Category Archives: Legislation

Soros and Farhana Khera the Islamic Homeland Security Threat

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Soros Money, Muslim Advocates Leader, Helped Weaken Homeland Security Policies
An IPT Investigation

by John Rossomando, IPT

A Muslim legal group, girded with $1.8 million in grant money from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF), has helped influence major policy changes in the war on terror, including the Department of Homeland Security’s screening of individuals with suspected terror ties and the FBI’s training program for its agents working in counterterrorism.

Internal records, made public by the hacking group DC Leaks, show OSF spent $40 million between 2008 and 2010 on programs aimed at weakening U.S. counterterrorism policy.

Muslim Advocates’ Executive Director Farhana Khera played a key role in shaping the foundations’ spending. Khera co-authored a 2007 memo that “informed” the foundations’ U.S. Programs Board’s decision to create the National Security and Human Rights Campaign (NSHRC), a Sept. 14, 2010 OSF document discussing the program’s reauthorization, shows.

The NSHRC’s goals included:

  • Closing Guantanamo Bay, eliminating torture and methods such as the extraordinary rendition of prisoners, and ending the use of secret prisons;
  • Ending warrantless and “unchecked” surveillance;
  • Ensuring that anti-terrorism laws and law enforcement activities do not target freedom of speech, association or religious expression;
  • Reducing ethnic and religious profiling of people of Muslim, Arab or South Asian extraction;
  • Decreasing secrecy and increasing oversight of executive actions, and expose U.S. government or private individuals who abuse or violate the law.

Some of these policies, such as closing Guantanamo and ending enhanced interrogation techniques, already were also advocated by Obama administration. OSF claimed its work laid the groundwork for implementing those policies. The Edward Snowden leaks cast light on the depth of the government’s warrantless surveillance activity. The other goals are more difficult to assess.

Muslim Advocates was founded in 2005 as an offshoot of the National Association of Muslim Lawyers. It often criticizes U.S. counterterrorism strategies that use sting operations and informants as discriminatory.

Papers released by the anonymous hacker group DC Leaks show that OSF budgeted $21 million for the NSHRC from 2008-2010. OSF spent an additional $1.5 million in 2010. The NSHRC also received a matching $20 million contribution from Atlantic Philanthropies, a private foundation established in 1982 by Irish-American Chuck Feeney billionaire businessman.

OSF made 105 grants totaling $20,052, 784 to 63 organizations under the NSHRC program. An Investigative Project on Terrorism tally shows Muslim Advocates received at least $1.84 million in OSF grants between 2008 and 2015.

A funders’ roundtable created by OSF in 2008 helped coordinate the grant making among several left-leaning foundations, ” in order to “dismantle the flawed ‘war on terror’ paradigm on which national security policy is now based.” At least “two dozen” foundations participated in the roundtable’s strategy sessions as of the end of 2008.

Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, called the Soros foundations’ $40 million program both hypocritical and ironic. He noted that the 2011 OSF-funded Center for American Progress report “Fear, Inc.” complained that seven conservative foundations donated $42.6 million to so-called “Islamophobia think tanks between 2001 and 2009.” The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and other major Islamist groups routinely use the $42.6 million funding number to portray their opponents as being pawns of dark forces.

“It’s amazing that one foundation donated an amount that CAIR and [Muslim] Advocates say is the huge sum of money that funds the entire anti-jihad campaign,” Jasser said. “… That wasn’t from one foundation. That was an addition of [the money given to] everybody that they threw under the bus.”

By contrast, OSF and Atlantic Philanthropies spent $41.5 million in just three years. OSF dedicated another $26 million to the NSHRC program from 2011-2014.

OSF additionally funded a study by the New America Foundation equating the terror threat posed right-wing extremists with al-Qaida. An Oct. 17, 2011 memo discussing NSHRC grants notes that New America received $250,000, partly to write two reports. The first aimed at creating a “‘safe space’ in which Muslims in America feel free to hold controversial political dialogues, organize without fear of unwarranted government surveillance.” The second aimed to “correct mistaken public beliefs that Al-Qaeda’s brand of terrorism is unique to Islam and that most terrorists are Muslim.”

The paper promised “to show how adherents of each extremist ideology use different language to justify very similar political means and goals. By demonstrating parallels among militant groups, this paper will aim to separate politically focused terrorism from the religion of Islam.”

Arguments from this report continue to help frame how Democrats and their allies talk about the jihadist threat. New America’s statistics and arguments recently came up in a House hearing about the threat from homegrown Islamic terrorists.

“According to the New America Foundation, there have been more incidents of right-wing extremist attacks in the United States than violent jihadist attacks since 9/11. I’m not minimizing jihadist attacks. In that light, can you explain what your office plans to do with respect to domestic right-wing extremism?” Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., asked Department of Homeland Security Office of Community Partnerships Director George Selim during a House subcommittee hearing last month.

New America’s effort to conflate right-wing extremists with al-Qaida glossed over a major difference – namely al-Qaida’s reliance on mass casualty attacks and suicide bombings.

New America’s latest data shows that jihadists have killed more people since 9/11 than right-wing extremists.

“What you’ve uncovered is the fact … that the Soros foundation works to obfuscate on national security,” Jasser said. “Muslim Advocates clearly is a prime example of the sickness in Washington related to dealing with the central reforms necessary to make within the House of Islam.

“You’ll see that the Soros foundation is spending money on organizations that deny the very principles they are defenders of, which are feminism, gay rights, individual rights. Muslim Advocates’ entire bandwidth is spent on attacking the government and blocking any efforts at counterterrorism.”

Muslim Advocates also opposes discussion on reform within the Muslim community and supports those who have theocratic tendencies, Jasser said.

