Secrecy cloaks the monitoring effort

NY Times | Jan 4, 2010

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

The nation’s top scientists and spies are collaborating on an effort to use the federal government’s intelligence assets — including spy satellites and other classified sensors — to assess the hidden complexities of environmental change. They seek insights from natural phenomena like clouds and glaciers, deserts and tropical forests.

The collaboration restarts an effort the Bush administration shut down and has the strong backing of the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In the last year, as part of the effort, the collaborators have scrutinized images of Arctic sea ice from reconnaissance satellites in an effort to distinguish things like summer melts from climate trends, and they have had images of the ice pack declassified to speed the scientific analysis.

The trove of images is “really useful,” said Norbert Untersteiner, a professor at the University of Washington who specializes in polar ice and is a member of the team of spies and scientists behind the effort.

Scientists, Dr. Untersteiner said, “have no way to send out 500 people” across the top of the world to match the intelligence gains, adding that the new understandings might one day result in ice forecasts.

“That will be very important economically and logistically,” Dr. Untersteiner said, arguing that Arctic thaws will open new fisheries and sea lanes for shipping and spur the hunt for undersea oil and gas worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

The monitoring program has little or no impact on regular intelligence gathering, federal officials said, but instead releases secret information already collected or takes advantage of opportunities to record environmental data when classified sensors are otherwise idle or passing over wilderness.

Secrecy cloaks the monitoring effort, as well as the nation’s intelligence work, because the United States wants to keep foes and potential enemies in the dark about the abilities of its spy satellites and other sensors. The images that the scientific group has had declassified, for instance, have had their sharpness reduced to hide the abilities of the reconnaissance satellites.

Controversy has often dogged the use of federal intelligence gear for environmental monitoring. In October, days after the C.I.A. opened a small unit to assess the security implications of climate change, Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, said the agency should be fighting terrorists, “not spying on sea lions.”

Now, with the intelligence world under fire after the attempted airliner bombing on Christmas Day, and with the monitoring program becoming more widely known, such criticism seems likely to grow.

A senior federal official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, defended the scientific monitoring as exploiting the intelligence field quite adroitly.

Ralph J. Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences and a member of the monitoring team, said the program was “basically free.”

“People who don’t know details are the ones who are complaining,” Dr. Cicerone said.

About 60 scientists — mainly from academia but including some from industry and federal agencies — run the effort’s scientific side. All have secret clearances. They obtain guidance from the National Academy of Sciences, an elite body that advises the federal government.

Dr. Cicerone said the monitoring effort offered an opportunity to gather environmental data that would otherwise be impossible to obtain, and to do so with the kind of regularity that can reveal the dynamics of environmental change.

“It’s probably silly to think it will last 50 years,” he said of the program in an interview. “On the other hand, there’s the potential for these collections to go on for a long time.”

The C.I.A. runs the program and arranges for the scientists to draw on federal surveillance equipment, including highly classified satellites of the National Reconnaissance Office.

Officials said the effort to restart the program originated on Capitol Hill in 2008 after former Vice President Al Gore argued for its importance with Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who was then a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee; she became its chairwoman in early 2009.

The Obama administration has said little about the effort publicly but has backed it internally, officials said. In November, the scientists met with Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director.

“Director Panetta believes it is crucial to examine the potential national security implications of phenomena such as desertification, rising sea levels and population shifts,” Paula Weiss, an agency spokeswoman, said.

The program resurrects a scientific group that from 1992 to 2001 advised the federal government on environmental surveillance. Known as Medea, for Measurements of Earth Data for Environmental Analysis, the group sought to discover if intelligence archives and assets could shed light on issues of environmental stewardship.

It is unclear why Medea died in the early days of the Bush administration, but President George W. Bush developed a reputation for opposing many kinds of environmental initiatives. Officials said the new body was taking on the same mandate and activities, as well as the name.

