Seth Rich

Exploration of Conspiracy Theories from Perspective of Esoteric Traditions

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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Mon Dec 25, 2017 7:13 pm

Gov’t Website Claims Santa Will Move To The South Pole To Escape Global Warming

The Daily Caller | 1:01 PM 12/23/2017

A Canadian government website claims Santa Claus signed an international agreement to relocate his workshop to the South Pole to escape the effects of man-made global warming in the Arctic.

The website for Policy Horizons Canada, a government website, notes that due to “rapidly melting Arctic ice and growing human operations in the North, Santa Claus has signed an agreement with the International community to relocate his village next year to operate in an exclusive zone in the South Pole.”

Policy Horizons was created to advise government officials on emerging public policy issues. The group put out a series of Christmas-themed blog posts that tie into emerging liberal policy concerns.

Horizons also put out blog posts on Santa relying on a self-flying sleigh, investing in Bitcoin and even using 3D printing technology to make toys. The latest blog post, however, is meant to focus on climate refugees.

“Santa’s relocation agreement marks the first time that the international community agrees on a common legal definition of climate change that includes refugees as corporations, as well as individuals,” reads the Horizons website.

“This deal is expected to lead to the deployment of a global climate change refugee visa system that in the near future could help to more easily relocate individuals and corporations facing the impacts of climate change,” the website continues.

Politicians and environmentalists have been claiming for years that man-made global warming will increase the number of peoples displaced by extreme weather events and violent conflicts.

A recent study even claimed temperature changes drove increased applications for asylum in Europe. A June study predicted 2 billion “climate change refugees” by the end of the century if nothing is done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Most famously, the United Nations Environment Program predicted there would be 50 million “climate refugees” by 2010. When that didn’t come to pass, the UN quietly removed a web page containing the information, and pushed the prediction to 2020.


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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Fri Dec 29, 2017 4:34 pm

Imran Awan’s Expanding Axis of Intrigue

Frontpage Mag

Iran-backed Hezbollah laundered money through Awan family used-car lot.

IT man Imran Awan has a problem with women but Democrats have failed to place the Pakistani-born Muslim on their honor roll of abusers with Al Franken and John Conyers. When Awan attempted to flee the country in July, the feds busted him on bank fraud charges. Andrew McCarthy warned it was more likely a serious national security case, and it turns out he was right.

As the intrepid Luke Rosiak notes in the Daily Caller, Imran’s brother Abid ran a used-car lot in Falls Church, Virginia, called Cars International A. Trouble was, the “CIA” dealership had no inventory and the sales people were fakes. As Rosiak learned, the Awan dealership “took money from a Hezbollah-linked fugitive” whose financial books were “indecipherable.” And as the DEA was aware, “the Iranian-linked terrorist group frequently deployed used car dealerships in the US to launder money and fund terrorism.” On the other hand, the DEA had trouble going after the terrorists.

As Josh Meyer reported in Politico, “In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States.”

The operation was called Project Cassandra and “as it reached higher into the hierarchy of the conspiracy, Obama administration officials threw an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way.” And when project leaders sought approval for prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions, “officials at the Justice and Treasury departments delayed, hindered or rejected their requests.”

A key player in the obstruction was John Brennan, the presidential advisor who touted “moderate elements” in Hezbollah and became POTUS 44’s CIA director despite having voted for the Stalinist Gus Hall, Communist Party USA presidential candidate, in 1976. Another official of more than passing interest is Bruce Ohr, the associate deputy attorney general who directed the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF), reportedly the keystone of the AG’s drug strategy.

Ohr has been making news for meeting with British spy Christopher Steele, author of the “dossier” on Donald Trump. That was during the 2016 campaign and after the election Ohr met with Glenn Simpson, founder of Fusion GPS, which hired Steele and brought aboard Ohr’s Russophile wife Nellie. Even before the fall of the USSR, Nellie enjoyed considerable access, from Moscow to Smolensk, and also showed expertise in cyber-security matters.

Congress may investigate what role Bruce Ohr may have played in quashing the operation against Hezbollah drug dealing. With the connection to the fake Virginia car lot, Hezbollah becomes part of Imran Awan’s ever-expanding axis of intrigue.

A number of prominent Democrats, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz, hired Imran Awan and members of his family to perform IT work, but there’s no public proof that any of the Awans were vetted by Capitol Police. Awan and his family of grifters could not possibly have qualified for a security clearance but Imran Awan enjoyed access to the computers of 45 members of Congress, including members the House Intelligence and Foreign Affairs committees. Awan made thousands of unauthorized accesses to government networks and for several months every year conducted his work from Pakistan.

Awan also accessed a server controlled by Rep. Xavier Becerra, once on Hillary Clinton’s short list as a running mate and now attorney general of California. When the Capitol police sought to obtain the data, Awan served up a fake image of the server. Awan was then banned from the congressional computer system but Debbie Wasserman Schultz duly kept the IT man on her payroll for more than six months. Awan was working for DWS while she headed the DNC, and when she lost the post after DNC emails were leaked or hacked.

Awan doubtless has the goods on Wasserman Schultz, which may be why she remains uncritical of the IT man. She blames his troubles on Islamophobia, what Awan’s attorney Chris Gown, a former Clinton aide, calls “working while Muslim.” After it emerged that “multiple women” had called police to report abuse by Imran Awan, including the threat of kidnapping, only two of 17 Democrat women who employed him opted to speak out.

Kyrsten Sinema reported firing Awan for incompetence. Frederica Wilson’s office told the Daily Caller she does not condone violence against anyone but declined comment on “an ongoing investigation.”

At this writing, Awan has only been indicted for bank fraud, though by the day it becomes more apparent that the case involves national security. Observers might wonder why Congress and Jeff Sessions’ DOJ have been slow to take action, especially with so much at stake.

With all the IT men in all the IT firms in all the world, there was no reason to hire Imran Awan or any member of his family. Like terrorists Sayfullo Saipov and Akayed Ullah, Imran Awan came to the United States through a lottery system, so there’s no good reason he should have been in the country in the first place. As investigators might discover, lottery immigration and chain migration have serious consequences.

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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Fri Dec 29, 2017 4:38 pm

Wasserman Schultz calls conspiracy theories about Seth Rich ‘vile and disgusting'

Anthony Man

Sun-Sentinel.com

U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee when young party staffer Seth Rich was murdered, is condemning what she says are attempts to exploit his death for political gain.

“The things that the right wing, and some of the left wing, frankly, including my opponent, have spewed are vile and disgusting and offensive,” the Broward/Miami-Dade County congresswoman said in an interview with the Sun Sentinel.

She said it should stop.

“I want to say that Seth’s parents’ wishes should be honored and respected, to stop dragging his name through the mud and politicizing what was a horrible, unfortunate, sad murder, and the death of someone who was deeply committed to serving his country and help making the world a better place,” Wasserman Schultz said.

A tweet this week from political operative Roger Stone, who is close to President Donald Trump, prompted Wasserman Schultz to comment about Rich. She hasn’t wanted to talk about Rich to avoid giving credence to conspiracy theories surrounding his murder and to honor the wishes of Rich’s parents.

Rich, 27, was murdered last summer, on July 10 in what police have described as a botched robbery.

Less than two weeks later, on July 22, WikiLeaks released thousands of stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee. U.S. intelligence services have concluded that Russia was responsible for the hacking of the DNC as part of its attempts to meddle in the U.S. presidential election.

The damage was immediate. Some of the emails showed Democratic Party staffers had favored Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders for the party’s presidential nomination, a revelation that forced Wasserman Schultz’s resignation as national Democratic Party chairwoman.

Conspiracy theorists have suggested — without evidence — that Rich, and not Russian hackers, might have provided explosive DNC emails to WikiLeaks, and that he might have been murdered as part of a cover-up.

The most prominent purveyors of that theory have been Fox News personality Sean Hannity and internet and radio conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

The issue was back in the news this week, when an investigator who had been hired by a Republican donor to solve the Rich murder said in a lawsuit that President Donald Trump and his former press secretary, Sean Spicer, played a role in shaping a false story that appeared on Fox News about the case.

Fox has retracted the story and denied it was originally published to distract people from the Russia investigation. Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said it was “completely untrue” that the White House had any role in shaping it.

Also this week, Stone entered the fray. The Fort Lauderdale resident’s political activities date back to his work for former President Richard Nixon.

Stone was in contact last year with Guccifer 2.0, the person or organization involved in hacking the Democratic National Committee last year. Multiple news reports have cited U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded Guccifer 2.0 is connected to Russian intelligence.

Weeks before the hacked emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta were released, Stone ominously predicted on Twitter that Podesta would soon be in the barrel facing scrutiny. He’s denied that he colluded with Russians on behalf of Trump or that the Russians meddled in the U.S. election

On Twitter this week, Stone wrote, “FACT – Wasserman-Shultz ‘IT consultant’ Awan was partying with Seth Rich the night of his murder! Eat it @TheAtlantic!”

He offered no evidence to support his statement. Stone didn’t immediately reply to an email Friday inquiring about his tweet.

Imran Awan, an information technology aide to Wasserman Schultz and multiple members of Congress, was arrested last week on a bank fraud charge. Wasserman Schultz said in the interview Thursday that Awan never worked for the DNC.

Most of the attempts to connect the Rich murder to WikiLeaks have come from people on the conservative end of the political spectrum. But it’s gotten some backing from people on the political left, including supporters of Sanders who don’t like Wasserman Schultz.

Tim Canova, who challenged Wasserman Schultz in the 2016 Democratic congressional primary and is running again in 2018, raised the issue several times earlier this year.

A video posted on Canova’s Facebook page in January shows him walking around the Washington, D.C., neighborhood where Rich was killed. He said there were reasons to doubt it was a robbery and suggested it could have been something more sinister.

In June, after reporters asked him about Rich, Canova took down the Facebook video and said he would refrain from talking about the case out of respect to the wishes of Rich’s family.

On Friday, he said via text message that it’s “funny how she and her supporters have been talking more about Seth Rich than I have been.”

Canova added later by email that he has refrained from talking about Rich recently. “Since Seth’s parents requested silence on his murder I have complied with their request.”

He said Wasserman Schultz, who answered questions about the Fox News story and Stone tweet on Thursday, was continuing to bring it up “apparently to try to score political points and in disregard of the wishes of his family.”

He said killings in Russia of journalists and dissidents — “under mysterious circumstances, some shot in the back at close range just like Seth Rich” — raise questions about “whether the Russians played any role in the murder in order to bring negative attention on the DNC and the U.S. political system.”

Canova said Wasserman Schultz’s criticism of him “suggests that she’s doing so simply to deflect attention from her own bizarre statements and suspicious actions related to the investigations of Awan.”

Copyright (c) 2017 South Florida Sun-Sentinel
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Sun Dec 31, 2017 1:51 am

With more to come, new JFK documents offer fresh leads 54 years later

By Kevin G. Hallkhall@mcclatchydc.com

mcclatchydc | WASHINGTON

Half-a-dozen 2017 releases of long-secret documents about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy have given plenty of new leads to those who don’t believe alleged gunman Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

President Donald Trump promised via Twitter this fall that all the JFK assassination documents will be public by the end of April 2018 “to put any and all conspiracies to rest.”

Instead, the 34,963 documents released so far in 2017 have fed the fire tended by researchers and others who believe there is much more to the story how a U.S. president was assassinated in Dallas 54 years ago.