“You have evidence here that the Soros foundation is part and parcel of the reason for the suffocation of moderation voices – reformist voices – in Islam,” Jasser said. “Muslim Advocates really ought to change their name to Islamist Advocates, and what the Soros foundation really is doing is just advocating for Islamists.”

OSF also contributed $150,000 in 2011 and $185,000 in 2012 to a donor advised fund run by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. It used this money to pay Hattaway Communications, a consulting firm run by former Hillary Clinton adviser Doug Hattaway, to develop a messaging strategy for Muslim Advocates and similar organizations. Hattaway’s message strategy painted Muslims as victims of American national security policies.

Khera used Hattaway’s strategy to paint the New York Police Department’s mosque surveillance strategy as “discriminatory.”

Farhana Khera

“Their only ‘crime’ is that they are Muslim in America,” Khera wrote in a June 6, 2012 op-ed posted on CNN.com.

OSF funded groups, including Muslim Advocates, the ACLU, and the Center for Constitutional Rights, filed lawsuits challenging the NYPD’s surveillance program as unconstitutional. Police Commissioner William Bratton ended the policy in 2014.

The NYPD monitored almost all aspects of Muslim life ranging from mosques and student associations, to halal butcher shops and restaurants to private citizens.  A federal district court dismissed the suit, but the Third Circuit Court of Appeals revived it in October 2015. New York settled the lawsuit in January, placing the NYPD under supervision of an independent observer appointed by City Hall.

Downplaying Radicalization and the Jihadist Threat

OSF accused conservative opponents of “borrowing liberally from Joe McCarthy’s guilt by association tactics.” It complained in a Sept. 14, 2010 memo to its U.S. Programs Board that the “homegrown terrorism narrative” resulted in “discriminatory” targeting of Muslims by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI.

Khera often expresses similar sentiments. She accused the FBI of engaging in “entrapment operations” to target “innocent” Muslims after former Attorney General Eric Holder called sting operations an “essential law enforcement tool in uncovering and preventing terror attacks.”

Khera likewise characterized law enforcement training materials discussing the Islamic extremist ideology as “bigoted, false, and inflammatory” in her June 28 testimony before a Senate Judiciary  Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight, Agency Action, Federal Rights, Federal Courts.

She and her organization played a central role in late 2011 when Muslim groups called on the Obama administration to purge FBI training materials that they deemed offensive. FBI counterterrorism training materials about Islam contained “woefully misinformed statements about Islam and bigoted stereotypes about Muslims,” she complained in a Sept. 15, 2011 letter. She objected to describing zakat – the almsgiving tax mandate on all Muslims – as a “funding mechanism for combat.”

Yet numerous Muslim commentators describe zakat as a funding mechanism for jihad. A footnote for Surah 9:60 found in “The Meaning of the Holy Qur’an,” says that zakat can be used to help “those who are struggling and striving in Allah’s Cause by teaching or fighting or in duties assigned to them by the righteous Imam, who are thus unable to earn their ordinary living.”

The Assembly of Muslim Jurists in America issued a 2011 fatwa saying zakat could be used to “support legitimate Jihad activities.”

Following Khera’s letter, then-White House counterterrorism advisor John Brennan announced a review of “CVE-related instruction across all levels of government.” This review resulted in a purge of 700 pages of material from 300 presentations. This included PowerPoints and articles describing jihad as “holy war” and portraying the Muslim Brotherhood as group bent on world domination.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s bylaws describe these ultimate ambitions and imply the need for violence: “The Islamic nation must be fully prepared to fight the tyrants and the enemies of Allah as a prelude to establishing an Islamic state.”

Khera’s influence with the Obama administration

Khera enjoys close connections with the Obama White House. Visitor logs show that Khera went to the White House at least 11 times.

Khera played a central role persuading the Obama administration to purge Department of Homeland Security records related to individuals and groups with terror ties, former Customs and Border Patrol (CPB) Agent Phil Haney told the Investigative Project on Terrorism.

His superiors ordered him to “modify” 820 CPB TECS records about the Muslim Brotherhood network in America, Haney said. Irrefutable evidence from the 2008 Holy Land Foundation (HLF) Hamas financing trial proved that many of these groups and individuals assisted Hamas, Haney said.

The HLF trial substantiated deep connections between American Islamist groups such as the Islamic Society of North America, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and a Hamas-support network created by the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States.

A 2009 OSF funding document claims credit for helping persuade then-Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano to order a review of border screening procedures. It also reveals that Muslim Advocates worked with “DHS staff to develop a revised border policy.”

The Muslim Advocates’ report recommended the “review and reform of … [Customs and Border Patrol policies and practices that target Muslim, Arab and South Asian Americans for their First Amendment protected activities, beliefs and associations; and … law enforcement and intelligence activities that impose disparate impacts on Muslim, Arab and South Asian communities.” It also asked DHS to prevent CPB agents from probing about political beliefs, religious practices, and contributions to “lawful” charitable organizations.

Muslim Advocates claimed a pivotal role in getting the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to reverse a new 2010 policy enhancing the screening on travelers from 14 countries, many of them predominately Muslim. The rule was proposed in the wake of the attempt by underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to blow up a Detroit-bound plane weeks earlier.

Muslim Advocates and several OSF grantees met with Napolitano and other top DHS officials, and the policy was canceled three months later. Muslim Advocates claimed that the Obama administration “made special mention” of its role in reversing the TSA policy.

“This broke into the open with the great purge of 2011 and 2012,” Haney said, recalling Brennan’s letter to Khera announcing that materials she complained about would be removed.

The purge accompanied a practice of meeting with Islamist groups as community partners, Haney said.

