy Now! about COINTELPRO.

NOAM CHOMSKY: COINTELPRO, which you mentioned, is actually the worst systematic and extended violation of basic civil rights by the federal government. It maybe compares with Wilson’s Red Scare. But COINTELPRO went on from the late ’50s right through all of the ’60s; it finally ended, at least theoretically ended, when the courts terminated it in the early ’70s. And it was serious.

It started, as is everything, going after the Communist Party, then the Puerto Rican Independence Party. Then it extended—the women’s movement, the New Left, but particularly black nationalists. And it ended up—didn’t end up, but one of the events was a straight Gestapo-style assassination of two black organizers, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, literally. I mean, the FBI set up the assassination. The Chicago police actually carried it out, broke into the apartment at 4:00 in the morning and murdered them. Fake information that came from the FBI about arms stores and so on. There was almost nothing about it. In fact, the information about this, remarkably, was released at about the same time as Watergate. I mean, as compared with this, Watergate was a tea party. There was nothing, you know?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was Noam Chomsky, world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author, speaking to Democracy Now! Keith Forsyth, could you talk about the significance of what Professor Chomsky said? And also, Noam Chomsky was part of the group Resist, which was one of the groups to which those FBI documents had been sent by you.

KEITH FORSYTH: Correct. So, at some point in the process after the initial mailing, Bill eventually hand-delivered all of the political documents that we had selected for distribution to the Resist office in Boston.

AMY GOODMAN: This was Bill Davidon—

KEITH FORSYTH: Bill Davidon, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —the Haverford professor and well-known antiwar activist.

KEITH FORSYTH: Yes. And one of the examples that Mr. Chomsky cited was the assassination of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, which we all knew about, but we didn’t know the extent of the FBI involvement. That came out later. As it turned out, the FBI had an informant in the Chicago Black Panther organization who provided a map of the apartment where the Panther leadership was staying, including a big X on the location where Fred Hampton slept.

BETTY MEDSGER: Fred’s bed.

KEITH FORSYTH: Fred’s bed, yeah, Fred’s bed. This map was provided to Hanrahan, the—I believe he was a district attorney in Chicago, and a—had a special unit of police whose focus was to target the Panthers. And Fred Hampton was drugged one night and was sleeping very soundly when the police broke in early in the morning. And they—they killed Mark Clark, and they shot and killed Fred Hampton—excuse me—in his bed, while he was sleeping.

JOHN RAINES: He wasn’t dead.

KEITH FORSYTH: Oh, right. That’s right.

JOHN RAINES: He wasn’t dead.

AMY GOODMAN: John Raines.

JOHN RAINES: He was shot, he was wounded, but he wasn’t dead. And then his girlfriend, who was pregnant, was in the same room, in the bedroom. Two policemen came in—two Chicago policemen came in. And they said—and she heard them say, “Well, it looks like he’s going to make it.” And one of the guys took out his revolver, put the revolver on the back of Fred’s head and blew him away, and said, “Now he’s good and dead.”

AMY GOODMAN: This was December 4th, 1969, a year and a few months before you raided the FBI offices—

KEITH FORSYTH: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: —in Media.

KEITH FORSYTH: And later on—

JOHN RAINES: That’s the kind of thing that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was involved in—I mean, radically unconstitutional, illegal. They—assassination, as Keith said.

BONNIE RAINES: Horrifying, horrifying, horrifying.

JOHN RAINES: Yeah.

KEITH FORSYTH: Later on, there was an FBI document discussing, evaluating this raid. And I no longer recall the exact wording, but it was words to the effect of: “The result was very satisfactory. We got the result that we wanted.”

AMY GOODMAN: You, Keith, had a wrench. You had tools to break in, and that’s what you used to get into the offices. Forty years later, Edward Snowden, you know, uses his digital skills in order to get these documents. Do you identify with him?

KEITH FORSYTH: I do. His skills are far more difficult to master than mine.