“To this point, as expected, we haven’t had a document that lists the conspirators in the murder of President Kennedy,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics and author of The Kennedy Half Century. “What we have gotten is a lot of rich material, not just about the Kennedy assassination but the times.”

It was a 1991 movie, Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” that led Congress to require the secret documents to be released more than two decades later after they were reviewed for national security purposes and to protect past informants. The film, which challenged the official version of the assassination, brought conspiracy theorists into the mainstream and led other Americans to question the official version of events.

McClatchy’s Washington bureau, the Miami Herald and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram have pored over thousands of newly released JFK documents. Here are some of the new or bolstered leads revealed thus far by the new material.

Dallas mayor was CIA asset

One particular document from the August release has created much buzz. It that shows that Earle Cabell, mayor of Dallas at the time of the Nov. 22, 1963, shooting, became a CIA asset in late 1956.

The CIA had withheld the information on grounds that it was not considered relevant. No related documents have been released, but even alone it is important. Cabell’s brother Charles was deputy director of the CIA until he was fired by Kennedy in January 1962.

“That shows why Dallas was the place,” said Zack Shelton, a retired veteran FBI agent who fervently disbelieves that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone gunman. “I think the investigation or focus is going to be turned more into Oswald not being the lone wolf.”

Shelton, now 67 and retired in Beaumont, Texas, was an FBI agent in Chicago combating organized crime in the 1980s. In the process of helping bust a contraband ring involving an alleged mafia hitman named James Files, Shelton was told that Files had curious things to say about the Kennedy killing roughly 20 years earlier.

That tip to Shelton launched a chain of events that led to Files confessing from prison in Illinois that he was one of several gunmen in Dallas on the fateful day, and that he fired from the famous grassy knoll.

Many historians dismiss Files’ claims, but Shelton maintains that Files was indeed an assassin and was part of the Cosa Nostra mob organization headed in Chicago by Salvatore “Sam the Cigar” Giancana. Files was released from prison in 2016 after a long stint for attempted murder.

The CIA and FBI documents released so far say nothing about Files or another assassin he allegedly worked with named Charles Nicoletti, but that’s no surprise to Wim Dankbaar. He’s a Dutch national with a website and videos devoted to debunking what he considers a myth — that Oswald killed Kennedy or that he acted alone — and promoting the view that Files assassinated Kennedy.

“Do you really think they haven’t deep-sixed the incriminating files?” Dankbaar asked in a testy telephone interview.

The November tranche of new documents does include some about Giancana’s courier, a former Chicago cop who went by the alias Richard Cain and met in Mexico City with CIA staff; he was also an informant for the FBI. A 1992 biography written by Giancana’s family said the mob boss had told his younger brother that Cain and Nicoloetti, not Oswald, were in the Texas Book Depository from where shots at Kennedy were fired.

In addition, several new documents discuss the CIA and its work with mobsters to prevent Fidel Castro’s rise to power in Cuba and later oust him.

There’s this bar in New Orleans

Another revelatory JFK document released in full on Dec. 15 was the transcript of a 1978 interview by the House Select Committee on Assassinations with Orest Pena. According to Pena, a bar owner in New Orleans, Lee Harvey Oswald was a U.S. government agent or informant.

How did he know? Because Pena himself was an informant, he said. He had given details to the Warren Commission in July 1964 but, as the new document shows, later revealed much more detail about Warren de Brueys, an FBI agent in New Orleans to whom Pena said he reported.

Oswald, he claimed, frequented a breakfast place regularly not only with de Brueys but with agents from U.S. Customs and Immigration in New Orleans. Pena believed Oswald had an office in the same government complex.

Pena also testified to the House panel that de Brueys had threatened him if he shared with investigators details of their meetings and training of anti-Castro instigators, and that his FBI handler had transferred to Dallas before the assassination. Pena’s testimony, however, was largely discounted by two government commissions.

“Their reasons for denying this were weak,” said Rex Bradford, president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, which boasts the largest searchable electronic collection of JFK assassination documents; Bradford is another disbeliever in the official version of events.

The newly released transcript is likely to spark new interest in the New Orleans link to the assassination and searches of government records in multiple agencies, he said.

De Brueys died in 2013 at the age of 92. Son Jim de Brueys told the New Orleans Advocate at the time that his father was sent to Dallas after the assassination, not before, and that he was long frustrated by being named in conspiracy theories.

David Atlee Phillips, Texan in Mexico

One of the names experts are watching for in the documents yet to be released is David Atlee Phillips. The Texan was a native of Fort Worth, a decorated World War II veteran and actor who rose to CIA leadership roles across the Americas, including Cuba, Mexico and Chile.

Among the new documents released earlier this month was one showing that the CIA itself was trying to gauge what Phillips knew about Oswald and when he learned certain things about the alleged gunman’s mysterious September 1963 trip to Mexico.

Documents show that the CIA had tracked Oswald and picked up phone intercepts of his calls with and visits to the Soviet and Cuban embassies in the Mexican capital just months before the assassination in Dallas.

“He was there for six days and we know about six hours. What was he doing there? I don’t think he was on vacation,” said Sabato, who thinks there is still much to learn about the Mexico trip.

The new documents provide details about people with whom Oswald met in Mexico and agency efforts to reconstruct his time there when he visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies, purportedly seeking to travel to either country. Spying on the Cuban embassy was one of Phillips’ chief tasks, he wrote in his own autobiography, “The Night Watch.”

A main reason Phillips is of such interest is the claim by a now elderly anti-Castro leader in Miami that Oswald was a CIA informant handled by a man named Maurice (or Morris, as it sometimes appears) Bishop. And Bishop was actually an alias used by Phillips, insists Antonio Veciana.

Veciana, a Cuban émigré, helped lead the anti-Castro group Alpha 66 and claims he himself worked with Bishop/Phillips, and saw him with Oswald.

In a statement to McClatchy, Veciana, now 89 and in failing health, said that “I have no doubt that the man I knew as Maurice Bishop was David Atlee Phillips. He was the same man I saw with Oswald.”

The newly released documents show that the CIA looked into Veciana’s claim. One document reveals a list of all employees past and present with the last name Bishop, ordered up by agency leaders.

“I don’t think I will live to see it, but as more documents come to light the country will eventually learn the truth about the Kennedy assassination and in what way Bishop/Phillips was involved,” Veciana told McClatchy.

Shawn Phillips, now 74 and an acclaimed folk musician, is the nephew of the former CIA leader. He has been often quoted telling the story of how his own father, James, became estranged from brother David late in life; an attempted reconciliation went south after David, dying from lung cancer, confessed to James that he had been in Dallas the day of JFK’s assassination.

The nephew did not return requests for comment, but in a 1988 poem eulogized his uncle as a man of mystery and complexity.

In “The Night Watch,” written years earlier, David Atlee Phillips said that he was working in the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City when he got a call from his wife saying she’d heard a report that Kennedy had been shot, contrary to what he supposedly confessed on his deathbed.

Of Oswald he wrote, “I know of no evidence to suggest that Oswald acted as an agent for the Cubans or the Russians, that he was a CIA agent or that any aspect of his Mexico City trip was any more ominous than reported by the Warren Commission.”

Still, documents released in 2017 suggest the CIA and FBI spent decades trying to better understand Oswald’s time in Mexico.

More intrigue

Other twists in the newly released documents include the finding that an ultra conservative former secret agent named George Gaudet had mysteriously had been issued a Mexican travel permit whose number was the next one after Oswald’s permit number.

And in yet another revealing document that will set researchers hunting in a new direction, there’s the account of a call to the British paper , the Cambridge Evening News, just 25 minutes before the assassination, advising that the U.S. embassy would soon have big news. The released document was a memo from the CIA to the FBI, dated four days after the killing, and notes the information was shared with Britain’s MI5.

“It’s getting late in the game. We are 54 years on,” said Bradford, with the Mary Ferrell Foundation.

More info on the web site:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation- ... 19019.html
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Tue Jan 02, 2018 8:29 am

Trump draws attention to case against ex-Dem IT aide Imran Awan

By Alex Pappas | Fox News

Fox News | 3:28

President Trump is drawing attention to the mysterious federal court case against Imran Awan, the former IT aide to a number of congressional Democrats, including former Democratic National Committee chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

“Whatever happened to this Pakistani guy who worked with the DNC?” the president asked in an interview published Thursday by the New York Times.

A grand jury in August returned an indictment in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia charging Awan and his wife, Hina Alvi, with a total of four counts, which included federal bank fraud and conspiracy. Awan has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

“Whatever happened to them?” Trump continued. “With the two servers that they broke up into a million pieces? Whatever happened to him?”

The president brought up the case while denying any collusion between his campaign and the Russians during the 2016 election.

Awan has not been charged with anything specific to his IT duties in Congress. But the case has drawn interest from Republican lawmakers because of Awan’s role for prominent Democrats and the access he had to sensitive data.

Awan and other IT aides for House Democrats had been on investigators’ radar for months over concerns of alleged equipment theft, access to sensitive computer systems and more, according to reports dating back to early 2017.

Awan and his wife are facing allegations they engaged in a conspiracy to obtain home equity lines of credit from the Congressional Federal Credit Union by giving false information about two properties – and sending the proceeds to individuals in Pakistan.

Awan was born in Pakistan, but came to the U.S. with his family when he was a teenager, according to The Washington Post. He became a U.S. citizen more than a decade ago.

The broader case surrounding him has put renewed scrutiny on Wasserman Schultz for keeping Awan on the payroll for months, even after a criminal investigation was revealed and he was barred from the House IT network.

Most lawmakers fired Awan in February, but Wasserman Schultz had kept him on until his arrest in July.

Earlier this month, prosecutors warned that Awan is a “flight risk” and could flee to Pakistan if a judge approves his request to lift “all of the conditions of his release.”

U.S. Attorney Jessie Liu filed a motion before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, urging the court to deny the request from Awan.

Awan is currently enrolled in the High Intensity Supervision Program (HISP) with conditions that he abide by an electronically monitored curfew of 12 a.m. to 6 a.m. and a limit on traveling beyond 150 miles from his residence, according to court documents. Awan and his attorney want to lift those conditions, including the electronic monitoring bracelet.


“Whatever happened to this Pakistani guy who worked with the DNC?”
- President Trump to New York Times
Federal prosecutors warned this could give Awan an opening.

“While the government possesses Awan’s Pakistani passport, nothing prevents him from obtaining a new Pakistani passport at the Embassy in D.C. That passport would permit Awan to board a flight and leave the country at any time,” the motion read. “The government asserts that Awan is a flight risk and that his participation in HISP is by far the least restrictive condition that can be imposed on him to ensure his return to Court.”

Wasserman Schultz has blamed the “right-wing media circus fringe” for the attention on Awan.

In an interview published in the Sun Sentinel in August, the former head of the Democratic National Committee suggested it's all part of an effort to distract from the investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign and possible ties to President Trump's team.

Fox News’ Brooke Singman and Jake Gibson contributed to this report.

©2017 FOX News Network, LLC.
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Tue Jan 02, 2018 9:20 am

Well researched and written.. kd



Documents Reveal the Complex Legacy of James Angleton, CIA Counterintelligence Chief and Godfather of Mass Surveillance

Jefferson Morley

The Intercept

Veteran CIA officer Cleveland Cram was nearing the end of his career in 1978, when his superiors in the agency’s directorate of operations handed him a sensitive assignment: Write a history of the agency’s Counterintelligence Staff. Cram, then 61, was well qualified for the task. He had a master’s and Ph.D. in European History from Harvard. He had served two decades in the clandestine service, including nine years as deputy chief of the CIA’s station in London. He knew the senior officialdom of MI-5 and MI-6, the British equivalents of the FBI and CIA, the agency’s closest partners in countering the KGB, the Soviet Union’s effective and ruthless intelligence service.