“I’m extremely pleased with what’s been happening,” said Michael B. McElroy, an atmospheric scientist at Harvard University and a senior member of the group. “It’s really first-rate.”

Among the program’s first responsibilities has been to assess earlier Medea projects to see which, if any, produced valuable information and might be restarted or expanded.

Dr. Untersteiner of the University of Washington said that in June the government posted some imagery results from that assessment on the Web sites of the United States Geological Survey in an area known as the Global Fiducials Library, which advertises itself as an archive of intelligence images from scientifically important sites.

Among other things, the online library displays years of ice imagery from six sites inside the Arctic Circle, including the Fram Strait, the main route for icebergs moving from the Arctic basin into the North Atlantic.

Scientists consider the Arctic highly sensitive to global warming and are particularly interested in closely monitoring its changes as possible harbingers.

In July, the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences released a report that praised the monitoring.

“There are no other data available that show the melting and freezing processes,” the report said. “Their release will have a major impact on understanding effects of climate change.”

Dr. Untersteiner said the federal government had already adopted one of the report’s recommendations — have reconnaissance satellites follow particular ice floes as they drift through the Arctic basin rather than just monitoring static sites.

For this summer, Dr. Untersteiner said he had asked that the intelligence agencies start the process sooner, “so we still see the snow cover, maybe in early May.”

Such research, Dr. Untersteiner said, promised to promote understanding of the fundamental forces at work in global climate change, including the endless whorls and gyres of polar ice.

“We still have a problem with ice mechanics,” he said. “But the dynamics are very revealing.”

Intelligence official says the man was being courted as possible informant

msnbc.com | Jan 1, 2010

KABUL – The suicide bomber who killed seven CIA employees at a remote outpost in southeastern Afghanistan had been invited onto the base and had not been searched, two former U.S. officials told The Associated Press on Thursday.

A former senior intelligence official says the man was being courted as an informant and that it was the first time he had been brought inside the camp. An experienced CIA debriefer came from Kabul for the meeting, suggesting that the purpose was to gain intelligence, the official said.

The former intelligence official and another former official with knowledge of the attack spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The CIA would not confirm the details, and said it was still gathering evidence on the incident.

“It’s far too early to draw conclusions about something that happened just yesterday,” said spokesman George Little.

Blow to tight-knit spy agency

A separate U.S. official suggested the bomber may have set off the explosives as he was about to be searched.

The bombing on Wednesday dealt a blow to the tight-knit spy agency. Among those killed was the chief of the CIA post, whom former officials identified as a mother of three. Six more agency personnel were wounded in what was considered the most lethal attack for the CIA since the war in Afghanistan began in 2001 and possibly even since the 1983 embassy bombing in Beirut.

It also was the single deadliest attack for Americans in Afghanistan since eight soldiers were killed in an insurgent attack on a base in the east on Oct. 3.

President Barack Obama and CIA Director Leon Panetta were joined by several leading lawmakers on Thursday in praising agency employees for their work.

“Those who fell yesterday were far from home and close to the enemy, doing the hard work that must be done to protect our country from terrorism,” Panetta said in a statement confirming the deaths. “We owe them our deepest gratitude, and we pledge to them and their families that we will never cease fighting for the cause to which they dedicated their lives — a safer America.”

In a letter to CIA employees, Obama said their fallen colleagues came from a “long line of patriots” who had helped to keep the nation safe despite grave risks.

Obama acknowledged that the spy agency has been tested “as never before” since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The CIA did not release information about the victims, citing the sensitivity of their mission and other ongoing operations. Harold E. Brown Jr., a State Department employee of Fairfax, Va., died in the attack, his father, Harold E. Brown Sr., told The Associated Press on Thursday.

The younger Brown, 37, who grew up in Bolton, Mass., served in the Army and remained a major in the reserves. He is survived by a wife and three children ages 12, 10 and 2.