In addition to the purge of training material, documents related to people and groups with terrorism ties such as Canadian Muslim Brotherhood leader Jamal Badawi and the Pakistan-based Tablighi Jamaat movement also disappeared from CPB records. (Tablighi Jamaat often serves as a de facto recruiting conduit for groups such as al-Qaida and the Taliban.)

Investigators might have had a better chance of thwarting the San Bernardino and the June Orlando shootings had those Tablighi Jamaat records remained available, Haney said, because the shooters’ respective mosques appeared in the deleted 2012 Tablighi Jamaat case report.

The Obama administration’s “absolute refusal to acknowledge that individuals who are affiliated with networks operating here in the United States, and their deliberate deletion of any evidentiary pieces of information in the system, has made us blind and handcuffed,” Haney said. “The proof of it is San Bernardino and Orlando.

“They obliterated the entire [Tablighi Jamaat] case as if it never existed.”

Haney’s claims have met with some skepticism. Haney stands by his claims and says critics “made a lot of factual errors.”

Still, Muslim Advocates’ success reversing the TSA policy was among the accomplishments showing that it “has proved itself to be an effective advocate on the national stage,” an April 25, 2011 OSF document said. It recommended renewing a $440,000 grant to “support the core operating costs of Muslim Advocates.”

In doing so, the Soros-funded OSF weakened U.S. national security and potentially left it vulnerable to the jihadi attacks we have been seeing in the homeland since the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.

Why Iran Funds Foreign Militias

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Primer:

In part from Washington Post: As the Obama administration scrambles for options in Syria, officials lament that the United States has no leverage over the Assad regime, Russia or Iran to persuade them to halt their ongoing atrocities, especially in Aleppo. But behind the scenes, the White House is actually working to weaken a sanctions bill lawmakers in both parties see as providing leverage against all three.

According to lawmakers and staffers in both parties, the White House is secretly trying to water down the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, a bipartisan bill that would sanction the Assad regime for mass torture, mass murder, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The bill, guided by House Foreign Affairs Committee ranking Democrat Eliot Engel (N.Y.), would also sanction entities that aid the Syrian government in these atrocities; that includes Russia and Iran.

The bill, named after a Syrian defector who presented the world with 55,000 pictures documenting Assad’s mass torture and murder of more than 11,000 civilians in custody, has 70 co-sponsors, a majority of whom are Democrats.  More here.

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MiddleEastEye/Karim El-Bar

In wake of Arab Spring, Iran’s backing of foreign militias has drawn much attention. Why is this support so central to Iranian foreign policy?

At a military parade commemorating the 36th anniversary of the Iran-Iraq War, the chief of the Iranian armed forces spoke clearly and bluntly. Tehran holds sway over five Arab countries.

Major General Mohammed Bagheri listed them as Lebanon, Yemen, Palestine, Syria, and Iraq.

Their enemy, as Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif controversially wrote in the New York Times last month, is Wahhabism, the ultraorthodox brand of Sunni Islam propagated by Saudi Arabia.

In some of these countries, like Lebanon, Iran has a long history. In others, such as Yemen, they have only recently involved themselves. The Palestinian cause, and by extension enmity to Israel, is a cornerstone of the theocratic regime’s domestic legitimacy.

In recent years, however, it has been Syria and Iraq that have dominated global headlines and Iranian foreign policy. Damascus and Baghdad, historically the twin capitals of the Sunni Islamic caliphate, are now under the control of predominately Shia Iran – a twist not lost on large swathes of the local population.

The sectarian dimension of Iran’s involvement in Syria’s civil war is hard to ignore. Late last month, the leader of the Iraqi Shia Najbaa Movement visited Aleppo. In a propaganda video released after his visit, a song can be heard in the background with the chorus “Aleppo is Shia.”

At the time of publication, over 10,000 Shia troops are currently massing outside rebel-held east Aleppo as joint Syrian-Russian airstrikes have all but obliterated it.

Translation: “The leader of the Iraqi Shia Najbaa Movement visits the city of Aleppo”

What unites Iran’s foreign policy in all these countries, and across the decades since the 1979 Islamic revolution, is Tehran’s unwavering support for these foreign militias and non-state actors across the Middle East.

The question is: Why?

Messianism or nationalism?

A declassified CIA report, written in 1986, said that while Tehran’s support for non-state actors abroad was meant to further its national interest, it also stemmed from the belief that “it has a religious duty to export its Islamic revolution and to wage, by whatever means, a constant struggle against the perceived oppressor states.”

The messianic nature of Iran’s ruling ideology is often cited as an explanation for Iran’s support of foreign groups, with the preamble to its constitution famously committing it to “the establishment of a universal holy government and the downfall of all others.”

There has been a long-running debate over whether Iran’s support for foreign groups is rooted in national interest or in ideology.



Iranian opposition leader in exile Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini gives a speech at Roissy airport near Paris on 31 January, 1979 before boarding a plane bound to Tehran (AFP)

“I think it’s very easy to latch on to this ideological concept of exporting the revolution as a justification or explanation for Iran’s policies,” Dr Sanam Vakil, an associate fellow at Chatham House, told MEE.

“It’s more about the pragmatic element,” she said. “It’s about the national interest.”

Ellie Geranmayeh, a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, agreed: “Iran is not doing this out of an ideological zeal.”

Geranmayeh said Iran’s policy in the region has much more to do with national security policy “rather than any sort of large ambition to export revolutionary ideals across the region.”

She pointed to the fact that many of Iran’s predominately Shia citizens would not religiously associate Assad’s Alawite regime with their own religion.

Regional intervention

This has not prevented Iran from throwing the kitchen sink at the Syrian civil war to preserve its sphere of influence, even recruiting poorer Shia from countries as far away as Côte d’Ivoire, Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan to fight on their behalf in Syria. This is in addition to the roles of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and its elite branch, the Quds Force.