Cram was assigned to investigate a debacle. The Counterintelligence Staff, created in 1954, had been headed for 20 years by James Jesus Angleton, a legendary spy who deployed the techniques of literary criticism learned at Yale to find deep patterns and hidden meanings in the records of KGB operations against the West. But Angleton was also a dogmatic and conspiratorial operator whose idiosyncratic theories paralyzed the agency’s operations against the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, and whose domestic surveillance operations targeting American dissidents had discredited the CIA in the court of public opinion.

In December 1974, CIA Director William Colby fired Angleton after the New York Times revealed the then-unknown counterintelligence chief had overseen a massive program to spy on Americans involved in anti-war and black nationalist movements, a violation of the CIA’s charter. Coming four months after the resignation of Richard Nixon, Angleton’s fall was the denouement of the Watergate scandal, propelling Congress to probe the CIA for the first time. A Senate investigation, headed by Sen. Frank Church, exposed a series of other abuses: assassination conspiracies, unauthorized mail opening, collaboration with human rights abusers, infiltration of news organizations, and the MKULTRA mind-control experiments to develop drugs for use in espionage.

The exposure of Angleton’s operations set off a political avalanche that engulfed the agency in 1975 and after. The post-Watergate Congress established the House and Senate intelligence committees to oversee covert operations. The passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act required the CIA to obtain warrants to spy on Americans. And for the first time since 1947, the agency’s annual appropriation was slashed.

Cram’s mission — and he chose to accept it — was to soberly answer the questions that senior CIA officials were asking in their private moments: What in the name of God and national security had Jim Angleton been doing when he ran the Counterintelligence Staff from 1954 to 1974? Did his operations serve the agency’s mission? Did they serve the country?

With his porkpie hat and trenchcoat, the portly Cram bore a passing resemblance to George Smiley, the fictional British spymaster as played by Alec Guinness in the BBC’s production of John le Carré’s classic “Smiley’s People.” There was some professional similarity as well. In le Carré’s novels, Smiley is introduced as a veteran counterintelligence officer called on by his superiors to assess a covert operation gone disastrously wrong. He is drawn into a hunt for a mole in the British intelligence service.

Cram’s task in 1978 was to investigate a covert career that culminated in a disastrous mole hunt. Like Smiley, Cram was a connoisseur of files, their connections and implications, their deceptions and omissions. Like Smiley, he embarked on a Cold War espionage odyssey that would fill more than a few volumes.

When Cram took the assignment, he thought his history of the Counterintelligence Staff would take a year to write. It took six. By 1984, Cram had produced 12 legal-sized volumes about Angleton’s reign as a spymaster, each running 300 to 400 pages — a veritable encyclopedia of U.S. counterintelligence that has never before been made public. With professional thoroughness, Cram plumbed the depths of a deep state archive and returned with a story of madness that the CIA prefers to keep hidden, even 40 years later.

Last June, I received a phone call from a Los Angeles area code. Half expecting a robocall, I tapped the green icon.

“I’ve heard you are interested in a man named Cleve Cram,” the caller said in a British accent. “Is that so?”

Was I ever. I had just sent in final changes to the manuscript of “The Ghost,” my biography of Angleton. I thought of Cleve Cram the way a fisherman thinks of the Big One that got away. I had focused on Cram in 2015, as soon as I started to research “The Ghost.” He had written an article, published in an open-source CIA journal, about the literature of counterintelligence, which gave some insight into his classified conclusions about Angleton. To learn more, I sought out his personal papers, more than a dozen cartons of correspondence and other documents that his family had donated to Georgetown University Library after his death in 1999. The library’s finding aid indicated that the bequest contained a wealth of material on Angleton.

But I was too late. The CIA had quietly re-possessed Cram’s papers in 2014. I was told that representatives of the agency had informed the library that the CIA needed to review the material for classified information. All that had been publicly available vanished into the CIA’s archives. By withdrawing the Cram papers from view, the agency effectively shaped my narrative of Angleton’s career. Without Cram’s well-informed perspective, my account of Angleton would necessarily be less precise and probably less critical. I wrote about the experience for The Intercept in April 2016.

The caller said his name was William Tyrer. He had read my article. He told me he had visited the Georgetown library a few years earlier, while developing a screenplay about a mole in Britain’s MI-5. He had gone through the Cram papers, photographed several hundred pages of material, and become fascinated by the man. “He’s like an American George Smiley, no?” Tyrer said.

I agreed and said I would be most interested to see what he had found. He questioned me closely about my views on Angleton, Cram, and the CIA, and said he would be in touch. A quick web search revealed that Tyrer is a British-American movie producer, the man behind “Memento,” a brilliant and unforgettable backward-running thriller, the cult favorite “Donnie Darko,” and scores of other movies. He was a serious man and a credible source. A few days later, Tyrer started emailing me 50 pages of material about Angleton that he had found in Cram’s personal papers.

The Cleveland Cram File, portions of which are published here for the first time, contains a sample of the primary source materials that the veteran CIA official used to write his Angleton study. The documents were photographed in Georgetown University’s Booth Family Center for Special Collections. A Georgetown archivist did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment; the CIA also declined to comment.

The Cram file illuminates a pregnant moment in the history of America’s secret government, when the CIA began to reckon with the legacy of James Angleton, a founding father of the deep state, a master of mass surveillance, a conspiracy theorist with state power.

Perhaps the most complex and contested Angleton story that Cram had to untangle concerned two KGB officers who defected to the United States and offered their services to the CIA in the early 1960s. Angleton insisted the men’s conflicting stories had enormous implications for U.S. presidents and policymakers, and indeed for U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union. For the CIA, the question was, which defector was the more reliable source?

Anatoly Golitsyn, the chief of the KGB station in Finland, bolted to the West in December 1961. He was a heavyset man with hazel eyes and a methodical and manipulative mind. Yuri Nosenko, a career KGB officer embedded in the Soviet delegation to a U.N. disarmament conference in Geneva, started selling information to the Americans in June 1962 to pay back official funds blown in the company of dubious women. Eighteen months later, he approached the CIA and struck a deal to defect in return for a $50,000 cash payment. Among other things, Nosenko had firsthand knowledge that the KGB had not recruited accused presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald when he lived in the Soviet Union from 1959 to 1962.

Golitsyn, resettled in upstate New York by the CIA, convinced Angleton that Nosenko was a false defector sent by the KGB. Under Golitsyn’s influence, Angleton came to believe that in 1959, the KGB had launched a massive deception operation designed to lull the U.S. government into believing Soviet propaganda about “peaceful coexistence” between capitalism and communism, with the goal of prevailing over the complacent West.

Nosenko’s purpose, Golitsyn said, was to protect a Soviet “mole” already working inside CIA headquarters. “He is a provocateur, who is on a mission for the KGB,” Golitsyn told Angleton, according to a memo found in the agency’s declassified online database known as CREST, or the CIA Records Search Tool. “He was introduced to your agency as a double agent in Geneva in 1962. During all the time until now he has been fulfilling a KGB mission against your country.”

Angleton reneged on the payment and ordered that Nosenko be held in what would now be known as a “black site,” a secret CIA detention facility in southern Maryland. Nosenko was not tortured, but he was fed a minimal diet, denied all possessions, and, he said later, dosed with LSD. He was held in solitary confinement for the next four years, all the while protesting his innocence.

In 1968, Angleton lost out to the institutional consensus within the agency that Nosenko was in fact a bona fide defector. Nosenko was released from solitary confinement and the CIA resettled him in suburban Washington, D.C. Nothing he did in his retirement supported the idea that the KGB had sent him or that he knew of a mole inside the CIA.

A few years later, Cram was faced with a simple but important question: Had Angleton been right to incarcerate Nosenko?

To answer it, Cram relied in part on a secret CIA history titled “The Monster Plot,” written by John Hart, a career officer in the Soviet Russia division who had previously studied the Nosenko case on behalf of CIA Director Richard Helms. “The Monster Plot,” which runs to more than 180 pages, was declassified with a batch of JFK assassination files in November; Cram kept a copy in his personal papers.

The introduction and conclusion of “The Monster Plot,” photographed by Tyrer in the Georgetown collection, detail how legitimate concerns about Soviet penetration of the CIA blossomed into Angleton’s certainty that a giant KGB deception operation was undermining the West. The history’s title referred to the massive size of the suspected Soviet “plot” that Angleton and others feared was unfolding within the CIA.

Angleton was well acquainted with Soviet treachery. His best friend in British intelligence was Kim Philby, with whom he shared many a secret over liquid lunches in Washington. In 1951, Philby was expelled from the United States on the wholly justified suspicion that he was a Soviet spy. He later turned up in Moscow and became a general in the KGB.

After Philby’s betrayal, Angleton and other CIA officials worried that another communist mole might still be working the agency, a theory that seemed to be borne out nearly a decade later, when the CIA began losing a string of spies inside the Soviet Union. In October 1959, Petr Popov, a Soviet military intelligence officer who had been passing secrets to the Americans for seven years, vanished. A few months later, it emerged that he had been arrested, which “added a specific problem to the general concerns about the possibility the CIA was penetrated,” wrote Hart.

In 1961, the CIA began receiving anonymous letters warning that Western intelligence agencies — but not the agency itself — had been penetrated. The information in the letters was considered genuine because it led to the arrest of Soviet spies in the upper ranks of the British and German intelligence services. A year later, Oleg Penkovsky, a British spy in Soviet military intelligence who had given the U.S. information of “great strategic importance,” was arrested.

Angleton suspected the worst, and he found Golitsyn’s explanation persuasive. All the Soviet defectors who came after Golitsyn’s arrival in late 1961, including Nosenko, were phonies, Golitsyn said. They had been dispatched with false information to discredit Golitsyn, to protect KGB moles already in place, and to confuse U.S. policymakers about Moscow’s intentions. Hart noted that when Golitsyn “stressed themes of KGB ‘disinformation’ (dezinformatsiya) and extensive (but initially unspecified) staff penetration of the Western services, he found a willing and eager audience” in Angleton.

Golitsyn couldn’t have known how ready Angleton was to believe him when it came to Soviet disinformation, for Angleton had learned firsthand how strategic deception operations could influence the course of history. As a young intelligence officer in World War II, he was cleared for the ULTRA operation, in which British intelligence fed false information to the German High Command. Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower both believed the ULTRA operation gave the Allies a decisive advantage over the Germans, and so did Angleton.

The Soviets’ goal, Golitsyn said, was to dupe the West into believing that a schism was developing between the Soviet Union and its longtime ally China in the late 1950s. On the surface, at least, there were ample indications of a split. When Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s tyranny in 1956, the Chinese communists turned hostile to Moscow, issuing bitter demarches about the correct course of communism and launching border skirmishes over obscure territorial disputes. But Golitsyn didn’t buy it. According to Hart, the defector “was certain” the purported distance between the two powers “was the clever product of KGB disinformation.”

