Re: John Deutch/Wen Ho Lee

["ÁÎ×Ó¹â HenryC.K.Liu ¹ù¤l¥ú" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Global Intelligence Update
Red Alert
December 7, 1998

Weekend Revelation of CIA Leaks to Hughes Electronics Baffling and Explosive

On Saturday morning, December 5, both the New York Times and the Washington Post
ran stories claiming that officials of Hughes
Electronics had been warned by agents of the U.S. Central  Intelligence Agency
that they would be called to testify before
Congress on the sale of satellite technology to China.  This  report is 
explosive
because, if true, these agents would be  guilty of a massive security breach.
Since the story appeared  simultaneously in both the Times and the Post, this 
was
a deliberate decision on somebody's part to plant explosives beneath someone in
the CIA.  Now, although we only know what we read in the newspapers, it is more
than enough to make us wonder what in the world is going on.

The unofficial official explanation from the Agency was bizarre.
It acknowledged that CIA officials had informed Hughes people
that they were going to be summoned by the Senate Select  Committee on
Intelligence (SSCI) to testify on technology transfers to China.  Moreover, it 
was
acknowledged that the leak had been approved by the Agency.  They did not claim
that this was some unauthorized accident by a junior employee.  The official
counter-leaks went on to assert that, whoever approved it, it was not CIA 
Director
George Tenet.  The Associated Press cited an anonymous CIA official as 
asserting,
"This was not the kind of thing that reached Tenet's desk."  So the party line 
is
that CIA employees did warn Hughes officials, that they were authorized to do so
by someone with enough clout to authorize such a thing, but that the 
authorization
didn't come from the top because DCI had no knowledge of the SSCI proceeding.

That's a little hard to believe.  The DCI, we would think, normally likes to 
stay
on top of anything having to do with the Senate Select Committee on 
Intelligence.
Given that this is an already highly sensitive matter that has directly affected
the President himself, it is more than a little hard to believe that Tenet 
doesn't
keep himself informed of every detail.  But let's assume that he did not 
authorize
the leak.  Let's also accept that the people who did the leaking were authorized
to do so.
Who did the authorizing?

Hughes is a major contractor for the intelligence community.
Hundreds or even thousands of intelligence employees for all
sorts of agencies have daily contact with Hughes employees.  But
few of these are senior enough to authorize a leak of this sort.
And, more important, none of these GS-12s have access to
sensitive SSCI papers.  We would expect that anything involving
the SSCI, the President, campaign contributions, and possible
criminality is handled at stratospheric levels in the Agency.  If
not Tenet, then who in the CIA has access to SSCI-sensitized
information?  Who has the ability to authorize lower level
officials with daily contact with Hughes to pass on information?
Who can access Agency's command and control mechanism to pass on such an
authorization?  Who has that much clout AND a reason to issue such a risky
authorization?

We give up too.

So let's try to approach this from a different direction.  What
would be the reason for the leak?  The obvious answer is to warn
Hughes that it is coming.  Well, when you think about it, that's
a pretty feeble reason.  Hughes officials were not about to be
kidnapped off the street to testify.  A nice letter would be sent
on Senate stationary and a date, several days or weeks away would
be arranged.  The Hughes people would have plenty of time to
prepare their testimony.  Why risk all of this just to give the
Hughes people some extra time to prepare?  Besides, the Hughes
folks had to know that all sorts of investigations were going on.
They read the papers.

According to the Post story, there is an innocent explanation
being leaked by the CIA. This explanation revolves around a CIA
analyst called Ronald Pandolfi, who testified to the SSCI in the
Fall of 1998 that Hughes had been "too aggressive" in marketing
technology to China.  Pandolfi's testimony originated in a study
he did in 1995.  Back then, Hughes executives had complained to
CIA officials about Pandolfi's research.  The office that deals
with Hughes reprimanded Pandolfi.  After Pandolfi's testimony
this year, this office informed Hughes of Pandolfi's views.  It
also offered Hughes that it would give the SSCI a list of Hughes
officials that could refute Pandolfi's views.  So, it was only in
this sense that Hughes was told that they would be called to
testify.  Only in this sense??!!
>
What this unofficial explanation implies is that it was not the
fact that they were going to be called before the SSCI that was
being conveyed to Hughes, but rather that the issue before the
SSCI was Pandolfi's report from 1995.  What they were being told
by the CIA was that the Pandolfi report was in the SSCI's hands.
Moreover, since Pandolfi had interviewed Hughes officials in
writing that report, they had a pretty good idea of what questions he had asked
and what answers he had gotten.  They knew the internal thinking at SSCI.  
Passing
this on to Hughes was a major security breach.  It told Hughes a great deal 
about
what the SSCI knew and when they knew it.  The CIA official who authorized the
leak to Hughes had no authority to do so, because the CIA didn't own the
information.  It belonged to SSCI and the U.S. Senate.
>
Why go to all the trouble?  What is the issue here?  Forget all
of the comings and goings and conspiracies for a moment and let's
concentrate on why someone at the CIA in an extremely senior
position would want to take this kind of risk at all.  What could
Hughes have been doing that would be so sensitive to the CIA or
to someone at the CIA to take such a risk?  So far as we can see,
there are four possible tracks for explaining this:
>
Track 1 -- The Old Boys Network Explanation: Hughes and the CIA
have been working together for generations.  Complex systems of
personal and institutional connections have developed until the
lines distinguishing the two organizations have begun to blur.  A
contract worker from Hughes who has been working at an
intelligence facility for twenty years may be getting a check
from Hughes, but his identity is with his facility.  Moreover,
the CIA is supposed to control its contractors.  When Pandolfi
reported that Hughes had gone over the line in China, this was a
direct attack on the CIA people responsible for monitoring
Hughes.  The CIA people went to bat for Hughes, Hughes went to
bat for the CIA.  This whole thing is nothing more than the
standard conflation of contractors with Federal agencies that has
been going on since the founding.  Clean it up and move on.