Hezbollah was reticent to involve themselves at first. Their involvement is still a point of controversy in the movement, with former leader Subhi al-Tufayli recently slamming their “aggression” in Syria and labelling anyone fighting alongside the Russians, or Americans, as an “enemy” to God.

“Iran has nurtured and maybe even given birth to Hezbollah, but as any parent will tell you children don’t always listen to you over the course of their life,” Vakil said.

Its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, reportedly only agreed after receiving a personal appeal from Khamenei.

“Hezbollah is not necessarily a puppet of Iran as described in the media, even though a large part of the funding comes from Iran. It has a lot of domestic goals and considerations inside Lebanon which are very important for the success of the movement,” Geneive Abdo, a senior policy fellow at the Atlantic Council, told Middle East Eye.

“Neither are the Shia militias in Iraq,” she added, some of which are more loyal to the influential Iraqi Shia cleric Ali al-Sistani than to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali al-Khameini.

“It’s very complicated,” Abdo said. “At the same time that Iran or the revolutionary guards have a great influence on these forces, it doesn’t mean necessarily mean they control them 100 per cent.”

Vakil expresses a similar level of caution: “Saying that Iran is responsible for everything is demeaning on so many levels.”

“Iran has influence, it has money, but it doesn’t have total control of every situation,” she said. “It is important not to overstate Iran’s ability to manage everything. I think that there’s a lot of overstating and as a result everyone assumes that Iran is bigger than it is, more powerful and more influential than it is.

“That in effect plays into the hands of the IRGC and Qassem Soleimani and creates this sort of mythic impression around the region of what’s happening,” she added.

Relations between Hamas and Iran deteriorated sharply following the outbreak of the Syrian revolution in 2011. The following year, the group’s leadership left Damascus after being based there for more than a decade. Their funding was reduced drastically shortly thereafter.



Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal delivers a speech on 16 November, 2003 in front of a giant painting of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during a ceremony in Beirut (AFP)

“Our position on Syria affected relations with Iran. Its support for us never stopped, but the amounts [of money] were significantly reduced,” a senior Hamas official said in 2013.

In response to this turn of events, Iran ramped up funding for other Palestinian groups, most notably the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Iran’s heightened involvement in the Middle East “began in Iraq with the US invasion and the United States’s role in creating a Shia-led government in Iraq,” according to Abdo.

“That paved the way for Iran’s involvement beginning in 2003 not only in Iraq but now we see in other Arab countries,” she said.

For example, the Quds Force have reportedly been arming the Houthis since 2012. In 2013, the Yemeni coast guard intercepted a boat full of arms, explosives, and anti-aircraft missiles suspected to have come from Iran.

In January 2014, the Bahraini authorities also intercepted a boat departing from Iraq with more than 220 pounds of explosives and other weapons such as C-4 explosives, mines and grenades.

Legacy of the Iran-Iraq war

Any analysis of Iran’s role in Iraq, and indeed the wider Middle East, must include reference to Iran’s bloody, eight-year long war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Geranmayeh emphasised the autonomy of the local actors themselves: “Given the near and imminent fall of Baghdad in 2014, Iran offered its help to Baghdad and that help was legitimately accepted by the central government of Baghdad.”

She sees Iran’s experience in the Iran-Iraq war as crucial to Iran’s approach to foreign militias around the Middle East in general, and Iraq in particular: “The (Iranian) military was weakened during the eight-year war with Saddam Hussein and so a kind of more voluntarily, locally organised Basij paramilitary force emerged in Iran. A lot of people who are in the Iranian military have that experience themselves of the Iran-Iraq war of how to mobilise local operations into a security architecture in times of need and in times where there is essentially a security vacuum in place. So they have certainly transported some of that know-how into Iraq.”



Iraqi soldiers walk after their victory in the battle at al-Howeizah swamps, north of Basra, on 22 March, 1985 (AFP)

She says that a similar dynamic is at play in Syria and the pro-government National Defence Forces (NDF): “What they (Iran) would say with the NDF is that they are in Syria with the legitimately recognised, UN-recognised government of Syria, the Assad regime, having blessed their cooperation in the Syrian sphere. They would see their role as advisory on the ground to local groups fighting at a time essentially when there is a security vacuum.”

“The IRGC has always played a critical role in Iran’s foreign policy,” Geranmayeh continued. “They have a long history, [with] a lot of these people of course fighting in the Iran-Iraq war, they understand the neighbouring countries very well because they spent a lot of time in those countries.”

“They (the IRGC) are most well-known for their defence of Iran during the Iran-Iraq war and the translation of that defence into supporting non-state actors in other countries throughout the world and in the Middle East itself; Hezbollah being their baby, they have created it,” Vakil said. “It’s the same sort of concept in Syria, they are responsible for the Syria portfolio, and they are responsible for any of the other portfolios around the region.”

The rise of the fiercely anti-Shia Islamic State group has increased the IRGC’s domestic popularity in recent years, Geranmayeh claims: “The IRGC is viewed much more now as a security apparatus that is protecting Iran from being contaminated by ISIS fighters… in Syria, for example, the choice is seen as one between Assad or ISIS.”

Abdo emphasised that the IRGC are an “an economic force, they’re a political force, and they’re an ideological force.”

“We have to be specific, it’s the revolutionary guards who are controlling and funding the militias,” she said.

Follow the money

Iran is one of only three countries considered an official state sponsor of terror by the US; it was added to the State Department’s list on 19 January, 1984. The only other countries listed are Sudan and Syria.

The US foreign ministry’s 2013 Country Reports on Terrorism stated that Iran supports non-state actors in Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain and Iraq.

“I think that an opportunity has been opened for Iran in the Arab world,” Abdo said. “For many decades, Iran didn’t have the opportunity that it has now in the Arab world… It’s a result of the post-Arab uprising era.”