Angleton was persuaded, viewing the public Sino-Soviet conflict as part of a KGB deception operation designed to persuade the West that the communist world was divided, Hart wrote. If the deception succeeded — that is, if the CIA believed it — it would undermine the U.S.’s commitment to a firm policy of containing Soviet power, Angleton thought. Hart concluded that Angleton had set out to break Nosenko before ascertaining the facts.

“There was never an honest effort at the time to establish NOSENKO’s bona fides,” Hart wrote. “There was only a determined effort to prove NOSENKO was mala fide, and part of a KGB deception operation meant to mislead the CIA into believing it was not penetrated.”

In his report, Hart affirmed the agency’s 1968 finding, reached over Angleton’s bitter objections, that Nosenko was a genuine defector. Not for the first or last time, a self-serving informant had used the agency’s ideological preconceptions to manipulate it to his own ends. Angleton’s handling of Nosenko “did not conform to any generally accepted sense of the term ‘methodology,’” Hart wrote. In his recommendations, he called for more rigorous psychological assessment of defectors and “improvement of intellectual standards” in the clandestine service.

Cram agreed. In a summary of his assessment of the Nosenko case, published in a 1993 monograph for the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence titled “Of Moles and Molehunters,” he concluded Angleton was wrong about Nosenko. The excerpts from Cram’s papers reveal the classified information on which he based his conclusion.

As Cram delved into Angleton’s records, he received a signed memo, included in the Georgetown collection, from a branch chief in the Soviet Russia division named “Miles.” Miles explained that in the mid-1960s, he had served on a CIA team code-named AESAWDUST that sought to vindicate Angleton’s theory of false defectors and strategic disinformation. (All CIA operations involving the Soviet Union were identified by the diagraph AE, followed by a randomly selected code name.)

With the benefit of hindsight, Miles admitted that groupthink had distorted his work. “The AESAWDUSTERS were convinced people (I ought to know, I was one of them), and they were very impatient with anyone who disagreed with them or were critical [sic], often snapping back that the critic did not have all the information they had, so didn’t know what he was talking about,” he wrote. “Convinced participating AESAWDUST members were terribly concerned and motivated by fear that until this vast deception complex was exposed and countered, we would be in bad trouble which could get worse at any moment.”
The sheer enormity of Angleton’s “Monster Plot” theory convinced its advocates that it must be true, Miles wrote. But a counterintelligence theory that explained everything was suspect. The mass of cases “tossed into the boiling pot grew and grew, until outsiders simply could no longer swallow the idea that all [Soviet defectors] were bad,” Miles wrote. “Sooner or later those not bound up in the mission said ‘Hold it, Wait a minute! Maybe NOSENKO [was a fake defector], maybe some [double agent] cases, maybe even a few more, but almost all? Too much.’”

“Simple passage of time has proven that AESAWDUST was wrong,” Miles continued. “The idea was that NOSENKO would not have been sent unless the goals of the KGB were truly major. These were postulated as negating GOLITSYN’s information (which NOSENKO never did, nor do I believe he could have); then to protect sources the KGB had in place in the USG and CIA (none discovered despite marathon effort); and finally to destroying CIA itself.”

The CIA had indeed “gone downhill” in the 1970s, Miles noted, but he attributed that decline to sensational revelations of CIA abuses in the press and the cultural changes wrought by the 1960s, not KGB deception operations. “Nothing has turned out as AESAWDUST predicted,” Miles concluded.

Even Angleton’s original supporters eventually became disenchanted with the rigidity of his thinking. Such testimony fortified Cram’s findings about Angleton and clarified the fate of another one of his victims, James Leslie Bennett, chief of counterintelligence for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

In the course of his inquiry, Cram heard from a counterintelligence officer with the initials “PTD” who seems to have known about the origins of Angleton’s investigation of Bennett.

PTD sent Cram a one-page memo on “The Bennett Case,” which was included in the Georgetown collection and photographed by Tyrer. It was a damning account of Angleton’s methods and his misguided reliance on Anatoly Golitsyn.
The Bennett Case began in 1970, when senior Canadian intelligence officers became convinced, correctly, that there was a communist spy working inside their headquarters. Because the CIA worked closely with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, known as the RCMP, Angleton was concerned, too. He consulted with Bennett, his Canadian counterpart, an intellectual whose headstrong opinions were not always appreciated by his more provincial colleagues. But Angleton liked Bennett, according to PTD. Angleton “never thought of Bennett as a spy and in fact was very high on him as a pro among cowboys,” PTD wrote. Angleton even gave a “tongue-lashing” to a colleague who suggested Bennett might be working for the Soviets.

One of the Canadian officials who clashed with Bennett came to Washington in the summer of 1970 for “long discussions of penetration of RCMP by [Russian Intelligence Service] and probable Bennett role,” PTD recalled.

After defending Bennett, Angleton asked Golitsyn to analyze the case. “In early 1972 Golitsyn was given RCMP files to peruse about the supposed RIS penetration,” PTD recalled. In his report, Golitsyn wrote down three names of Canadian officials, one of whom was Bennett. “After pondering some he decided Bennett was the penetration.”

Angleton was suddenly persuaded. “JJA forced Golitsyn on the RCMP for this purpose of supposedly aiding them in the investigation,” PTD wrote, using Angleton’s initials. “And all through the case, JJA kept up an unrelenting pressure on the RCMP … to push Bennett out.”

Bennett protested his innocence and took a polygraph test to prove it. The exam “showed him to be a strong reactor on certain subjects not related to the investigation,” PTD reported. “But when queried whether he was working for an adversary service (and they tried them all), there was no response.”

When a CIA polygraph security officer looked at the results, PTD wrote, “he concluded Bennett had passed the test.” By then Bennett had already been forced to retire.

As first reported in “Cold Warrior,” Tom Mangold’s 1993 book about Angleton’s mole hunt, Bennett left intelligence work under a cloud of undeserved suspicion. He got divorced and moved to Australia. The Canadians eventually caught a Russian spy in their midst who had nothing to do with Bennett. In 1993, the Canadian government cleared Bennett of any wrongdoing and gave him $150,000 Canadian in compensation, according to journalist David Wise.

To Cram, PTD’s account showed that Angleton had acted on Golitsyn’s whim, misinterpreted the polygraph results, and ruined a man’s career on the slenderest of suppositions.
As Cram dug into the debacle of the mole hunt, he came across its absurd culmination: Angleton, the mole hunter, became the prime suspect.

Cram heard the story in May 1978 from Clare Edward Petty, a veteran U.S. counterintelligence officer. After years of unsuccessful mole hunting, Petty became convinced that the mole must be working on Angleton’s staff. First, Petty wrongly suspected Angleton’s longtime deputy, Newton “Scottie” Miler, and later Pete Bagley, chief of counterintelligence for the Soviet Division, who didn’t actually work for Angleton but was, in Cram’s estimation, “wholly under Angleton’s domination.”

Petty had also spoken to two reporters, David Martin, a defense correspondent for Newsweek, and David Ignatius, then a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Both had written glancingly about the astonishing-if-true allegation that Angleton was suspected of being the mole, and were trying to confirm it with sources inside the agency.

In a four-hour interview with Cram, Petty gave a more detailed version of the story he had told Martin and Ignatius. He said that he had written up his suspicions of Bagley in a memo and sent it to Angleton at some point in the late 1960s. Several months later, during a long conversation about something else, Angleton suddenly said, “Bagley is not a spy.”

That blanket denial, Petty said, set him wondering what made Angleton so sure. Could it be that Angleton was himself the mole? Cram thought it unlikely that Petty was alone in his suspicions, “for there were many who regarded Angleton as sinister,” he observed in his memo about the interview, which was included in the Georgetown collection.

Petty said he recorded 30 hours of commentary in which he outlined the various “litmus tests” he had run on Angleton to see if he was a KGB spy. His reasoning might have been called “Angletonian.” Assuming the CIA had been penetrated at a high level, Petty considered the possibility that both Anatoly Golitsyn and Yuri Nosenko had been sent by the KGB under the guidance of the real mole, Angleton himself. Through this analytical lens, Petty saw new meaning in the anomalies of Angleton’s career: his friendship with Kim Philby; his faith in Golitsyn; his insistence that the Sino-Soviet split was a ruse. Every decision he made seemed to impede U.S. intelligence operations, Petty noted. Perhaps it was intentional.

Cram’s account of the interview makes clear that Petty had no solid evidence to support his musings. Petty specialized in “airy theorizing,” Cram wrote later, favoring “extreme speculation unsupported by facts.”

There was — and is — no evidence that Angleton was a spy for the KGB. Given Angleton’s staunch anti-communism, the notion is close to absurd. Petty’s accusation is most significant as evidence for Cram and the CIA leadership that Angleton’s theory and practice of counterintelligence were deeply flawed.

If Angleton wasn’t working for the Soviets, what could account for his folly?

Among the papers Cram reviewed was a “very secret” report prepared in January 1973 for Angelo Vicari, chief of the Italian National Police, and included in the Georgetown collection. It conveyed the views of an Italian intelligence officer serving in Washington to his superiors in Rome, including his impressions of the CIA.
“He regards the offensive sector of the CIA as better than the defensive sector and says that noteworthy conflicts exist between the two of them,” the report said. “The man who ruined the defensive sector there is Angleton, known to you personally — who though fortunately set aside for some time — is still in a position to do harm.”

“According to this opinion, not his (because he does not know him personally) but of his service, Angleton is clinically mad and his madness has only gotten worse in these later years. This is a madness that is all the more dangerous because it is sustained by an intelligence that has about it elements of the monstrous and that rests on a hallucinatory logical construction. The whole is unified by a pride that imposes a refusal to recognize his own errors.”

That was hearsay evidence of a widely held belief that buttressed what even Angleton’s onetime supporters admitted: The man’s thinking bordered on delusional, even as he was too proud to admit he might be wrong about anything.

Angleton’s behavior may have sometimes been foolish, but he was no fool, not when it came to amassing power and wielding it. Angleton’s expansive view of the CIA’s scope of operations was discredited in the mid-1970s, but it returned in the 1980s with President Ronald Reagan, who countenanced the extra-legal activities that culminated in the Iran-Contra scandal. After the September 11 attacks, the George W. Bush administration revived Angleton’s warrantless mass surveillance program for the digital age. To oversimplify only slightly, Dick Cheney picked up where Jim Angleton left off.

Angleton acted zealously on a theory of history whose validity is hard to accept and harder to dispute: that secret intelligence agencies can control the destiny of mankind. He had a keen understanding of how intelligence agencies covertly manipulate societies, and he believed that such operations could turn the tide of history. He would not have been surprised by Russia’s meddling in the U.S. presidential election of 2016. The CIA had used such tactics in scores of votes around the world, starting with the 1948 Italian elections, which prevented the communist party from coming to power, and in which Angleton himself played a key role.

Angleton lived and thrived in what he called “the wilderness of mirrors,” his favorite phrase for Soviet deception operations. When David Martin published a book about Angleton called “Wilderness of Mirrors,” Angleton indignantly claimed he had coined the phrase, according to a three-page memo included in the Georgetown collection. He hadn’t. He had first read it in T.S. Eliot’s poem, “Gerontion.” But his explication of the metaphor was apt. The phrase, he wrote in the memo, perfectly captured the “myriad of stratagems, deceptions, artifices, and all the other devices of disinformation which the Soviet bloc and its coordinated intelligence services use to confuse and split the West … an ever fluid landscape where fact and illusion merge.”
The most powerful intelligence agencies traffic in facts and illusions to manipulate societies on a massive scale. Substitute “CIA” for “Soviet bloc” and “America’s perceived enemies” for “the West” and you have a solid description of U.S. covert action around the globe for the last 70 years. Substitute “Putin’s Russia” for “Soviet bloc” and you’ve captured the FSB-sponsored social media operations in recent U.S., French, and German elections.