AMY GOODMAN: How did you learn?

KEITH FORSYTH: I started with a correspondence course in locksmithing, which I took originally to assist in the draft board raid movement, to try to facilitate getting in and out of draft boards. And then—then, I also—I was actually working part-time as a locksmith on the side, in addition to driving a cab, so I got some practice there. And then we practiced—I practiced quite extensively at John and Bonnie’s house, made up a little sort of fake door with a whole—five or six locks in it, so you could, you know, work different ones, and just practiced fairly diligently to try to get the time down. So…

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Betty Medsger, can you talk about FBI Agent Welch?

BETTY MEDSGER: Yes. Neil Welch played a number of important roles at that time and was an agent quite different from most FBI agents. While the culture of the FBI was dominant—dominated by Hoover’s personality and many offices of the FBI were dominated also by COINTELPRO demands and actions similar to those kinds of operations, political spying and so forth, there were a few agents who didn’t like that culture. It was very hard to resist it. But Neil Welch was an agent, a special agent in charge at various places, and he was, I think, the only special agent in charge in the FBI who refused to carry out Hoover’s orders that COINTELPRO programs take place. He refused to let his agents participate in them, and at times was placed on probation because of this.

A couple things about him later on. First of all, he happened to be the agent in charge of the Philadelphia office five years after the burglary, when the statute of limitations expired on the burglary. And it is he who signed the document closing the case. He claims—and I’m sure this is true—that it was a matter of routine; it was time to do that, since the burglars had not been found and there was no hope that they would be. I think he was also happy to do so, because he, years later, when I interviewed him, told me that although he doesn’t think that people should burglarize FBI offices, that he nevertheless thought that these people had done a heroic thing that was very important.

And something else that he did that shows the change that took place in the years immediately afterwards, Clarence Kelley became the director of the FBI, the first full director after J. Edgar Hoover. It was a—he came in at a critical time, when people in the Justice Department and Congress were first starting to look at the FBI and raise questions. And he at first defended COINTELPRO, later apologized for it. But at one point, he finally—he ordered Welch to come to Washington to go into the domestic intelligence files and go through every single one of them and test whether or not they should be held open. Very few were held open. Most of them were closed by Welch. And that was not reported at the time. It was not known. But it really symbolizes the dramatic change that did take place.

AMY GOODMAN: John Raines, can you—what did you teach at Temple University? And—

JOHN RAINES: Well, I taught Christian social ethics.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the influence of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, his significance, who he was?

JOHN RAINES: Well, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor and theologian. And he spent a year or two at Union Theological Seminary, which is where I would later get my theological training. The Second World War was on, just beginning, and he decided he had to go back to Germany. He would be safe in this country, but he had decided that he was not going to choose safety. He would go back to his country, where his people were. And Hitler was very much against, of course, this theologian, this marvelous man. And finally, they decided, a group within this kind of religious underground, that they should undertake the assassination of Hitler. And his name was associated with that effort, and he was killed after that assassination failed.

AMY GOODMAN: And his influence on your decision to do what you did May 8th, 1971, with your wife Bonnie and the others?

JOHN RAINES: Well, it was a—it was an example of, one, significant identity with his nation; two, taking on grave personal risks in order to save that nation from what was happening to Germany under Hitler. And he paid the ultimate price for that. Bonhoeffer paid the ultimate price for that. And that was a significant kind of inspiration for those of us, just like Martin Luther King was also, taking a risk for what you know to be right and following that risk, if you have to, all the way to the cross.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Betty Medsger, his influence on Bill Davidon?

BETTY MEDSGER: Well, I would just like to say something I learned about his—how both John and Bonhoeffer were influenced in their move toward resistance by African-American people. I didn’t realize, until I did the research for the book, that Bonhoeffer, after he returned to Germany and wrote about his move toward resistance, attributed his ability to decide to resist the government to what he learned here in Harlem from African Americans and about their struggle and their willingness to resist. And I found—when I discovered that, I mean, even his language in describing it was so similar to the way John described that working with African Americans, resisting with them in the South, was what gave John courage to resist.