Deep bench in Afghanistan

According to one former agency employee, the death toll represents a significant portion of the CIA’s clandestine force in the region, but that many of the agency’s employees have experience in Afghanistan.

“The bench is deeper in Afghanistan than it is anywhere in the world,” the former employee said.

The bigger question for CIA operations will probably be whether the agency moves to tighten safety rules for its employees, the former employee said.

The incident occurred at a former military base on the edge of Khost city, the capital of Khost province which borders Pakistan and is a Taliban stronghold.

Full Story

Telegraph | Dec 31, 2009

The bombing , which came as President Barack Obama’s surge is gathering pace, represented the biggest loss of life suffered by the US intelligence agency since an attack in Beirut in 1983. The CIA said on Thursday a further six agents had been injured in the attack.

On Thursday night it was reported that the bomber had been invited onto the base and had not been searched.

A former senior intelligence official told the Associated Press that the man was being courted as an informant and that it was the first time he had been brought inside the camp.

The official said a senior and experienced CIA debriefer came from Kabul for the meeting, suggesting that the purpose of the session was to gain intelligence.

That official and another former intelligence officer with knowledge of the attack spoke to the news agency on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak publicly.

The CIA would not confirm the details, and said it was still gathering evidence.

“It’s far too early to draw conclusions about something that happened just yesterday,” said spokesman George Little.

A separate US official suggested the bomber may have set off the explosives as he was about to be searched.

The bombing was expected to deal a major psychological blow to the spy agency, if not its ability to collect valuable intelligence on Taliban and al-Qaeda forces operating along Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan.

NY Times | Dec 31, 2009

By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON — The deaths of seven Central Intelligence Agency operatives at a remote base in the mountains of Afghanistan are a pointed example of the civilian spy agency’s transformation in recent years into a paramilitary organization at the vanguard of America’s far-flung wars.

Even as the C.I.A. expands its role in Afghanistan, it is also playing a greater role in quasi-military operations elsewhere, using drone aircraft to launch a steady barrage of missile strikes in Pakistan and sending more operatives to Yemen to assist local officials in their attempts to roll back Al Qaeda’s momentum in that country.

The C.I.A. operatives stationed at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost Province, where Wednesday’s suicide bombing occurred, were responsible for collecting information about militant networks in Afghanistan and Pakistan and plotting missions to kill the networks’ top leaders. In recent months, American officials said, C.I.A. officers at the base had begun an aggressive campaign against a radical group run by Sirajuddin Haqqani, which has claimed responsibility for the deaths of dozens of American troops.

Over the past year, the C.I.A. has built up an archipelago of firebases in southern and eastern Afghanistan, moving agency operatives out of the embassy in Kabul and closer to their targets.

But the push to the front lines carries great risk.

In 1983 in Beirut, it took a car bomb loaded with 2,000 pounds of explosives to kill eight C.I.A. officers stationed at the heavily fortified American Embassy in the city. In Khost on Wednesday, all it took was one man bent on martyrdom to slip into a remote base and inflict a similar toll on the spy agency’s relatively small work force.

Among those killed, officials said, was the chief of the Khost base, who was a mother of three and a veteran of the agency’s clandestine branch. Besides the seven C.I.A. operatives who died, the blast also wounded six agency employees, according to a C.I.A. statement.

Current and former intelligence officials said Thursday that early evidence indicated that the bomber, in Afghan military fatigues, might have been taken onto the base as a possible informant and might not have been subjected to rigorous screening. But details about the episode remained murky, and a NATO official said the bomber had managed to elude security and reach an area near the base’s gym.

C.I.A. personnel regularly take foreign agents onto the base before sending them on intelligence collection missions in eastern Afghanistan and across the border into Pakistan, said one Pentagon consultant who works closely with the C.I.A. in Afghanistan.

“You must to some degree make yourself known to people you don’t trust,” said one American intelligence official who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke anonymously to discuss classified information.