The Cram papers suggest that if Angleton were in government today, he would approve of the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance capabilities, which were reportedly used to listen in on Russians calling their contacts in Trump Tower. He probably would have overestimated the FSB’s capacity to pull off deception operations, such as social media-driven “fake news,” and their impact on American government, just as he overestimated the KGB’s capabilities and influence in the 1960s. He would have searched long and hard for “moles,” the agent or agents inside the U.S. intelligence community who helped the Russians advance their schemes. Counterintelligence was Angleton’s religion, and he would have insisted on its relevance.

Cram continued to study Angleton and share the lessons of his extraordinary career for the rest of his life, even as his epic study remained a state secret. In his 1993 monograph, declassified a decade later, Cram concluded that Angleton was “self-centered, ambitious and paranoid with little regard for his agency colleagues or simple common sense.” He was a visionary and a crank, a prophet and a law breaker, a national security menace just slightly ahead of his time.

Top photo: Former CIA counterintelligence chief James J. Angleton as he departed from a meeting of the Rockefeller commission on the CIA in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 11, 1975. Angleton, who resigned from the agency that December, testified for nearly two hours in closed session as the panel probed alleged domestic spying.

Document photos and photographs of the players:
https://theintercept.com/2018/01/01/the ... -angleton/
kinderdigi
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Tue Jan 02, 2018 11:13 am

The FBI Spy It took 15 years to discover one of the most damaging cases of espionage in U.S. history. An inside look at the secret life, and final capture, of Robert Hanssen

By JOHANNA MCGEARY Monday, Mar. 05, 2001

Those who betray must always fear betrayal. It happened to Robert Philip Hanssen a little after 8 p.m. on a Sunday night, just five weeks shy of his planned retirement from the spy game. Ten armed FBI agents shivered in the cold as they watched Hanssen walk up to a "dead drop" code-named Ellis, a spot under a bridge in a quiet suburban Virginia park where he hid a plastic garbage bag full of secret U.S. documents. As he emerged from the woods of Foxstone Park, the agents, guns drawn, surrounded fellow FBI spy catcher Bob Hanssen, clapped handcuffs on his wrist and began reading him his Miranda rights. Some FBI men plunged into the darkness, backtracking along Hanssen's path to recover the bag. Not far away, in nearby Arlington, another team of agents was covertly watching a second drop site called Lewis, to see if Russian intelligence officers showed up to reclaim a package Hanssen had not picked up. It contained $50,000 in $100 bills that the FBI believed was the payment for Hanssen's purloined material. When the Russians didn't show, the agents collected the cash as evidence. Hanssen seemed thoroughly shocked and surprised by his arrest. But he was not nearly as shocked as the FBI. When Hanssen's arrest was revealed last Tuesday, FBI Director Louis Freeh called his alleged double dealing the "most traitorous actions imaginable" against the U.S. and warned that the damage could prove "exceptionally grave." It was one of the worst failures of American intelligence ever and a brutal humiliation for the FBI, which had not caught on to Hanssen for 15 years. Says an investigator inside the case: "This guy almost committed the perfect crime." The intelligence community has launched a deep probe into exactly what Hanssen may have turned over to Moscow during those years, but a colleague believes he "gave the whole bleeping thing away." Hanssen had extraordinary access to precious U.S. secrets invaluable to the intelligence services of first the Soviet Union and now Russia and delivered upwards of 6,000 pages of classified stuff into their hands. In the process, analysts believe he compromised every important human and electronic penetration of Russia for the past 15 years. A blue-ribbon panel has been set up to undertake a postmortem of the FBI, to determine how to thwart other moles. As Freeh admitted frankly, "We don't say, at this stage, that we have a system that can prevent this type of conduct." Everyone who knows the dour-faced Hanssen professed astonishment that he could be one of the great spies of the age. What, we want to understand, makes a man betray, and how did he get away with it for so long? Here, from the 100-page affidavit filed by prosecutors and from Time's own sources, is the story behind the alleged case against Hanssen. The Spy Who Loved Spying A good spy needs a good cover, and Hanssen had one of the best. He looked the quintessential suburban dad, devoted to his wife and six kids, working a government job to pay for a four-bedroom split-level house on a cul-de-sac in a modest Virginia neighborhood, Catholic school and college for the kids, and three aging cars. Neighbors often saw him walking through a neighborhood park at night, letting his dog romp, though he rarely stopped to chat. He piled the family into a van every Sunday for Mass at the same church FBI boss Louis Freeh attended. He and his wife Bonnie belong to the church's conservative Opus Dei society. Bonnie is a devout, spiritual woman, much admired among her neighbors for her sunny optimism and her skill at child rearing. If the reserved, aloof Hanssen was less popular, he was still regarded by those who knew him as a good father, good husband, good professional. And a good son. "He has always been very honest and upright," said his mother Vivian Hanssen, 88, reached by Time at her home in Venice, Fla. "I don't understand how he could be leading a double life. I hope there are extenuating circumstances." Yet Hanssen was in the perfect position to spy on his country. For 25 years, he rose through the ranks of counterintelligence agents who toiled on the FBI's "Dark Side," as insiders call the highly secretive National Security Division. In 1978, when Hanssen was posted to the big New York field division, most rookie agents required to work counterintelligence hated the job. The hot career path lay in the dramatic bank robberies and Cosa Nostra cases of the criminal division. Intelligence surveillances took years, decades even, and seldom if ever resulted in actual indictments. But Hanssen actually seemed to like the slow, intricate building of counterintelligence cases and was well suited to it. If criminal agents called the other realm "Sleepy Hollow," the NSD boys scoffed at their rivals as "knuckle draggers." As an agent who worked with Hanssen in the Soviet unit put it, "The counterintelligence agents read the New York Times, and the criminal agents read the Daily News. Espionage cases are the best cases in the world because they're very cerebral." So was Hanssen. He read voraciously, everything from spy novels to Marxist tomes to the richly detailed logs filed by surveillance squads overnight. "He really wanted to do counterintelligence work," says the agent. PAGE 1 | | | |

PAGE | 2 | | | In one of the many letters he allegedly sent to Moscow, Hanssen claimed that what he really wanted was to be a double agent, like the British intellectual turned mole Kim Philby. "I'd decided on this course when I was 14. I'd read Philby's book," he wrote (although Philby's autobiography was not published until 1968, when Hanssen was 24) in a rambling discourse last March to the SVR, Russia's foreign-arm successor to the Soviet-era KGB. "My only hesitations were my security concerns under uncertainty. I hate uncertainty." Hanssen got something of a late start in the spy business. He was born April 18, 1944, in Chicago to a veteran cop engaged for nearly 30 years in local anticommunist intelligence work. He was raised as a Lutheran on a street lined with towering elms in a middle-class neighborhood of northwest Chicago. Next-door neighbors remember Bob as polite, a good kid who did well in school and pleased his teachers. He went to the select liberal-arts Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., where he majored in chemistry but had few extracurricular activities, unusual in the busy, close-knit society of the school. He also studied Russian, something even his mother Vivian says she did not know. "He might have been one of those loners," says Bruce Spencer, who attended Knox but doesn't remember him. Hanssen went on to graduate school at Northwestern University, where he studied first dentistry, then accounting. After a stint with the Chicago police department's short-lived "supersnoops" unit, Hanssen eventually joined the FBI. At 32 he was more mature than most brash recruits, often condescending to his colleagues, and he wore his religious faith on his sleeve. "People who are super-religious, and only God meets their standards, usually have no time for mere mortals," says a retired agent who worked in the New York field office's Soviet division, where Hanssen was assigned from 1978 to '81 and again from 1985 to '87. "He thought he was mentally superior to his peers and probably his leadership," says Robert Bryant, former FBI assistant director. That subtle arrogance made him few friends there, and he was nicknamed Dr. Death for his sallow complexion, dark hair, black suits and humorless stare. Because he had no bedside manner, he was never sent out to recruit Soviet turncoats. "He had no people skills at all," says the former colleague, who wonders if the cruel nicknames helped set Hanssen on his traitorous course. Yet he became a clever inside man, adept at the computers the FBI was introducing to keep track of its counterintelligence activities. He helped set up the Intelligence Investigative System into which agents dumped names, addresses, likes, dislikes and other telling minutiae about Soviet targets, giving him access to the true names of every FBI intelligence source in New York. He also worked with the electronics specialists who roamed the night streets installing bugs and cameras to watch over Soviet officials. And he was very inquisitive about everything going on around him. "I just figured he was nosy," says the former colleague, who nevertheless wrote off his curiosity as genuine interest in the unit's work. During Hanssen's stints at headquarters in Washington, from 1981 to '85 and again from 1987 to his arrest, his increasingly important assignments let him poke unnoticed into virtually every corner of government intelligence, surveying a complete library of sources, methods, techniques, targets, plus secret-operations plans and analytical assessments. "He couldn't have had better assignments," mourns a top G-man. On Oct. 4, 1985, the Justice Department charges, Hanssen sent a fateful letter, addressed to a KGB officer in Washington. Inside was a second missive marked "Do not open. Take this envelope unopened to Viktor I. Cherkashin." Hanssen knew well who Cherkashin was: Moscow's chief counterspy at the Soviet embassy, a KGB colonel adept at handling double agents. (Cherkashin was already masterminding the activities of CIA mole Aldrich Ames, who was not uncovered until 1994.) Inside that second envelope was an anonymous offer to send a trove of classified papers to the KGB in exchange for $100,000, and a proposal to keep on selling similar secrets. "They are from certain of the most sensitive and highly compartmented projects of the U.S. intelligence community," wrote the man identifying himself only as "B." "All are originals to aid in verifying their authenticity." As another gesture to establish his good faith, "B" named three KGB officers who had been recruited to spy for the U.S., confirming names that Ames had spilled in June. Soon, the three were recalled to Moscow, where later two were executed and one jailed. PAGE | 2 | | |