Naame Shaam, an independent campaign group focused on Iran’s role in Syria, published a report in December 2015 in which they estimated the level of support Iran provided non-state actors across the region.

This is a difficult task to say the least, according to Vakil.



A picture taken on 11 April, 2011 shows Iran’s biggest denomination currencies in Tehran (AFP)

“The key is that we just don’t know what those figures are, they’re estimates and guestimates from different sources and outlets,” she said. “The accurate reflection of Iran’s investment in Syria is a big question ultimately. We know it’s a lot but we just don’t know how much it is. And because they’ve invested a lot obviously it’s a clear indication that this strategy means something for them and they have some sort of long-term plan. But, again, there is a lot of opacity as to what that could be.”

With this in mind, Naame Shaam – comprised of Iranian, Syrian, and Lebanese activists and journalists – used publicly available data to make the following estimates:

  • Lebanon: From the 1980s to the beginning of the Arab Spring, Hezbollah received between $100m and $200m annually from Iran. Domestic economic decline and the increasing intervention in Syria led to this number between being cut to around $50m to $100m per year from 2010 onwards.
  • Iraq: From the 2003 invasion of Iraq until the end of Bush’s presidency, Iran provided a range of Iraqi Shia militias with $10m to $35m a year, a number which skyrocketed after 2009 to $100m to $200m a year.
  • Palestine: From its consolidation of power in 2007 to the start of the Arab Spring in Syria and elsewhere in 2011, Hamas received approximately $100m to $250m per year from Iran. Hamas’s refusal to back Assad led to a dramatic decline in funding.
  • Yemen: The Houthis have received anywhere between $10m and $25m a year since 2010.
  • Syria: Assad government forces and its allied militias received between $15bn and $25bn over the first five years of the conflict, amounting to between $3bn and $5bn per year.
  • Overall: Naame Sham estimated that over the period of time mentioned above, Iranian expenditure on foreign militias and non-state actors ranges between a low estimate of $20 billion – and a high estimate of $80 billion.

The money comes partly from public budgets, but largely from the huge sums of money under the direct control of the supreme leader and the IRGC. These funds come from clandestine business networks pumping out billions of dollars of revenue, and are untraceable as they are not accountable to the public, according to Naame Shaam.

History and consistency



Iranian Defence Minister Hossein Dehghan (L) attends the 5th Moscow Conference on International Security (MCIS) in Moscow on 27 April, 2016 (AFP)

Iran’s defence minister is Hossein Dehghan – a former militia commander who orchestrated the bombing of a US Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, an attack that killed 241 American troops. This was the deadliest terrorist attack in US history before 9/11. Fifty-eight French soldiers were also killed in the same operation on a French military barracks.

The following year saw Hezbollah’s abduction of CIA station chief William Francis Buckley, who was tortured and executed.

In 1992, the Israeli embassy in Argentina was bombed, killing 29 people. Two years later a Jewish cultural centre was bombed in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people.

Iran and its Lebanese proxies were linked to both attacks. Argentina ordered the arrest of infamous Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyah for his participation in the 1992 attack, as well as Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior adviser to Khamenei, for orchestrating the latter attack.

In 1996, a further 19 US soldiers were killed by an Iran-backed group, this time in Saudi Arabia as a result of the Khobar Towers bombing. Ahmed al-Mughassil, the suspected mastermind of the attack, was arrested last year in Beirut, having lived under Hezbollah’s protection since the attack.

Iran’s reach is not limited to the Arab world either. Its Shia majority, but staunchly secular, neighbour Azerbaijan has also felt the long reach of Tehran’s arm.

In 2006, Baku arrested 15 of its citizens with links to Iran and Hezbollah, who were planning a wave of attacks against Israeli and Western visitors in the country.

Two years later, Azerbaijan foiled a joint Iran-Hezbollah plan to bomb the country’s Israeli embassy in revenge for the 2008 assassination of Mughniyah.

In 2012, Baku carried out another wave of arrests to prevent another planned bombing campaign, again found to be linked to Iran and Hezbollah.

The same year saw five Israelis killed in Bulgaria in an attack that Sofia said had “obvious links” to Hezbollah.

In his 2014 testimony to the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Dr Matthew Levitt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy said the Quds Force’s increase in activities goes back to Hezbollah’s repeated failures to avenge the assassination of Mughniyah in Azerbaijan and elsewhere, leading to growing frustration within IRGC ranks.

“The IRGC would no longer rely solely on Hezbollah to carry out terrorist attacks abroad,” he told the committee. “It would now deploy Quds Force operatives to do so on their own, not just as logisticians supporting Hezbollah hit men.”



Handout mugshot obtained 12 October, 2011 courtesy of the Nueces County, Texas sheriff’s Office shows Manssor Arbabsiar (AFP PHOTO/NUECES COUNTY SHERIFF)

For these reasons, the State Department reported in 2012 “a marked resurgence of Iran’s state sponsorship of terrorism, through its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force (IRGC-QF), its Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), and Tehran’s ally Hezbollah. Iran and Hezbollah’s terrorist activity has reached a tempo unseen since the 1990s.”

The previous year, Iran even tried to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, in the nation’s capital Washington, D.C.

Manssor Arbabsiar, an Iranian-American citizen, pleaded guilty to the plot in June 2013 and admitted to “conspiring with members of the Iranian military in the formulation of the plot,” CNN reported at the time.

Iran vehemently denied involvement, but the plot was allegedly foiled when Arbabsiar’s contact in the Mexican drug cartel he tried to recruit to carry out the assassination turned out to be an undercover US agent.

Al-Qaeda connections

Iranian tensions with America only heightened after the 11 September attacks in 2001.

As the executive and legislative branches in America struggled over whether to allow families of 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia, Iran’s role has also been a point of controversy.