JOHN RAINES: Oh, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: John, I was wondering if you could read the statement you read the morning after the burglary to a Reuters reporter. Now, this was what? March 9th, 1971.

BONNIE RAINES: About 5:30 in the morning.

AMY GOODMAN: Describe it. Bonnie, what was going on? You were in the farmhouse?

BONNIE RAINES: No, we were headed back to our home in our car, and it was early morning. We had decided that the statement that the group had written should be released the very same day, if possible. And so, we stopped in our car headed back into the city at a public phone, and John called a reporter from Reuters whom we’d—I think Bill Davidon had arranged that—called him, woke him up and read the statement to him over the phone.

JOHN RAINES: OK, the statement is, that I read: “On the night of March 8, 1971, the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI removed files from the Media, Pennsylvania, office of the FBI. These files will now be studied to determine: one, the nature and extent of surveillance and intimidation carried on by this office of the FBI, particularly against groups and individuals working for a more just, humane and peaceful society; two, to determine how much of the FBI’s efforts are spent on relatively minor crimes by the poor and the powerless against whom they can get a more glamorous conviction rate, instead of investigating truly serious crimes by those with money and influence which cause great damage to the lives of many people—crimes such as war profiteering, monopolistic practices, institutional racism, organized crime, and the mass distribution of lethal drugs; finally, three, the extent of illegal practices by the FBI, such as eavesdropping, entrapment, and the use of provocateurs and informers.”

It goes on: “As this study proceeds, the results obtained along with the FBI documents pertaining to them will be sent to people in public life who have demonstrated the integrity, courage and commitment to democratic values which are necessary to effectively challenge the repressive policies of the FBI.

“As long as the United States government wages war against Indochina in defiance of the vast majority who want all troops and weapons withdrawn this year, and extends that war and suffering under the guise of reducing it, as long as great economic and political power remains concentrated in the hands of a small clique not subject to democratic scrutiny and control, then repression, intimidation, and entrapment are to be expected. We do not believe that this destruction of democracy and democratic society results simply from the evilness, egoism or senility of some leaders. Rather, this destruction is the result of certain undemocratic social, economic and political institutions.”

NERMEEN SHAIKH: I want to turn to comments that Glenn Greenwald wrote on Tuesday about—Glenn Greenwald is the journalist who first broke the story about Edward Snowden and his NSA revelations. He wrote a piece yesterday, Tuesday, responding to the revelations about the 1971 FBI break-in. Greenwald writes, quote, “Just as is true of Daniel Ellsberg today, these activists will be widely hailed as heroic, noble, courageous, etc. That’s because it’s incredibly easy to praise people who challenge governments of the distant past, and much harder to do so for those who challenge those who wield actual power today.”

So, Betty, I’d like to ask you: How were your reports received then? How did people writing in response to the documents, the articles that you wrote, respond to the fact that these activists had broken into the FBI, taken these documents, and that The Washington Post had made the decision to publish them?

BETTY MEDSGER: Well, the letters to the editor were mixed. I think the majority were positive. People were shocked. They were also glad that evidence had been presented to them, that they had no idea of what existed. There were other—I mean, this was a time of Cold War attitudes still being very—so there were many people who accused us of being communist and trying to serve a communist purpose by making these documents public. There also was a very strong response among a few people in Congress that the adulation of Hoover in Congress needed to stop and questions needed to be asked for the first time—very strong effort to press for an investigation. Also, newspaper editorial writers at papers that had only written positive things about Hoover also called for investigations. I mean, that turned out to be a relatively long process, but those investigations did take place in 1975, when there was a buildup of additional revelations, including coming to understand what COINTELPRO was, and then Sy Hersh’s article in December 1974 that revealed that the CIA, in violation of its charter, was also engaged in massive domestic surveillance. That sort of was the tipping point. There was this string of things, and then Congress did. But this all started with the Media file release and the reaction.