PAGE | | 3 | | That initiated a sporadic series of communications and payments between "B" and the KGB lasting until December 1991. By the time of the arrest, "B" had been paid some $600,000 in cash, plus three diamonds, and had been told an additional $800,000 lay banked for him in a Moscow account (though he scoffed that he knew the account was a typical spymaster's fiction). As a counterintelligence agent, Hanssen knew his gravest danger lay in betrayal. So he was obsessive about security from the start and never revealed his identity to his "friends" in Moscow. He noted that his first delivery of documents made him vulnerable because "as a collection they point to me." He said his name and position "must be left unstated to ensure my security." He used various aliases besides "B," including Ramon Garcia and Jim Baker; his handlers could address him only as "Dear Friend." When Moscow suggested more complex and distant drop sites, he refused, saying, "My experience tells me we can actually be more secure in easier modes." He refused requests to meet Soviet agents face to face or travel abroad: these could look suspicious. "I am much safer if you know little about me," he wrote in 1988. "Neither of us are children about these things. Over time, I can cut your losses rather than become one." In December 1991, "B" abruptly broke off with Moscow until late 1999, when he just as abruptly resumed as before. In hindsight, FBI officials believe the reason is obvious. In 1992, the FBI and CIA assembled a "backroom" team to figure out why a series of operations had been blown. They suspected a high-level mole. Eventually their stealthy investigations led them to CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames in 1994. Though the backroom hunt was a closely held secret, the ever curious Hanssen might have figured it out from stray details. Even after Ames' arrest, the mole ferreting went on, leading to the 1996 arrest of CIA employee Harold Nicholson, then of FBI agent Earl Pitts. That July, Hanssen started running his own name, his address and keywords such as dead drop and Foxstone through the FBI's automated database, which contained information on all investigations. Only when he found nothing indicating that he was under suspicion did he get back in touch with his former handlers, now in service to the SVR. They still had no idea who he was. Yet a delighted letter from Moscow in October 1999 crowed, "Dear Friend: Welcome! It's good to know you are here." But as "B" resumed selling American secrets, he grew increasingly anxious. "I have come as close as I ever want to come to sacrificing myself to help you and I get silence," he complained in March 2000. "I hate silence ..." Speculating darkly about his own motives, he wrote: "One might propose that I am either insanely brave or quite insane. I'd answer neither. I'd say, insanely loyal. Take your pick. There is insanity in all the answers." Though he believed he had so far "judged the edge correctly" of his own jeopardy, "it's been a long time, my dear friends, a long and lonely time." In June he suggested that a Palm VII wireless organizer might improve secure communication. While he mocked the U.S. as a "powerfully built but retarded child, potentially dangerous but young, immature and easily manipulated," he worried, "it is also one that can turn ingenious quickly, like an idiot savant." And in November, even as he joked about retiring to Moscow to teach Spying 101, he wrote: "I ask you to help me survive ... Wish me luck." Catching a Mole By the autumn of 2000, Hanssen needed more than luck. The back room was still digging, since none of the previous arrests explained all the blown operations of the '80s and '90s. Not too long after "B" resumed contact with the Russians, the analysts concluded that the failures were caused by leaks from FBI files. They were sure the FBI harbored another mole. After an analysis of the NSD employees with access to data on compromised missions, Hanssen's name popped up on a short list of suspects. Yet he might never have been uncovered without betrayal from the other side--the one thing even the cleverest double agent cannot control. The back room's first hard look at him produced no leads of value. Hanssen wasn't spending money. His daughter was on full scholarship. There was no drinking, no gambling in his file--in short, nothing to indicate he was selling out his country. Like most other career FBI agents, he had not been polygraphed since he joined. Once, in 1994, he had been caught fiddling with a colleague's computer, but he explained that away by saying he was testing the system for vulnerabilities. He was one of the foremost computer experts in the NSD; it seemed part of his job. The back room, says an official, needed more and "decided to find people who knew the answers." Investigators went trolling for disaffected Russian intelligence veterans who might have had useful information, and in the fall of 2000 they delicately wooed several, targeted for their knowledge and weaknesses. One informer came in with a priceless item--a piece of a black plastic garbage bag. From that scrap, FBI lab experts lifted two latent fingerprints and ran them against every set in the agency's personnel file. Bingo: they matched two on the 10-print card filed in the name of Robert Philip Hanssen. PAGE | | 3 | |

PAGE | | | 4 | A second clue produced by the trolling operation was a tape recording of an August 1986 telephone conversation between a Washington-based spy named Aleksander Fefelov and "B," the highly placed volunteer double agent. Two FBI analysts who had worked with Hanssen for five years listened to the tape, enhanced to minimize noise, and concluded "without reservation" that "B" was Hanssen. A short time later, a Russian source produced Hanssen's complete KGB dossier--the original, not photocopied, master file on the agency's 15-year relationship with "B." The paper trail of letters and documents stunned even the ferrets in the back room. Here appeared to be incontrovertible evidence that one of their own was responsible for irreparable damage to U.S. security over many years. But that was old stuff: now the agents wanted to catch him in the act, to collect hard evidence that would stand up in court--or persuade Hanssen he was better off confessing all. Armed with secret wiretap approvals and search warrants, agents mounted intensive electronic and physical surveillance of Hanssen. They snooped into his computer files, decoded encrypted messages, read his Palm Pilot. On Dec. 12 they spotted him driving four times past the sign used to signal a drop, just a mile from his home. On Dec. 26 they watched him do it again, as he walked right up to the signpost with a flashlight to sweep its beam in search of the adhesive-tape signal, then raise his arms in a gesture of disgust. On Jan. 12 Hanssen was reassigned to an obscure office at headquarters to isolate him. Still, he made three more passes by the signal site in January and three more in February. Finally, on Feb. 12, at another park code-named Lewis, agents discovered a package containing $50,000. They photographed and examined everything in the packet, then replaced it. And waited for Hanssen to make the red-handed exchange. In the aftermath, many agents who had known Hanssen over the years were left to wonder why. Was he desperate for money? In 1985, when he began his double life, agent pay in New York was so low that some agents used food stamps. Was he angry and vengeful? "He was really tormented professionally," says an acquaintance. "He was a lot smarter than a lot of the people he worked for, and they really kicked him around." Or was there, as former New York field office chief James Kallstrom suggests, a serious psychological kink in Hanssen's brain? "For an FBI agent to be a traitor, to sell out his family, his country, his children, is unbelievable," says Kallstrom. "There's something really wrong in how he processes information that we didn't pick up." Containing the Damage As Hanssen sits in a detention facility in northern Virginia, the FBI hopes he is meditating on the death penalty. He may be eligible for it under a post-Ames law, for abetting the death of agents working for the U.S.--two of those three Russians he fingered in 1985 and possibly two others Moscow television says he brought down. The FBI hopes the lethal prospect moves Hanssen to detail exactly what he gave away. If he "sold the farm," as former FBI assistant director Bryant believes, U.S. intelligence will have to rebuild its entire Russian program from the ground up. And every operative in the U.S. spy apparatus, from satellite controllers to eavesdroppers to military planners, is searching frantically to discover what may have been compromised. Equally worrisome is the damage to the FBI. "It's a real kick in the balls," says a former CIA official, for an agency that has long angled for primacy in counterintelligence and that used the Ames fiasco to expand its reach into all the CIA's Russia brief. Because the FBI got access to many more CIA files, so did Hanssen. "The FBI used the Ames case to expand their jurisdiction," says another former intelligence official. "In the aftermath, they produced a situation in which whatever this guy was doing, he was more likely to learn more." Freeh may hope the blue-ribbon panel he quickly named under the friendly hand of former FBI Director William Webster will save the agency from a nasty probe. The proud FBI hates the very idea of any outside control or oversight. After Ames' treachery was discovered, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Bromwich produced a scathing review of the bureau's inaction and confusion when a highly placed mole was first suspected. Freeh enlisted Webster, charges a former Justice Department official, "as a pre-emptive strike to another inspector general investigation." PAGE | | | 4 |

PAGE | | | | 5 Congress is going to have plenty of angry questions for the FBI this time. Why did it take so long to catch Hanssen? Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Shelby wants to know, "Why didn't someone finger him in some way?" Why does the FBI have less stringent standards for checking up on its people than other agencies have? The CIA has long employed routine polygraph tests to "flutter" agents every five years to search out misbehavior. Those tests are controversial, and Freeh has resisted using them, despite pressure from his own National Security Division managers to do so ever since the 1994 debacle. There must be "a happy medium," says former CIA chief Jim Woolsey, between overzealous, career-destroying tests and the FBI's lax ways. Why wasn't Hanssen caught even when he regularly ran his own name and particulars through cbi computers? "That should have triggered something," declares Shelby, echoing the concerns of many on Capitol Hill. Meanwhile, there are no days off in the back room. Neither the FBI nor the CIA can rule out the possibility that there are other moles burrowed away inside its institution, learning from the mistakes that brought down Ames and now, if the charges are proved, Hanssen. That means the next case may be even worse.

http://content.time.com/time/world/arti ... 48,00.html
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Fri Jan 05, 2018 4:17 am

Judge ends curfew for ex-Dem IT aide Imran Awan, but still requires GPS device

By Alex Pappas | Fox News

Fox News | 11:17

A federal judge has ended curfew restrictions for ex-Capitol Hill IT aide Imran Awan but is still requiring him to wear a GPS monitoring device as he awaits trial on fraud charges and prosecutors argue he is a flight risk.

U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan revoked Awan’s curfew restrictions and stopped requiring him to be drug tested, according to a Wednesday court filing.

But Chutkan kept in place the GPS monitoring device and requirement that he not travel outside a 150-mile radius of his home.

Awan, a former IT aide for Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, has been enrolled in the High Intensity Supervision Program (HISP) with conditions that he abide by an electronically monitored curfew of 12 a.m. to 6 a.m. and a limit on traveling beyond 150 miles from his residence.

Awan and his attorney had attempted to lift those conditions, including the electronic monitoring bracelet.

But federal prosecutors had warned that could give Awan an opening.

“The government asserts that Awan is a flight risk and that his participation in HISP is by far the least restrictive condition that can be imposed on him to ensure his return to court,” they argued.

A grand jury in August returned an indictment in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia charging Awan and his wife, Hina Alvi, with a total of four counts, which included federal bank fraud and conspiracy. Awan has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Awan has not been charged with anything specific to his IT duties in Congress. But the case has drawn interest from Republican lawmakers because of Awan’s role for prominent Democrats and the access he had to sensitive data.

Awan had been scheduled to appear in federal court next week for a status conference hearing, but it was rescheduled Thursday until March.

Meanwhile, President Trump recently drew attention to the case against Awan, asking during an interview with the New York Times: “Whatever happened to this Pakistani guy who worked with the DNC?”

Awan was born in Pakistan, but came to the U.S. with his family when he was a teenager. He became a U.S. citizen more than a decade ago.

Fox News’ Brooke Singman contributed to this report.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/01 ... evice.html
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Fri Jan 05, 2018 4:21 am

The Democrat's Bizarre IT Scandal Gets Another Deferment

Frank Miniter

Forbes | 2018-01-04

Last July Imran Awan, a former IT administrator for members of Congress, was arrested at Dulles International Airport before he could fly away to Lahore, Pakistan. Imran and his wife—she was allowed to fly to Pakistan months before with their children—were subsequently indicted for bank fraud.

Imran’s arrest made headlines, as he was then still employed by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) even though he’d been banned from the House network since February 2, 2017. Capitol Police say they tossed Imran and his associates off the House network after he provided them with fraudulent data of what was supposed to be a copy of the data on the House Democratic Caucus’ server—a server Imran was accessing against House rules as he moved data from the many Democrats in the House he and his associates worked for to the server, for what reason we don’t know.

When they need to, a district attorney (or in this case a U.S. attorney) will often use a smaller charge to get an indictment to hold a suspect as law enforcement continues to investigate. This bank fraud charge feels like that kind of hold on Imran Awan and now Hina Alvi (she returned with their kids from Pakistan last October, perhaps with a plea deal).

Still, there are many more questions here than answers. A status hearing scheduled for just before Thanksgiving was postponed to January 8, 2018. Now this hearing has been moved to March.

The official explanation for this postponement from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia says:

Since the last status conference, the government has continued to engage in substantial discussions with counsel for the defendants regarding complex discovery issues and other legal issues in this case, in particular issues surrounding claims of attorney-client privilege being raised by defendant Imran Awan. Regarding those issues, the government has provided defendants with additional discovery, which they continue to review and analyze. As such, all of the parties in this case are respectfully requesting additional time to address these issues with their clients and with the government.