Track 2 -- The Criminal Conspiracy Explanation: The Hughes
transfer of technology to China was a deliberate security breach
by Hughes (and perhaps other companies like Loral) for the simple
purpose of making money.  Certain officials of the CIA were aware
that the technology transfer was taking place but either failed
to report it or were personally part of the conspiracy.
Pandolfi's discovery threatened to expose corruption at the CIA,
so every attempt was made to discredit him and keep his report
from the SSCI.  When it got to the SSCI, Hughes was told so that
they could start the shredders running and transfer vulnerable
employees to Chad.  Staff at SSCI got wind of it and went to the
newspapers.  This would explain the claim that Tenet didn't know
about any of this but that it was an authorized leak.  Under this
theory (for which we haven't a shred of evidence), whoever did
the authorizing may have some interesting Swiss bank accounts as
well.

Track 3 -- The Political Conspiracy Explanation: The President
has been charged, among other things, with permitting the
transfer of sensitive technologies to China in exchange for
political contributions for the 1996 elections.  Pandolfi's work
was done in 1995, when the fundraising was roaring along.  The
SSCI is studying the technology transfer issue at the same time
that the House Impeachment committee is doing something (though
we can't quite figure out what).  Henry Hyde just announced that
the impeachment committee will not be considering campaign
finance issues.  Someone at SSCI, aware that there may be some
smoking guns in the SSCI's extremely classified archives, is
taking advantage of this breach to frantically wave his arms in
an attempt to get Henry Hyde's shell-shocked attention.  So, this
assumes that there was a criminal conspiracy by the President to
take campaign money in exchange for permitting technology
transfers to China.  It also assumes that there is now a  political conspiracy 
by
the President's enemies on the SSCI to make this public before the impeachment
committee signs off on  their recommendation.

Track 4 -- There was in fact a major technology transfer program
to China, but it was a Trojan horse.  In other words, while major
technology was transferred to China, the technology was either
carefully flawed or embedded with some sort of monitoring system
that would permit U.S. intelligence to monitor its use and
neutralize its capabilities.  Hughes and other companies were
participating in a complex, covert operation that had to appear
to be a security failure on the part of the United States in
order to achieve its ends.  The CIA, having recruited Hughes for
a covert operation, must help Hughes cover its tracks.  This
conspiracy is so sensitive that the CIA never mentioned it to the
SSCI and it is now leaning on Hughes to keep the secret.  In this
scenario, Hughes and the CIA are patriotic heroes and the SSCI is
blundering around, lousing everything up.  (By the way, we have
no evidence whatever for this track.  In addition we are not
revealing anything to the Chinese with this speculation because
the Chinese are a lot smarter than STRATFOR and much more
paranoid.  We have nothing to teach them about being suspicious).

Let's throw another one in.  Remember right after the Wye
Agreement, the Israelis announced that Jonathan Pollard, the
Israeli spy, would be released as part of the agreement?
Remember that he wasn't released?  Remember that it leaked a few
days later that George Tenet had threatened to resign if Pollard
was released?  Well, the only one who would have wanted to leak
that story was Tenet, because it made him look really good at the
agency.  It also made Clinton look like a wimp.  Clinton couldn't
fire him at the time, because he couldn't afford to look like he
was caving in to the Israelis.  Clinton must have been extremely
annoyed with Tenet for the threat and the leak.  If this affair
proves as damaging as it appears to be, Tenet's career is over,
regardless of what he knew.  Maybe this is just the White House
taking care of a bit of unfinished business.