AMY GOODMAN: And you, really, in pushing for your piece to be published, you laid the groundwork—though Katharine Graham first didn’t want to and then ultimately did—for Watergate, because the same thing was taking place with Woodward and Bernstein, but now she had the experience of releasing—releasing your piece.

BETTY MEDSGER: Yeah, I mean, I like to think that there was a buildup of—as she became more experienced with this through time. And certainly it was—she was making very tough decisions. I mean, it’s easy for those of us who are simply finding the stories and thinking, “Boy, this is a story there’s no way they could refuse to publish,” to realize that there were pressures. And in the instance of the press—I mean, of The Washington Post, the fact that they owned television stations and the Nixon administration could threaten them with loss of those licenses was a very real thing.

AMY GOODMAN: John and Bonnie Raines, so your name is known; Keith Forsyth, your name is now known. What are your thoughts about people knowing who you are?

BONNIE RAINES: Well, I can judge most immediately by the things that came in on my phone, my emails and responses from so many people who either read the Philadelphia story or The New York Times, overwhelmingly saying, “Wow! You did an amazing thing and never talked about it, never shared it all these years. And thank you very much for what you were able to accomplish.”

AMY GOODMAN: These are your close friends.

BONNIE RAINES: These are all colleagues, work colleagues. And I’m hopeful, too, that these are people who will want to see the film, as well, 1971, because it’s a wonderful documentary and very well done. But I just—it was a flood of responses that were overwhelmingly positive.

AMY GOODMAN: And John?

JOHN RAINES: Well, the same.

BONNIE RAINES: Former students.

JOHN RAINES: Former students, yes, and all of them saying, “You did a good job, Raines. Thank you for standing your watch.”

AMY GOODMAN: And how will you deal with the glare of the media spotlight?

JOHN RAINES: Oh, lights are a funny thing. They come on, and they go off. And knowing that that’s the way lights are, it helps you get ready when the lights go on, knowing that someday they’ll go off again. And that’s fine by me.

AMY GOODMAN: And those who are not named, maybe you could address this, Betty. Someone who is named is Bob Williamson. Tell us what happened with him.

BETTY MEDSGER: Bob Williamson was a defendant in the Camden trial after the Media burglary and then moved to New Mexico. And Bob has gone through many changes. He was eager to move away from total engagement with the movement, as he knew it, in Philadelphia and to get on with a new life. And he eventually did that. He was quite happy to recall his memories of what happened and what was a very important experience in his life. He’s become a Republican and stands in very different position from the rest of the burglars today, but he still looks back on that as a very important thing and regards it as something that caused positive change. And he came to New York yesterday to see the documentary and be with his fellow burglars and brought his adult daughter to share in the sense of celebration that they all felt.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, it was fascinating to see him, because now he became a Republican speech writer, among other things. And with his daughter in the audience, he said, “I wanted her to know who I was before I was her father.”

BETTY MEDSGER: Right. He’s told her about some of the things that he did. I was fairly surprised to learn yesterday at lunch that he hadn’t told her about breaking into an FBI office until they were on the plane leaving Albuquerque on Tuesday.

AMY GOODMAN: And Bill Davidon died in November. He knew that his name would become known, but he was not shy about his antiwar activism, and he was out there all the way. Why didn’t he speak out before? Was it part of the vow you all took together?

JOHN RAINES: Yes.

BETTY MEDSGER: Yeah.

KEITH FORSYTH: Yes.

JOHN RAINES: Yeah, sure.

BONNIE RAINES: Yeah, it was. That was so, so important that we—we were going to trust each other to maintain a silence about it. And I think we knew that Bill would do everything possible to get the word out, but not as one of the burglars. He was—he was very anxious to continue to push for the changes that he thought were so important.