Right now the only charges against the Awans are “conspiracy to commit bank fraud, false statements on a loan or credit application, and unlawful monetary transactions,” yet U.S. attorneys and the lawyers representing the defendants are in the throes of a fight about attorney-client privilege related to a laptop computer, letters and a notebook used by Imran, but that was officially owned by Rep. Wasserman Schultz’s office, that was found sitting in what was once a phone booth in a congressional building after midnight on April 6, 2017.

Continued from page 1

The affidavit from the FBI used to attain the indictment very clearly laid out their alleged bank fraud and related crimes. If this were only a case about bank fraud, however, U.S. attorneys wouldn’t need the data on the laptop or the other evidence left in the congressional building for a conviction. They could just press on with only the evidence they need for those charges.

As anyone following this case knows, there is a lot more here than possible bank fraud. Nevertheless, though Capitol Police have been investigating, along with the FBI, for well over a year the only charges filed so far are these bank fraud and related charges—even though prosecutors and defense attorneys are wrestling over evidence that appears to have to do with other things besides bank fraud.

Meanwhile, the media has mostly ignored the much more salacious elements of this case; quite possibly because the 40-plus members of Congress the Awans and their associates worked for were all Democrats.

For these reasons and more this case feels like a ticking bomb. It’s speculation to say just what it’s loaded with, as everything from massive procurement thefts to espionage have been mentioned in relation to this investigation, but it does appear that a lot of people are begging for time to defuse it before it goes boom!

Frank Miniter is the author of Kill Big Brother, a cyber-thriller that shows how to keep our freedom in this digital age.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/frankminit ... 7fc7f41675
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Fri Jan 05, 2018 5:15 am

Just a heads up.. this means your phone too! Anything using Intel or AMD CPUs.
kd

Meltdown and Spectre Side-Channel Vulnerabilities

Original release date: January 03, 2018 | Last revised: January 04, 2018

US-CERT is aware of a set of security vulnerabilities—known as Meltdown and Spectre—that affect modern computer processors. Exploitation of these vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to obtain access to sensitive information.

Users and administrators are encouraged to review Vulnerability Note VU#584653, Microsoft's Advisory(link is external), and Mozilla's blog post for additional information and refer to their OS vendor for appropriate patches.

US-CERT is not aware of any active exploitation at this time. Additional information as it becomes available will be available on the following webpage: https://www.us-cert.gov/Meltdown-Spectre-Guidance

See site for detailed info:
https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/current-ac ... rabilities




http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/03/technol ... index.html
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Fri Jan 05, 2018 9:13 am

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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Sat Jan 06, 2018 8:39 pm

SPY CASE IS CALLED THREAT TO FINDING SOVIET SUBMARINES

By BILL KELLER, Special to the New York Times

nytimes.com | June 6, 1985


WASHINGTON, June 5— Submarine experts said today that as a result of the Walker family spy case, the Navy might have to rebuild portions of the undersea network of sound detectors that are a crucial early warning system against a Soviet nuclear attack.

Some experts, including former Navy officers, said replacing the Sound Surveillance System, called Sosus, was potentially one of the most difficult and costly measures needed to restore confidence in the American submarine fleet's command of the seas, if the allegations of a 20-year spy network prove true.

The Navy has not completed its appraisal of what steps might be needed to compensate for security breaches that may have resulted. Experts interviewed today stressed that it was too early to be sure what countermeasures would be required.

Possible Exaggeration of Damage

Navy spokesmen, citing the confidential nature of investigations by the Justice Department and a Navy intelligence team, declined to comment.

In interviews today, experts in Navy affairs said they believed reports so far of possible military damage from the purported spy ring might have been exaggerated.

Several experts said the worst danger would be if Moscow had gained information that would help it track American submarines carrying ballistic missiles. The submarines are considered the least vulnerable portion of America's nuclear arsenal.

The experts said they believed none of the suspects arrested so far in the case had access to recent information involving the submarines. The submarines operate under a command independent of non-nuclear Navy forces and with separate communications.

So far, the experts said, the only suspect with experience aboard submarines carrying nuclear missiles is John A. Walker Jr. His experience in the 1960's as a radioman aboard two submarines carrying Polaris-class missiles, experts said, would probably have given him access to only limited information of value to Moscow.

The Polaris class of vessel was succeeded by Poseidon submarines, which are now being replaced by Trident submarines. A number of Polaris submarines are still in service, but they have been extensively modernized.

Stansfield Turner, a retired admiral and former Director of Central Intelligence, said today: ''My alarm focuses on John Walker and his experience in the ballistic missile submarine force.''

But Admiral Turner said Mr. Walker would probably have had access to little information that would threaten more modern submarines. ''It isn't going to make our subs totally vulnerable tomorrow,'' he said.

Force Still 'Silent on Patrol'

A former submarine commander with wide experience in the Pentagon and the shipbuilding industry, who spoke on condition that he not be named, said: ''I can't picture any serious loss of strategic submarine security. That's a totally isolated command, and I think rightfully so.''

Dr. Harlan K. Ullman, a former Navy officer and Pentagon consultant, said ''it's my understanding'' that the ballistic-missile submarine force ''remains silent on patrol.''

''John Walker may have had access to operational details with a very short half-life,'' Dr. Ullman said, ''but I think the damage has been greatly exaggerated.''

Nonetheless, several experts said they assumed that, because of the Walker case, the Navy had changed the travel patterns of the submarines and had altered codes and radio frequencies.

Several submarine experts with experience in the Navy and in the shipbuilding industry said they believed the gravest possibility was that the Soviet Union learned details about the Navy's ability to detect Soviet submarines, including sonar systems on American ships and the Sosus devices.

Deduction of Weak Points

In the 1950's and 1960's, the United States draped chains of sound-sensitive devices called hydrophones along the sea bottom and on the continental shelf at key points separating Soviet ports from the open seas.

According to several submarine experts, if the Soviet Union had access to many years of Navy communications reports on Russian submarine movements, it may have been able to deduce the weak points in this network.

More important, the experts said, the Russians may have been able to compute the sensitivity of these undersea microphones. By traveling at a slower speed, producing less noise, they might be able to sneak by the Sosus system. Soviet submarines thus might be able to move from safe harbors into open sea to mass for war without being detected, giving an added element of surprise to an attack, experts said.

Difficulties in Moving Sensors

One intelligence source said some Navy officers had long suspected from watching changes in Soviet submarine movements that the Russians had access to inside information. But Navy officials have debated for years whether the Russians' information came from a close reading of published technical data or from spies.

''If the Navy has got enough indicators that the Soviets are doing things a little too smart, then they better start putting their hydrophones in different places,'' said a submarine expert who participated in the placement of the Sosus sensors.

One intelligence source said relocating the Sosus sensors ''would be an enormously expensive move'' and would be difficult to do secretly because the Soviet Union has vastly improved its satellite surveillance.

Rear Adm. Gene R. LaRocque, a retired expert in antisubmarine warfare who now directs the Center for Defense Information, a private research group that is often critical of the Administration, said he doubted such a drastic step as replacing the system would be necessary.

More Sensors for 'Blind Areas'

But he said the Navy might need to add sensors to ''blind areas.''

''The Soviets know where some of the sensors are already,'' Admiral LaRocque said. ''They know it exists.''

But he said that if it became clear that the spy ring had given away the precise detection abilities of the network, the Navy might need more sensitive devices.

''The best kept secret in the Navy is the capability of our Sosus system to detect Soviet submarines in various modes of operation and in various locations,'' he said.

The espionage case has heightened Congressional interest in a $10 million study by the Central Intelligence Agency of the security of United States missile-carrying submarines.

Representative Les Aspin, Democrat of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a telephone interview, ''We asked for an assessment of how invulnerable the strategic submarine force is, and how invulnerable it might be in the future.''

He stressed that the 18-month study, which was requested last year, was not prompted by any specfic incident or threat to the submarine fleet.

Mr. Aspin said he assumed that if any sensitve information regarding the nuclear submarine force had been passed to the Soviet Union as a result of the alleged spying, this would be addressed in the study.

© 2018 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/06/us/sp ... rines.html

John Walker
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Anthony_Walker
Last edited by kinderdigi on Sat Jan 06, 2018 8:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Sat Jan 06, 2018 8:43 pm

Hydrophone Arrays

A hydrophone array is made up of a number of hydrophones placed in known locations. These hydrophones maybe placed in a line on the seafloor, moored in a vertical line in the water column, or towed in a horizontal line behind a boat or ship, for example. Sound arriving at the array from a distant source, such as a submarine, will reach each hydrophone at slightly different times, depending on the direction from which the sound is coming. This time difference is known as the time-of-arrival-difference and can be turned into a direction. Using this information from all the hydrophones in the array, the direction from which the sound is coming can be pinpointed.

Even a simple array consisting of only two hydrophones can give the approximate direction from which a sound is coming. People do this all the time in air with a “receiving array” that consists of two ears. Sound arriving from a source, such as a person speaking, will reach each ear at slightly different times, depending on the direction from which the sound is coming, making it possible for the listener to tell the direction to the speaker.
When the listener wants to detect a single specific sound, hydrophone arrays are much better than single hydrophones. This is because the array is able to filter out noise coming in from all directions and focus on sounds arriving from a specific direction. The increased signal-to-noise ratio allows sounds that normally couldn’t be detected by a single hydrophone to be heard. If a hydrophone array is being used to receive a specific sound source, it also allows the source to be quieter and still be detected. For example, the projector in an underwater communication system can be quieter if the receiver is an array pointed at the source.

Hydrophone arrays are used to locate submarines, track marine mammals, and even to study global climate change by detecting temperature differences. Examples of hydrophone arrays include the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS), which is a set of fixed hydrophone arrays on the seafloor, and the US Navy towed array known as the Surveillance Towed Array Sensor System (SURTASS).

Good graphics ..
https://dosits.org/galleries/technology ... ne-arrays/
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Sat Jan 06, 2018 8:48 pm

US Navy Upgrading Undersea Sub-Detecting Sensor Network

New contract augments old Cold War “SOSUS” arrays.

By Steven Stashwick for The DiplomatNovember 04, 2016

The Diplomat


During the Cold War, the U.S. Navy laid fixed networks of underwater hydrophones on the ocean floor called the “Sound Surveillance System” (SOSUS) to detect Soviet submarines transiting from their bases to patrol areas in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Listening arrays placed in strategic chokepoints that those submarines would necessarily have to transit, like the waters between Greenland, Iceland, and Scotland — the so-called “GIUK Gap” — notionally let the United States know every time a Soviet submarine entered the North Atlantic, allowing the U.S. Navy to direct its own ships or submarines to track them.

Because of the system’s sensitivity, its very existence remained classified until after the Cold War. Now, in what may be the biggest upgrade to the Navy’s fixed undersea surveillance system since the Cold War, General Dynamics has been recently awarded a contract by the Office of Naval Research to develop the Deep Reliable Acoustic Path Exploitation System (DRAPES). DRAPES appears to be part of a suite of upgrades to the Navy’s submarine detection capabilities to cope with expanding fleets of advanced submarines around the world.