Iran quickly condemned the terrorist attack, but the 9/11 Commission Report, published three years after the attack, found that eight of the 10 hijackers travelled through Iran between late 2000 and early 2001.

They were taking advantage of an agreement with the Iranian government that meant the passports of al-Qaeda members were not stamped as they passed through the country.

In a similar vein, a leading figure of al-Qaeda in Iraq – Abu Musab al-Zarqawi – was given shelter in Iran in 2001 and 2002, with Tehran reportedly refusing to extradite him to Jordan. The links are said to have continued and in 2012, the US Department of the Treasury slammed the Iran’s main intelligence organisation, the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), for its “support to terrorist groups, such as al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda in Iraq… again exposing the extent of Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism as a matter of Iran’s state policy.”



A US soldier stands between two images of al-Qaeda leader in Iraq Abu Musab al-Zarqawi during a US military briefing 8 June, 2006 in Baghdad (AFP)

In July, the US Treasury imposed sanctions on three senior al-Qaeda members – all of whom are located in Iran. Faisal al-Khalidi is a former al-Qaeda commander and plays a leading role in weapons acquisition, while veteran member Yisra Bayumi served as a mediator with Iranian authorities as early as 2015 and facilitated the transfer of al-Qaeda funds, and Abu Bakr Ghumayn in 2015 assumed control of the financing and organisation of al-Qaeda members in Iran.

With regards to Iran sheltering al-Qaeda members, Vakil said Tehran was “perhaps using them as bargaining chips.”

“There is very limited love between Iran and al-Qaeda, they have no ideological symmetry in just about anything,” she said. “If they are doing anything, it is quite a pragmatic effort trying to get something out of it and that is what this regime is known for.”

Rouhani and the regime

Hassan Rouhani has often been portrayed as a moderate, at least in comparison to his hard-line predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. His focus is said to be on rebuilding Iran’s shattered economy and normalising relations with the West.

Experts agree, however, that his impact on foreign policy has been minimal.

“It’s very difficult for one person alone to fundamentally redirect and rearrange regional policy without a consensus being formed at top leadership level,” Geranmayeh said.



Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani (C) leaves after addressing the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly at the UN headquarters in New York on 22 September, 2016 (AFP)

Vakil agrees: “Rouhani doesn’t actually have that much control and influence over Iran’s foreign policy portfolio.”

“One would assume the president is in charge of these things, but in fact he’s not,” she added. “The purview of foreign policy is primarily in the hands of the supreme leader.”

“I think his impact has been minimal,” Abdo said of Rouhani and Iran’s foreign policy. “I think that he has been used as an instrument in the similar way that Mohammed Khatami was used an instrument to achieve a certain regime objective. In Rouhani’s case it was the nuclear deal, in Khatami’s case, it was to try to improve relations with the West.”

Through this prism, the nuclear deal was not “necessarily a Rouhani victory,” she said, but what the supreme leader authorised.

Nuclear deal

In 2006, then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said: “Iran has been the country that has been in many ways a kind of central banker for terrorism in important regions.”

A decade later, Obama’s nuclear deal meant Iran received more than $100bn in sanctions relief as well as reintegration into the pivotal SWIFT international banking system. Rouhani has also made a number of visits to the West to increase economic ties.

The lifting of financial sanctions is a contentious issue, so much so that when the Obama administration sent $400m in cash to Iran last month, he kept his own military out of the loop.

“There was a lot of opposition to the lifting of sanctions on Iran, particularly in the US, based on the argument that the money is going to be funnelled to fund Iran’s regional policies that are essentially opposed to Western interests,” Geranmayeh said of opponents of the nuclear deal.

This was certainly the position of Naame Shaam, who wrote in the conclusion to their report that: “There have been fears that, next to domestic investment needs, part of the released funds could end up fuelling conflicts in the Middle East even further due to increased military spending and financial backing of allied militias and governments like the Assad regime in Syria.

“The increase in Iran’s 2015/16 current defence budget may be a first sign of this,” it continued. “In recent months, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Iranian Minister of Defence, Hossein Dehqan, both made it clear that they had no intention to cut their support to Hezbollah, Hamas, the (Palestinian) Islamic Jihad, the Houthi militias in Yemen, the Syrian and Iraqi governments and their militias, despite a nuclear deal.”



Iranian Foreign Minister Muhammad Javad Zarif addresses the parliament in Tehran on 2 October, 2016 (AFP)

Geranmayeh takes a different view, however: “The majority of the money is going to fund local investment projects to reduce unemployment, to promote job growth, and to tackle issues to do with inflation.”

Vakil agrees: “The country does need the money internally because if Iran is going to hit all of its growth markers for the next 10 years there has to be a lot of investment in the Iranian economy. For the Iranian regime that is a huge part of why it signed the nuclear deal. It wasn’t about anything else except the economy, and trying to get the economy going, and trying to generate foreign and internal investment into different sections of the Iranian economy. It’s about the long-term sustainability of the Islamic republic.”

The consensus is far from unanimous though.

“I think the money will be directed toward non-state actors abroad,” Abdo said. “I think that it’s very unfortunate, but I think that the regime’s strategy is that they will basically maintain the minimum economic commitment required to prevent dissent and uprising, and as long as they can maintain this low level of service to their own people – which means that the subsidies are cut and the value of the currency is low and so forth – they will continue to do this if this means freeing up resources for regional domination.”

“It’s very clear if you go to Iran, the wages are low, the economy is in a bad situation,” she said. “But they’re spending enormous amounts of money on their regional ambitions.”

Sectarianism and survival

Iran supports non-state actors in the Middle East “because they want to have a foothold politically in the Arab world,” Abdo said.