The bomber appears to have worn an explosives-laden suicide vest under an Afghan National Army uniform, two NATO officials said Thursday. The attack happened close to dusk, when some people at the base were relaxing before dinner.

In a statement to the C.I.A.’s work force, President Obama said that the spy agency had been “tested as never before,” and that C.I.A. operatives had “served on the front lines in directly confronting the dangers of the 21st century.”

Forward Operating Base Chapman sits in an isolated spot several miles from the town of Khost, but not far from Camp Salerno, a larger base used by Special Operations troops.

American officials said that the C.I.A. base had been a focal point for counterterrorism operations against the Haqqani network, a particularly lethal militant group that operates on both sides of the Afghan border.

“Those guys have recently been on a big Haqqani binge,” said the Pentagon consultant. “I would be really shocked if the bombing on Wednesday wasn’t some kind of retaliation.”

There was an air of defiance among intelligence officials on the day after the attack, and some spoke of their fallen comrades using military language.

“There is no pullout,” the American intelligence official said. “There is no withdrawal or anything like that planned.”

The C.I.A. has always had a paramilitary branch known as the Special Activities Division, which secretly engaged in the kinds of operations more routinely carried out by Special Operations troops. But the branch was a small — and seldom used — part of its operations.

That changed after Sept. 11, 2001, when President George W. Bush gave the agency expanded authority to capture or kill Qaeda operatives around the world. Since then, Washington has relied much more on the Special Activities Division because battling suspected terrorists does not involve fighting other armies. Rather, it involves secretly moving in and out of countries like Pakistan and Somalia where the American military is not legally allowed to operate.

The fact that the agency is in effect running a war in Pakistan is the culmination of one of the most significant shifts in the C.I.A.’s history. But the agency has at times struggled with this new role. It established a network of secret overseas jails where terrorist suspects were subjected to brutal interrogation techniques, and it set up an assassination program that at one point was outsourced to employees of a private security company, then known as Blackwater USA.

Some longtime agency officers bristled at what they saw as the militarization of the C.I.A., worrying that it was straying too far from its historical missions of espionage and intelligence analysis.

When he took office in January, President Obama scaled back the C.I.A.’s counterterrorism mission, but only to a point. He ordered that C.I.A. prisons be shut and that C.I.A officers no longer play a role in interrogating suspects accused of terrorist acts.

At the same time, the administration has accelerated the C.I.A.’s drone campaign, using Predator and Reaper aircraft to launch missiles and rockets against militants in Pakistan.

In early 2009, the White House approved a C.I.A. plan to expand the drone operations in Pakistan into Baluchistan, where top leaders of Afghanistan’s Taliban militia are thought to be hiding. The agency has also recently begun sending more operatives into Pakistan to, among other things, gather target intelligence for the drone program.

Alissa J. Rubin contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.

CNN | Dec 31, 2009

Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) — Two of the seven CIA officers killed Wednesday in a suspected terrorist attack on a U.S. base in Afghanistan were contractors for Xe, a private security firm formerly known as Blackwater, a former intelligence official said Thursday.

A current intelligence official confirmed to CNN that the casualties included a mix of people — CIA staff and contractors. The CIA considers contractors to be officers.

The Taliban have claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s attack, which wounded six other people. A senior U.S. official said information suggested that a bomber walked into a gym facility at Forward Operating Base Chapman — in Khost Province, near the border of Pakistan — and detonated bombs in a suicide vest.

It is not known how the bomber got past security. In a posting on its Web site Thursday, the Taliban claimed the bomber was an Afghan National Army soldier.

A U.S. intelligence official on Thursday vowed that the United States would avenge the attack.

“This attack will be avenged through successful, aggressive counterterrorism operations,” the intelligence official vowed.

Former CIA official Robert Richer called it “the greatest loss of life for the Central Intelligence Agency since the Beirut Embassy bombing” in 1983, which killed eight agents.