When the Cold War ended, the U.S. Navy no longer faced a “peer threat” to its control of the seas and many capabilities and weapons necessary for defeating advanced adversary ships and submarines were decommissioned. Research for more advanced follow-on technology was also put on hold. After operating 30 undersea surveillance sites around the world during the Cold War, the Navy has only three operational today. But as Russia, and especially China, have developed larger and more advanced submarine fleets, the U.S. Navy has had to re-learn old Cold War anti-submarine warfare competencies while developing new capabilities to tackle more challenging modern submarine technology.
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While the Navy says relatively little about the advanced sub-hunting capabilities of the Integrated Undersea Surveillance System (IUSS), of which SOSUS is a part, some IUSS systems have received more public attention. The afloat Surveillance Towed Array Sensor System (SURTASS) is a small fleet of civilian-crewed ships that carry sensitive towed listening (passive) arrays that can detect submarines from great distances. These ships grabbed headlines in 2009 when the SURTASS ship USNS Impeccable was harassed by Chinese Maritime Militia while operating in the vicinity of China’s South China Sea submarine bases on Hainan Island. The SURTASS ships have also received technical upgrades since the Cold War. The introduction of the Low Frequency Active (LFA) capability, an “active” system that transmits low frequency “pings” that bounce off of submarine hulls and are then picked up by the existing passive SURTASS arrays dramatically increases their ability to detect submarines at great distances.

By contrast, little is known publicly about the SOSUS networks after the Cold War. Defense Systems reports that DRAPES, like SOSUS, will be a fixed passive listening system with a new communications capability to transmit its data. Mobile systems like SURTASS have the advantage of being able to get closer to possible contacts and follow them, but can only be in one place at a time, and must eventually return to port. Fixed systems like SOSUS, and now DRAPES, have the advantage of providing permanent coverage over target areas and then “cueing” a mobile sensor capability, like a ship or aircraft, to zero in on a submarine it detects.

One reason there were 30 IUSS sites during the Cold War is that the SOSUS systems had to be connected to collection facilities by underwater cable, requiring sites to be relatively local to the target area. But DRAPES will apparently use a new underwater communications system to transmit the acoustic data it collects to the three remaining Navy Operational Processing Facilities (NOPFs). These facilities combine data from the static SOSUS networks and SURTASS ships to provide “detection, localization, and tracking of submarines.” DRAPES’ ability to provide wide coverage from a fixed location in the ocean, apparently without the need for additional NOPF facility footprints, would be a substantial improvement over the old SOSUS network.

As China and Russia have asserted themselves anew as “pacing competitors,” as described by Undersecretary of Defense Robert Work, the U.S. Navy has taken a renewed interest in its traditional Cold War antisubmarine warfare mission. Together, DRAPES and SURTASS promise to provide a persistent, long-range ability to detect adversary submarines around the globe. Using cueing data from those platforms, improved local anti-submarine assets like the P-8 Poseidon sub hunter aircraft (which replaces the 50 year-old P-3 Orion) and surface combatants with new, improved towed sonar arrays of their own, like the Multi-Function Towed Array, can then close on a target, and track or engage it as needed.



© 2018 The Diplomat. All Rights Reserved.
https://thediplomat.com/2016/11/us-navy ... r-network/
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Re: Seth Rich

Postby kinderdigi » Sat Jan 06, 2018 8:58 pm

German U212, U214 and variants ..

Why Germany's New Super Stealth Submarines Could Take on Any Navy

The German Navy was a pioneer in large-scale submarine warfare, its U-boats able to contest the United Kingdom’s superior navy in ways that German surface warships could not. While modern-day Germany no longer has the ocean-spanning naval ambitions of its predecessors, it has become a global leader in designing small, stealthy submarines that can effectively patrol littoral waters at a fraction of the cost of nuclear-powered submarines. The secret sauce in the new generation of German submarines is the use of hydrogen fuel cells for power, which allows submarines to operate nearly silently for weeks at a time without using expensive nuclear reactors.

During World War I and II, submarines were at their most vulnerable when their noisy, air-breathing diesel engines forced them surface to recharge batteries, exposing the boats to detection and attack. The Kriesgmarine built several experimental Type XVIIB submarines with an Air Independent Propulsion (AIP) system, using hydrogen peroxide fuel that theoretically enabled extended underwater endurance. In practice, the boats were considered dangerously unsafe and unreliable. Although the United Kingdom, Soviet Union and United States all experimented with AIP submarines after the war, development was abandoned in favor of higher-performing nuclear-powered submarines.
It was left to Sweden, in 1997, to deploy the first operational submarine using an AIP system, the stealthy Gotland-class boats that employed a heat-converting Stirling engine. German submarine developers were close on their heels with the Type 212 in 2002, which uses hydrogen fuel cells. Though more expensive and complicated to refuel compared to the Stirling, the German PEM hydrogen fuel cells benefit from greater power output (and thus higher speed), have no major moving parts that betray acoustic stealth, and do not impose limits on diving depth.

The modern German Navy has two principal missions: participating in expeditionary operations, such as combatting piracy or supporting peacekeeping operations, and sea control of the Baltic Sea—which has grown in importance, given recent tensions with Russia. To operate in this maritime theater characterized by shallow, cold waters averaging around fifty meters in depth, the German Navy has a flotilla of six Type 212A submarines, numbered U-31 through U-36. The small vessels are only fifty-seven meters long and are manned by crews of just twenty-seven each—including both men and, as of 2014, women.

The Type 212’s double hull displaces 1,800 tons submerged, and is made of nonmagnetic materials so that it is not susceptible to detection by magnetic anomaly detectors. The softer metal limits the operational depth to just two hundred meters, but this is not a major limitation in shallow Baltic waters. The Type 212’s fuel cells, with hydrogen fuel stored in between the outer and inner pressure hulls, allow it to sail underwater for three weeks before surfacing. Reportedly, a Type 212A set an underwater endurance record for conventionally powered submarines in 2013 by transiting eighteen days submerged without use of its snorkel. While the Type 212 can achieve underwater speeds of up to twenty-three miles per hour, its sustainable cruising speed is closer to nine miles per hour while using just the AIP system.
The Type 212A is intended as a stealthy reconnaissance boat and ship hunter, which is why its armament was initially confined to torpedoes. Its six tubes can fire off up to thirteen 533 millimeter DM2A4 Seahake torpedoes connected to the submarine by a fiber optic cable, allowing the crew to guide the weapon to a target up to fifty kilometers away. The torpedo’s wide-aspect conformal sonar also allows it to send sensor data back to the launch vessel. A Norwegian combat management system is intended to integrate data from the Type 212’s various sensors, which include both a towed passive sonar array deployed from the sail and a hull-mounted flank array.


Recently, the German Navy has started installing the capability to fire IDAS fiber-optic missiles while submerged from four-cell magazines in the torpedo tubes. Based on the IRIS-T air-to-air missile, IDAS would be used primarily to shoot down hostile aircraft, but can also attack ground targets and medium-sized or small surface ships up to twenty kilometers away.

The Type 212’s ability to operate in waters as shallow as seventeen meters deep, enabled in part by its X-shaped rudder, makes it ideal for creeping close to the coast to deploy Germany’s elite naval commandos, known as Kampfschwimmers. Reportedly, the German Navy is working on installing a retractable thirty-millimeter Moray autocannon to provide fire support for special forces, which would seem like a throwback to the days of deck-mounted guns. In a modern twist, however, the cannon’s retractable mast will also supposedly be able to deploy three Aladin reconnaissance drones.
Berlin announced recently that it will build two more Type 212As over the next decade, and Poland has shown interest in leasing two of the German boats. The small subs supposedly cost around 371 million euros ($394 million) each, which implies that the current German U-boat force cost less to build than a single one of the $2.8 million Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarines used by the U.S. Navy. (To be fair, fluctuating exchange rates complicate the price comparison.) The Italian Navy, meanwhile, fields four Type 212s, designated the Todaro class, the last of which completed construction in 2015. Rome intends to build an additional two.

Shipyards across the world have also license-produced more than a dozen German Type 214 export submarines, fuel-cell-powered successors to the popular Type 209 submarine, one of which saw action in the Falkland War under the Argentine flag. The sixty-five-meter-long Type 214 lacks the 212’s nonmagnetic hull, and some sources maintain its systems are downgraded. However, the export submarine has longer range and a greater diving depth of four hundred meters, to accommodate waters beyond the Baltic, and its eight torpedo tubes are capable of launching Harpoon antiship missiles while submerged.

The Greek Navy operates four Type 214 Papanikolis-class boats with a special hoistable Low Probability of Intercept radar. However, the Greek boats initially suffered from significant teething problems. Portugal operates two Tridente-class boats launched in 2010, and Turkey is in the process of building six Type 214 vessels at its Gölcük shipyards, though the program has suffered some delays. These will have Turkish electronics, and be armed with American Mark 48 torpedoes, IDAS missiles and possibly Gezgin-D land-attack cruise missiles.

South Korea currently operates six Type 214s designated the Son Won-il class, with a seventh recently launched and two more under construction. The Son Won-ils boast customized sensor packages, and the most recent boat, the Hong Beom-do, has reportedly been modified to launch ground-attack cruise missiles. The South Korean Navy also intends to refit its older Type 209 Chang Bogo-class boats with AIP fuel cell propulsion. Similarly, the Israeli Navy is already operating three AIP-equipped Dolphin 2 submarines built by Germany, and looks set to acquire another three.

German shipbuilders have recently offered larger, longer-range versions of the 212/214 submarines, the Type 216 and 218. The Type 216 was intended for sale to the Royal Australian Navy, but was passed over in favor of the French Shortfin Barracuda. However, two Type 218SGs are under construction for Singapore, and will be completed in 2020. Details are sketchy, but the seventy-meter-long “ocean-going” submarines will retain a small crew of twenty-eight and an X-shaped rudder. They are believed to have Horizontal Multi-Purpose Locks, which can be used to launch either torpedoes or divers, and also cruise-missile launch capabilities.

Admittedly, all of the small German submarines may seem to have unimpressive speed, endurance and weapons loads, compared to larger nuclear-powered American and Russians submarines, which can sustain well over twenty-five miles per hour submerged for three months while carrying dozens of weapons.


However, the fuel-cell boats are at least as stealthy as their nuclear-powered cousins, if not more so, and each individual torpedo carried can be just as deadly. Considering that multiple boats like the Type 212 or 214 can be built for the price of a single nuclear attack submarine, the firepower advantage of the larger submarines is not so clear-cut. This explains why the German submarines have proven so popular with navies across Europe and Asia seeking to assert their control over littoral waters.

Sébastien Roblin holds a Master’s Degree in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring.

http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-bu ... 021?page=2

http://www.naval-technology.com/projects/type_212/
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Type 212 (class) Diesel-Electric Attack Submarine (Germany)
The Type 212A-class design is shared by both the German and Italian navies, in the latter recognized as the Todaro-class.

"The use of hydrogen fuel cells is groundbreaking for, at the end of World War 2, the United States Navy and the British Royal Navy both took, as war prizes, two German Type XVIIB submarines that used an experimental hydrogen-peroxide propulsion system. The US Navy dropped the experiment due to the lethal nature of hydrogen-peroxide when confined in small spaces with crew members. Its modern form, however, as the Air-Independent Propulsion (AIP) system, has been redesigned using small amounts of hydrogen in a protected crew-safe environment. The interest is high to build or purchase small submarines that can operate in brown water as well as blue without the cost (and dangers) of nuclear-driven power. Having said that, nuclear power can offer options that a diesel-powered combined with AIP cannot - an increased weapons suite or an unlimited operational range with submersion time that conventionally-powered vessels lack. The final decision is always the cost of the complete weapons system with crew size, nuclear as compared to conventional fuel and now AIP. A nation's overall military mission doctrine coupled with the cost of developing nuclear energy steers many away from nuclear propulsion. "
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