BETTY MEDSGER: I’d like to say something about Bill and the keeping of secrets. Bill’s personality was—he was a very humble, modest person, while at the same time being a very strong leader. And to some extent, that’s a reflection of the qualities of the other members of the group, and one of the things that I think made it possible for them to keep the secret all these years. I’ve covered a lot of people and a lot of different kind of movements, and there tend to be some pretty dramatic egos in movements of all kinds, where I think for most people, once that five-year period passed, it would have been very tempting to want to get credit. And I was amazed when I met them and to find out that they did not have that kind of ego need.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Keith Forsyth, before we conclude, how is it—how is it for you now that your name is out, after all these decades of secrecy?

KEITH FORSYTH: I’m the kind of person that’s not really comfortable talking about myself in public. And so, it’s been—it’s been a little difficult for me. But I was persuaded that, you know, by sharing our names, it helps give the story more weight, and it makes it more difficult for people who may not share our political views to dismiss it out of hand. You know, a book like this, with all unsubstantiated sources, unnamed sources, would be, I think, a different book, both as a historical record, which I think is important, and also in terms of the effect it can have to spark a political discussion. So, I’m not anxious to be even a little bit famous, but if it—if this will help spur the discussion that we need to have in this country, then I’m willing to do it.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, I mean, what is so astounding about this—and, Betty, you touched on this—is when the FBI set its sights on someone, as they did on John Grady, thinking he headed this plot, they’re blind to everything else—and maybe that woman they had a sketch of who ended up being Bonnie Raines. But as you show on page 150 of the book, The Burglary, there is a front-page headline, Delaware County Daily Times, a picture of Bill Davidon—this is five days after the break-in—with the headline, “Davidon Unveils Plot Against FBI.” Public remarks by William Davidon about the burglary reported in a front-page banner headline in a local newspaper four days, that is, after the burglary. “As guest speaker at a meeting of clergy in Swarthmore, he read the commission’s statement”—that’s your Commission to—Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI—”explaining why they broke into an FBI office.” In those five years, he was never investigated for this.

BETTY MEDSGER: No.

AMY GOODMAN: Betty.

BETTY MEDSGER: That amazing article sort of points to two things. First, the FBI was under orders at that point not to question him, his incredible immunity as a result of being investigated for Harrisburg.

AMY GOODMAN: Which protected you all in many ways.

JOHN RAINES: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

BETTY MEDSGER: Right, right.

BONNIE RAINES: Definitely.

AMY GOODMAN: Except for the one who dropped out. That’ll teach him. He becomes the suspect.

BETTY MEDSGER: But it also shows Bill, although I described him as this humble, unegotistical person, he also was so determined that this information become public. And the fact that the office had been burglarized wasn’t even getting attention. There were these tiny stories just saying, “Yes, not much was taken. Just a little burglary.” And he wanted it to be known that something had happened, and he was willing to go this far, but always standing back, never acknowledging that he was involved in it.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you all for being with us. Betty Medsger has written the book, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI. And the activists themselves—professors, taxi cab drivers, a director of daycare—who were involved with this break-in, John Raines, Bonnie Raines, Keith Forsyth, they called themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
GUESTS

John Raines, participated in the 1971 FBI break-in and helped photocopy many of the stolen documents. He and his wife Bonnie hosted many of the planning meetings for the burglary by the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. He was a professor at Temple University.

Bonnie Raines, participated in the 1971 FBI break-in and helped survey the office prior to the burglary. She and her husband John hosted many of the planning meetings for the burglary by the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. She was a mother of three at the time and worked as a daycare director.

Keith Forsyth, served as designated lock-picker in the 1971 FBI break-in by the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. He was working as a cab driver at the time.

Betty Medsger, author of the new book, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI. She is the former Washington Post reporter who received an anonymous package in 1971 that contained secret documents obtained by the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. Her new book about the saga has just been published.

David Kairys, civil rights attorney and a law professor at Temple University. He has represented the activists for more than four decades.

Find this story at 8 January 2014