“I think also there is a religious dimension to this and many people disagree with me,” she said. The topic is one she discusses at greater length in her new book, The New Sectarianism, due to be published on 1 December 2016.

“If you go back and look at Khamenei’s speeches during the early years of the Arab uprising, he talked a lot about the Islamic awakening. This is just pure rhetoric,” she said. “In fact what has happened is that the Iranians are supporting Shia groups in the Arab world.”

“Nasrallah has made very clear over the last two years that Hezbollah now functions as a Shia militia,” Abdo said. “Both Iran and Hezbollah never played the Shia card, they never said that they are the military force for Shia in the region, but they departed from that approximately two years ago and now there is no question that both Hezbollah and Iran are military forces to support Shia in the region.”

“This is what I think is very important in what has changed their historic rhetoric since the revolution,” she said.

There is an ethnic, as well as a religious, dimension to the complexity of Iran’s support for foreign militias, Abdo continued, because these groups are comprised mainly of Arab, not Persian, Shia.

“The Iranians are making inroads because the Shia in many of these countries are not gaining any support from their own governments,” she said. “Iraq is a perfect example of this.”

Zarif’s article in the New York Times has refocused attention on this sectarian proxy war currently raging across the Middle East.

“No doubt the Saudis are definitely instrumental in driving this conflict, but I think the important difference is that ideologically the Saudis don’t need this conflict for their survival,” she says. “The Iranian state depends upon conflict with the West ideologically and conflict with its neighbours to maintain its survival and its legitimacy.”

Related reading: Obama administration and State Department are Hiding Iran Agreements

Related reading: Obama Grants Clemency to 7 Iranian Terrorists in United States, but there were really 21 of them and no access to who they were.

Obama’s New Policy on Intelligence Gathering and National Security

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Next it will be some climate change mandate….

The White House
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release
October 05, 2016

FACT SHEET: Presidential Memorandum on Promoting Diversity and Inclusion in the National Security Workforce

Since the beginning of his Administration, President Obama has deepened the commitment of the United States Government to draw upon the talents and skills of all parts of our society.  Diversity has always been one of the Nation’s greatest strengths, and it is no different for the Federal workforce, which has a responsibility as the country’s largest employer to lead by example and to reflect the population that we serve.  Inclusion has been key to ensuring that the investments we make to develop our workforce result in a more effective and skilled government for the American people.

 

The imperative to promote diversity and inclusion is also critical for our national security workforce.  In a complex and interconnected world, the nature of our national security challenges and opportunities is more global than ever.  As a society that can trace its roots to every region around the world, the American people are our greatest asset when it comes to the United States’ ability to build bridges to communities at home and abroad, address foreign threats and aggression, and lead coalitions to promote global peace and prosperity.  Promoting diversity and inclusion ensures that national security departments and agencies can recruit their employees from the broadest possible pool of talent and bring a wide range of perspectives, skills, and backgrounds to bear to tackle our toughest problems.

 

Today, the President is issuing a new Presidential Memorandum that provides guidance on the implementation of policies to promote diversity and inclusion in the national security workforce.  Currently, more than three million military and civilian personnel in the U.S. Government are engaged in protecting the country and advancing our interests abroad, through diplomacy, development, defense, intelligence, law enforcement, and homeland security.  In broad comparison with the wider Federal Government, the federal workforce dedicated to our national security and foreign policy is – on average – less diverse, including at the highest levels.

 

While this data does not necessarily indicate the existence of barriers to equal employment opportunity, the Presidential Memorandum outlines a number of actions that will allow departments and agencies to better leverage the diversity and inclusion of the federal workforce, consistent with the existing merit system and applicable law, including:

  • Collection, analysis, and dissemination of workforce data: Data is an essential tool to help departments and agencies identify workforce talent gaps, assess the efficiency and effectiveness of their diversity and inclusion efforts, and promote transparency and accountability.  The memorandum provides guidance for departments and agencies to make key workforce data available to the general public, provide an annual report to their leadership and workforce on the status of diversity and inclusion efforts, expand the use of applicant flow data to assess the fairness and inclusiveness of their recruitment efforts, and identify any additional demographic categories they recommend for voluntary data collection.
  • Provision of professional development opportunities and tools consistent with merit system principles: Providing access to professional development opportunities consistent with merit system principles is a key element to retaining and developing a diverse and inclusive workforce.  The memorandum directs departments and agencies to engage their workforce through regular interviews to understand their views on workplace policies and why they choose to stay or leave, prioritize the expansion of professional development opportunities including programs specifically designed to develop the next generation of career senior executives, and implement a review process for decisions related to certain assignment or geographic restrictions.
  • Strengthening of leadership engagement and accountability: The memorandum recognizes the critical role that senior leadership and supervisors play in fostering a diverse and inclusive workforce and cultivating talent consistent with merit system principles.  It encourages departments and agencies to reward and recognize efforts by senior leaders and supervisors to participate in mentorship, sponsorship, and recruitment; to disseminate voluntary demographic data for external committee and boards that advise the leadership of an agency; and to expand the provision of training on implicit or unconscious bias, inclusion, and flexible work policies.

 

The guidance in this Presidential Memorandum furthers the initiative that President Obama announced in 2011 in Executive Order 13583, “Establishing a Coordinated Government-wide Initiative to Promote Diversity and Inclusion in the Federal Workforce,” for departments and agencies to develop and implement a more comprehensive, integrated, and strategic focus on diversity and inclusion.  It also complements the remarkable progress that the national security workforce has made over the past several years in recognizing the importance of diversity and inclusion to the success of their mission, including but not limited to:

  • The Department of Defense’s decisions to eliminate all remaining institutional barriers to service by opening all military occupations to women and transgender individuals;
  • The Central Intelligence Agency’s commissioning and public release of two studies on women and diversity in their leadership and its active implementation of the studies’ recommendations;
  • The Office of the Director of National Intelligence release of its annual Intelligence Community demographics report, the first time it has ever been publicly released; and
  • The Department of Justice announced that all law enforcement agents and prosecutors will receive training to recognize and address implicit bias.