So, we have cronyism, criminal conspiracy, political conspiracy,
covert conspiracy and  inside-the-beltway conspiracy to choose
from.  We genuinely don't know which is the real story.  But we
don't think it is trivial.  This affair could be a wedge into a
very important and complex part of American history.  Someone is
issuing an extremely public invitation to investigate a critical
issue with grave implications.  It is almost as if someone is
painting a map.  The revelation of this single, relatively minor
security breach could wind up explaining a great deal about the
recent past.  There may be simple and innocent explanations.
There may be complex and dark explanations.  But, for what little
they are worth, our instincts tell us that this is the place  where explanations
begin.  End


Henry C.K. Liu


Louis Proyect wrote:

> Back-stabbing, CIA-style
>
> The John Deutch scandal shows that the spooks spend more time trying to
> ruin each other than they do chasing down security breaches.
>
> - - - - - - - - - - - -
>
> By Jeff Stein
>
> Feb. 3, 2000 | Tennis chat, anyone?
>
> John Deutch, the ex-CIA chief whose security clearance was stripped because
> he had 17,000 pages of classified documents on his home computer, also
> maintains a very un-spooklike visibility on the internet.
>
> In his America Online profile, which AOL subscribers fill out at their own
> choice -- and risk -- Deutch lists his family status (married), occupation
> (scientist) and hobby (tennis). His residence is listed as Bethesda, Md.
> His AOL screen name is not much of a disguise, either -- JDeutch@xxxxxxxx
>
> According to CBS, someone using that account has visited porno sites on the
> Web.
>
> But if he has other names for, say, tennis talk in AOL chat rooms, he's
> keeping that private. Otherwise, he's hiding in plain site -- not much of a
> James Bond.
>
> All of which has apparently outraged an unlikely alliance of CIA
> malcontents and defenders of Los Alamos nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee, who
> charge that current agency chief George Tenet and his honchos adopted a
> double standard for Deutch after gumshoes brought his computer indiscretion
> to their attention.
>
> He should have been prosecuted, they say, just like Wen Ho Lee, the Chinese
> scientist who's been jailed since nuclear documents were found on his
> computer.
>
> But this is about back-stabbing, Washington-style, not spies. If the spooks
> spent as much time conspiring to get rid of Saddam Hussein as they did
> trying to ruin each other, the Iraqi dictator would be playing golf with
> Baby Doc Duvalier instead of pulling out the fingernails of CIA agents in
> Baghdad.
>
> "There's more covert action inside CIA than outside it," one agency old
> hand says.
>
> This latest Gilbert and Sullivan production from the CIA began Monday, when
> somebody leaked the results of an agency investigation to the New York
> Times, charging that current CIA boss Tenet and his minions soft-pedaled
> the internal finding of classified documents on Deutch's computer. The
> drift was that enemy spies could have stolen the computer or hacked their
> way into Deutch's hard drive via AOL and stolen valuable CIA secrets.
>
> Like what, one might ask. Deutch was forced out at the CIA when he
> contradicted White House claims that U.S. missile strikes on Iraq were
> effective. The attacks hadn't damaged Saddam Hussein one whit, Deutch told
> Congress in an unusual display of Washington candor. It cost him his job.
> Perhaps he had more "secrets" like that on his computer.
>
> The fact is, Deutch remains an unpopular figure inside the bureaucracy, and
> his protégé Tenet has ruffled feathers by bringing big changes to the CIA.
> This week's skirmish is just bureaucratic back-stabbing, CIA style.
>
> Besides telling the truth, Deutch was disliked because he tended to be
> impatient and brusque.
>
> "He'd come into a room and say, 'Get to the point, I don't have time for
> this twaddle,'" a former intelligence official says. "Just unnecessarily
> ... Deutch almost seemed to enjoy hurting people. But he's a very bright guy."
>
> "Knowing him, and I do," the official added, "I would guess his having that
> stuff on his own computer was ... typical. He thought he was above all of
> the petty rules which apply to mere mortals."
>
> Confronted with the alleged security lapse, Deutch immediately erased the
> documents from his home computer, according to reports, and signed up as an
> unpaid consultant to the CIA so that he'd officially be permitted access to
> information. After considering the matter for several months, Tenet
> stripped his former boss of his top-secret clearance, a striking rebuke in
> Washington, where security badges are equated with penis size.
>
> "I quite frankly was almost shocked at the time that he was humiliated by
> yanking his clearance," said a former colleague. "I thought that was pretty
> brutal."
>
> Only in a ritual sense, however. It's highly unlikely any of the Pentagon
> and CIA-connected corporations whose boards Deutch sits on have barred him
> from the door.
>
> In any event, the CIA probably loses more documents in a day than Deutch
> ever stored on his computers. Tales abound of the CIA selling off surplus
> computers or office furniture with classified material still in it. Last
> year a classified U.S. military data cartridge was found in a scrap yard in
> Budapest. The State Department, it has been reported, failed to tighten
> security even after the FBI warned it a Russian bug had been planted in the
> building.
>
> Charges that Deutch's security lapse is comparable to those committed by
> Wen Ho Lee or even CIA traitor Aldrich Ames have a partisan ring.
>
> "It seems to be a pattern. I think it's very troublesome," Senate Majority
> Leader Trent Lott told reporters at a hearing Wednesday. The
> still-classified findings of the CIA inspector general raise "fundamental
> questions," he said. Even those who really dislike Deutch, though, disagree.
>
> "It's probably a slow news day," said one source, "plus somebody's playing
> games inside ... My God, this to me is a nothing."
>
> Deutch, meanwhile, is going on about his way at MIT, where the bespectacled
> professor teaches chemistry and has a Web page.
>
> salon.com | Feb. 3, 2000
>
> Louis Proyect
>
> (The Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org)