Flags at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, flew at half-staff Thursday.

“These brave Americans were part of a long line of patriots who have made great sacrifices for their fellow citizens, and for our way of life,” President Obama said in a written statement Thursday.

“The United States would not be able to maintain the freedom and security that we cherish without decades of service from the dedicated men and women of the CIA.”

Richer, who retired from the agency in 2005 as the associate deputy director for operations, knew many of Wednesday’s victims personally. In a written statement Thursday, he called on the public to “remain mindful that our great country is served well by those in and out of uniform. That officers like those lost in this attack placed themselves in harm’s way, at a critical and dangerous crossroads in the war on terror.

“We should be thankful for the service and sacrifice of these fine Americans. They and their colleagues, who compose the very thin line of Agency officers working in the shadows at the very tip of the war on terror, are a national asset; an asset often misunderstood and under appreciated.”

CIA Director Leon Panetta said in a statement Thursday that “those who fell … were far from home and close to the enemy, doing the hard work that must be done to protect our country from terrorism.”

A U.S. military source noted that Chapman was originally a base for the Khost Provincial Construction Team, but the team left some time ago. A U.S. intelligence official would not discuss the specific mission of the base but acknowledged that it was a crucial CIA post and a “hub of activity.”

Authorities believe that the suicide bomber might have attacked just after a convoy was ending or beginning, which would account for the high number of casualties.

Eight Americans were originally believed to be killed in the bombing.

CBS News Exclusive: CIA Had Info on Person of Interest Dubbed “The Nigerian” in August But Officials Failed to Connect Dots

CBS | Dec 29, 2009

By Armen Keteyian

(CBS)   CBS News has learned that as early as August of 2009 the Central Intelligence Agency was picking up information on a person of interest dubbed “The Nigerian,” suspected of meeting with “terrorist elements” in Yemen.

Sources tell CBS News “The Nigerian” has now turned out to be Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. But that connection was not made when Abudulmutallab’s father went to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria three months later, on November 19, 2009. It was then he expressed deep concerns to a CIA officer about his son’s ties to extremists in Yemen, a hotbed of al Qaeda activity.

In fact, CBS News has learned this information was not connected until after the attempted Christmas Day bombing.

“We must get better at collecting these bits of information, putting them together at a central point, analyzing them and then acting,” said Lee Hamilton, the vice-chair of the 9/11 Commission.

Also Tuesday, the Foreign Minister of Yemen told the Times of London that there may scores of trained young militants ready to follow in the footsteps of Abudulmutallab, the minister saying, “They may actually plan attacks like the one we just had in Detroit. There may be hundreds of them – 200 to 300.”

A Yemini-based Al Qaeda group has claimed responsibility for the attack, praising Abudulmutallab’s attempt to blow up Flight 253 with about 3 ounces of the powerful explosive PETN stashed inside a pair of specially-made underwear, reports CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian.

For many the global security breach represents the kind of system failure detailed in the 9/11 Commission Report.

“We’re sharing information better than we did prior to 9/11, but this incident surely illustrates we’ve got a long ways to go,” Hamilton said.

In a statement, the CIA did not dispute CBS News’ report.

“We learned of him in November, when his father came to the U.S. embassy in Nigeria and sought help in finding him. We did not have his name before then,” said Paul Gimigliano, a CIA spokesman. “Also in November, we worked with the embassy to ensure he was in the government’s terrorist database – including mention of his possible extremist connections in Yemen. We also forwarded key biographical information about him to the National Counterterrorism Center. This agency, like others in our government, is reviewing all data to which it had access – not just what we ourselves may have collected – to determine if more could have been done to stop Abdulmutallab.”

Blackwater ‘hired’ Pak’s intelligence, army officers: Khwaja

dnaindia.com | Dec 29, 2009

LAHORE: Controversial US private security firm Blackwater, accused of carrying out secret operations in Pakistan, has hired services of army officers and former employees of intelligence agencies of this country for “handsome” salaries, a retired ISI official has claimed.

Khalid Khwaja, who has been at the forefront in raising the issue of “missing persons” or people detained without charges by Pakistani security agencies, said that ex-intelligence personnel hired by Blackwater had been asked to “pick up people with alleged connections to Taliban or al-Qaeda.”

The Supreme Court “has directed the Pakistan government to produce some 1,000 or so missing persons. The Pakistani (intelligence) agencies have expressed inability to comply with the order (on the ground that they do) not have knowledge
about the missing persons,” he said.

“I have written to the prime minister and the Interior Minister to investigate the matter,” said Khwaja, a retired ISI official.

Blackwater, he claimed, has “hired the services of army officers and former employees of intelligence agencies of Pakistan for handsome salaries.”

Former Pakistan army chief Gen Mirza Aslam Baig recently alleged on a TV news channel that Blackwater was involved in the assassination of former premier Benazir Bhutto.

Shireen Mazari, a defence analyst and editor of The Nation daily, believes the American security contractor is operating in North West Frontier Province, Islamabad, Quetta, Karachi and Lahore.

Islamabad recently deported a US national who was believed to be an employee of Blackwater, which also operated during wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and whose functions had been shrouded in secrecy.

The Interior Ministry said the American national was accused of establishing “illegal contacts with pro-Taliban militants.”

The Lahore High Court too sought details of the deportation of the US national while hearing a petition regarding the presence of Blackwater in Pakistan.

The Pakistani media has been reporting about the presence of Blackwater in the country for the past few months. However, the Pakistan government and the US embassy have rejected reports about Blackwater’s presence in Pakistan.

“Blackwater is not operating in Pakistan. We have our own system, rules and regulations and will not allow anybody to operate from here,” Interior Minister Rehman Malik has said.

Blackwater has officially changed its name to Xe Services LLC.

Former ISI chief Asad Durrani

Press TV| Dec 25, 2009

Former ISI chief Asad Durrani says private US contractors such as Xe (formerly known as Blackwater) and other intelligence agents may be behind the assassination of civilians across Pakistan.

In an exclusive interview with Press TV, Durrani said on Friday that the local militants led by Hakimullah Mehsud primarily target the government and military installations.

Arguing against the local militants involvements in civilian assassinations, Durrani added that the militants consider Islamabad as a close ally of the US in the so-called ‘war on terror’ and that they have been launching retaliatory attacks against the government targets, particularly since the Pakistani army launched a major offensive against their stronghold in South Waziristan.

Durrani said that he doubted the notorious militants groups were behind a recent surge in attacks on civilian targets across the country.

The former head of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) claimed that certain theories were circulating among Pakistani intellectuals suggesting that the foreign agents or private US contractors could have been orchestrating assassinations on the civilian targets in the nuclear-armed country.

According to Durrani, these attacks were being carried out to encourage Islamabad to be more involved in war against the militants.

Pakistan has experienced a wave of violence over the past two years. Nearly 3,000 people have been killed in bomb attacks and other terrorist operations across the country.

Hindustan Times | Dec 20, 2009

by Vir Sanghvi

Did the Americans have detailed advance information about the 26/11 plot which they did not share with India, only passing on a watered-down warning? And was there an American spy within the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba who kept Washington (or Langley) informed of terror acts planned against India —  even if this information was never handed over to us?

It is certainly beginning to look that way.

When Headley was first arrested, the Americans declared that they had foiled a plot to kill a Danish cartoonist. Then, more details began to trickle out. The terror suspect, we were told, was a US citizen of Pakistani origin. He had some links with the LeT. He had visited India. He may have been part of an advance team for 26/11.

Indian investigators, intrigued by these reports, flew to Washington to meet Headley. They were denied any access to him. They tried to work out if Headley was in fact somebody they themselves had been looking for. They had asked the CIA if it had any information about an American who, their sources had told them, was part of the LeT. They received no real cooperation.

Then, even as the Indian media were obsessing about Headley’s friendship with Mahesh Bhatt’s son, investigative journalists in America tracked down court papers pertaining to Headley’s arrest on drug charges in 1998. These papers showed that Headley had been convicted and sent to jail. But after 9/11, he had been set free and sent to Pakistan to work as an undercover agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

According to US journalists, Headley had been given a new passport in the American name of David Headley (his American mother’s maiden name is Headley) rather than his original name of Daood Gilani. He flew around the world, entering and leaving the US at will, avoiding the sort of attention that a convicted drug criminal was certain to attract at US airports.

Further, suggested US journos, the DEA assignment may have been a cover. After 9/11 America was under pressure to infiltrate Pakistan’s terror groups and many undercover agents were sent into Pakistan for this purpose.

Upto this point, we had two stories. The first was the version of the US government that it had arrested a terrorist. The second was the version favoured by the US media that this ‘terrorist’ had actually been sent to Pakistan by the Americans as an undercover agent.

American journos, on the whole, refused to believe that he worked only for the DEA and thought that he was probably in the pay of the CIA. But, many said, Headley had clearly gone rogue, becoming a double agent and owing true loyalty to the LeT.

Indian investigators had many questions. We know now that the US tipped us off that attacks on the Taj Mahal Hotel were imminent and that the terrorists would use the sea route. (Of course, our local flatfoots ignored the warnings.) At that stage, it was believed that the intel came from a CIA mole within the terror network. Could    Headley have been that mole?

Besides, if US investigators had been on Headley’s trail for a while  — as the US officially claims — and they knew that he was regularly visiting India on behalf of the LeT, why was this information never passed on to New Delhi? If you accept the official version, that Headley was a terrorist they were tracking, then surely we had a right to be informed of his visits to India? If he was an agent who had gone rogue (the non-official US version), even then we should have been told. So why were we kept in the dark?

As far as I know, there has been no official answer to any of these questions.

So all we have is the theory of the Indian investigators. It goes like this:

In the aftermath of 9/11, the US was desperate for spies it could sent into Pakistan. Headley was sprung from jail and asked to infiltrate terror groups. Assisted by the US government (new passport etc.), he worked for the LeT using his American passport to gain access to places where he would normally have been treated with suspicion if he had revealed his Pakistan roots.

He came to Bombay not just to check out the Taj but do a recon of Nariman House. He posed as an American Jew and sent back detailed reports. Along the way, he revealed details of the 26/11 plot to his American handlers. The US was caught in a bind. If it told us everything, the LeT would know that Headley was the source and his cover would be blown. Yet, it could not sit by. So, it compromised by giving us some intel about the attack that could not be traced back to Headley. And Headley continued to operate as a US asset inside LeT.

A few months ago, Indian agencies began tracking a Bangladeshi with US links. That trail led to an American who was involved with LeT. They asked the US for help. Headley was arrested soon afterwards.

The arrest took India by surprise. The way these things work is that if the US knows about a terrorist, it allows him to fly to Pakistan or India (both frequent Headley destinations) and then tips off the local intelligence service. The terrorist is arrested and tortured to extract information. (Americans are now banned from using torture.) When the terrorist has been wrung dry, he is handed over to the US, along with his confession.

In this case, however, the Americans arrested Headley before he could fly out. He was formally charged, allowed to appoint a lawyer and is now entitled to all the protections of the US Constitution: he would be within his rights to tell Indian investigators to take a flying jump.

Why would the US treat a 26/11 suspect with such consideration?

The only explanation that fits is this: he was an American agent all along. The US arrested him only when it seemed that Indian investigators were on his trail. He will be sentenced to jail, will vanish into the US jail system for a while and will then be sprung again — as he was the last time.

So, could 26/11 have been avoided? If this theory is right, then yes, the Americans could have told us more. And we could have foiled the plot.

On the other hand, given that we ignored the warnings they did give us, who is to say that our inept national security structure would not have failed yet again, even if we did have full information?

Ultimately,  intelligence is only useful if it is accessed by the intelligent.

David Headley was allegedly involved in reconnoitring targets for the November 2008 Mumbai attacks, including the Taj Hotel

London Times | Dec 17, 2009

by Rhys Blakely in Mumbai

A key terror suspect who allegedly helped to plan last year’s attacks in Mumbai and plotted to strike Europe was an American secret agent who went rogue, Indian officials believe.

David Headley, 49, who was born in Washington to a Pakistan diplomat father and an American mother, was arrested in Chicago in October. He is accused of reconnoitring targets in India and Europe for Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the Pakistan-based terror group behind the Mumbai attacks and of having links to al-Qaeda. He has denied the charges.

He came to the attention of the US security services in 1997 when he was arrested in New York for heroin smuggling. He earned a reduced sentence by working for the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) infiltrating Pakistan-linked narcotics gangs.

Related

Did America keep mum on 26/11?

http://www.hindustantimes.com/News-Feed/virsanghvi/Did-America-keep-mum-on-26-11/Article1-488533.aspx

Indian investigators, who have been denied access to Mr Headley, suspect that he remained on the payroll of the US security services — possibly working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) — but switched his allegiance to LeT.

“India is looking into whether Headley worked as a double agent,” an Indian Home Ministry official said yesterday.

Mr Headley, who changed his name from Daood Gilani, was in Mumbai until two weeks before the attacks on the city, which claimed 166 lives last November. It is alleged that he spent months checking targets in India’s commercial capital, using his Western looks and anglicised name to move in elite social circles, hobnob with Bollywood actors and even to pass himself off as Jewish.

Despite being firmly on the radar of the US intelligence agencies, he was allowed to return to India as recently as March. Indian officials are furious that their American counterparts did not share details of that visit at the time. The Indian media has raised the possibility that Mr Headley was being protected by his American handlers — a theory that experts say is credible.

“The feeling in India is that the US has not been transparent,” said B. Raman, a former counter-terrorism chief in the Indian foreign intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing.

“That Headley was an agent for the DEA is known. Whether he was being used by the CIA as well is a matter of speculation, but it is almost certain that the CIA was aware of him and his movements across the subcontinent.”

According to Mr Raman, it is probable that Mr Headley, who was arrested when the US authorities learned that he was about to fly to Pakistan, was listed on the main database of the US National Counterterrorism Centre, a facility used by the CIA and several other American agencies to track terror suspects.

Indian officials suspect that US agencies declined to share intelligence to avoid compromising other secret operations and to to be able to deny any link with Mr Headley.

Analysts believe that the US may also have been anxious to avoid sharing information that could further raise tensions between India and Pakistan, nuclear-armed neighbours who have fought three wars.

According to documents put before a court in Chicago, Mr Headley had links with the Pakistan Army and, through it, with al-Qaeda.

As well as helping to co-ordinate the Mumbai atrocity, Mr Headley is accused of planning attacks on Mumbai’s Bollywood film industry, the Shiv Sena, a Hindu extremist group also based in Mumbai, a major Hindu temple, and a Danish newspaper that had published cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

The US authorities allege that he was close to Tahawwur Hussain Rana, a former Pakistani schoolmate and businessman who is also being charged with planning to attack the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten. Mr Rana is accused of having known about the attack on Mumbai in advance.

The CIA denied that Headley had worked for the organisation.

“Any suggestion that Headley was working for the CIA is complete and utter nonsense. It’s flat-out false,” Paul Gimigliano, from the CIA’s Office of Public Affairs, said.

The Indian Home Secretary, Gopal Krishna Pillai, has said that his Government would seek the extradition of Mr Headley — a request that has so far been stonewalled by US officials.