 

The Presidential Memorandum also aligns with a number of congressional efforts to promote the diversity of the national security workforce.  Over the past several decades, Congress has passed legislation mandating reforms to ensure that institutions including the Foreign Service, Intelligence Community, and U.S. military provide equal employment opportunity to all those who have the desire and qualifications to serve their country.  Under this Administration, the Congress and President Obama have collaborated on important legislation on this issue, most notably on the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Repeal Act of 2010.

1999: Clinton Admin Knew/Facilitated China Military Theft

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 Wen Ho Lee

Related reading: 2015, FBI Arrests Chinese Millionaire Once Tied to Clinton $$ Scandal

Related reading: The Russia-China relationship could lead to some interesting changes on the global stage.

And the biggest changes are occurring far away from Washington’s orbit.

obama xi putinUS President Barack Obama (L-R), China’s President Xi Jinping, and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin during a photo shoot at the International Convention Center at Yanqi Lake in Beijing, November 11, 2014. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon

Although the Sino-Russo relationship predates the Ukraine conflict, there’s no question that the crisis has shifted Moscow even more toward Beijing.

Over the last year, we saw the two countries sign highly publicized energy deals, conduct joint military exercises, and even generally support each others’ foreign policy adventures. More here from BusinessInsider.

Here are a few questions for investigators in both houses of Congress to pose:

NYT’s: To Samuel Berger, the Hogan & Hartson trade lobbyist turned national security adviser: Why can’t Congress see your memo to President Clinton summarizing the devastating Cox report on espionage when it was submitted for security clearance in January? With the report now public, no claim of secrecy can properly be made.

Clinton pretended two months ago to have been uninformed of wholesale espionage. Did Berger’s January cover memo truly reflect the Cox report’s revelations, or did it lull the President into a false sense of national security?

To Bill Richardson, Energy Secretary since September 1998: You were briefed on espionage suspicions in November, and received the Cox report in January. Did you never have occasion to mention its serious implications on China policy to the President? You knew Secretary of State Albright was going to China in February; why did you withhold it from her? Did the White House suggest she be kept ignorant, or was it your own idea?

To F.B.I. Director Louis Freeh: Attorney General Janet Reno says ”I was not apprised of the details of the case at the time the decision was made” to reject wiretap surveillance of Wen Ho Lee at Los Alamos. Didn’t you think this was important enough to take to the top? She also says your 1997 request ”did not contain a request to search any computer.” If that is true, why not?

To the Senate Democratic leader, Tom Daschle: The bipartisan Cox report charges the White House with failing to inform Congress, but you say ”Republican chairs of the Congress were warned about this as early as 1996 and also chose to do nothing.” Did you read those ”warnings” before accusing Senator Arlen Specter and Representative Porter Goss of failing in their intelligence oversight duties? Can the public now see if those staff briefings were complete?

To Dan Burton, chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee: With Reno Justice allowing all Clinton’s illegal Asian fund-raisers to cop a plea and walk, you’ve subpoenaed Charlie Trie for June 10 and John Huang for June 17. Will you allow the ranking Democrat, Henry Waxman, to turn hearings into a partisan circus, or will you depose Trie and Huang extensively beforehand to discover links to Bruce Lindsey, the D.N.C.’s Don Fowler and Hillary’s Harold Ickes?

To George Tenet, Director of Central Intelligence: You reported to Cox that information on China’s theft of our W-88 nuclear warhead design came from a ”walk-in” planted by Chinese intelligence. That’s counterintuitive counterintelligence; does nobody in C.I.A. dispute the ”dangle” theory? Where is he now, and is he (or she) singing?

To Richard Shelby and Bob Kerrey of Senate Intelligence: The Cox report ran 900 pages, but nearly 400 pages were cut out by the Clinton sanitizers. Was all of this really for security reasons, or do many redactions cover C.I.A., F.B.I. and White House embarrassments?

To Senator Robert Torricelli, Democrat of New Jersey: You told CBS’s Bob Schieffer that Clinton should talk to Reno about ”her ability to perform her duties.” Are you worrying about her judgment under a physical affliction, or making a nonpartisan judgment on sustained misfeasance at Justice — or helping the White House toss her off the sled to save Sandy Berger?

The biggest question is this: Will we fall for the usual ”it’s old news” and ”everybody did it” defenses? Or will we connect the dots from the (a) corrupt Asian and satellite-producer contributions to the (b) refusal to stop the theft of nuclear codes lest it offend Beijing to the (c) change of policy to sell China powerful computers capable of using those codes to simulate tests?

The House is being serious. What about the Senate?

****What is this all about you ask?

*The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has stolen design information on the United States’ most advanced

thermonuclear weapons.

* The Select Committee judges that the PRC’s next generation of thermonuclear weapons, currently under development, will exploit elements of stolen U.S. design information.

* PRC penetration of our national weapons laboratories spans at least the past several decades and almost

certainly continues today.

****

• The stolen information includes classified information on seven U.S. thermonuclear warheads, including every currently deployed thermonuclear warhead in the U.S. ballistic missile arsenal.

• The stolen information also includes classified design information for an enhanced radiation weapon (commonly known as the “neutron bomb”), which neither the United States, nor any other nation, has yet deployed.

• The PRC has obtained classified information on the following U.S. thermonuclear warheads, as well as a number of associated reentry vehicles (the hardened shell that protects the thermonuclear warhead during reentry).

****

In addition, in the mid-1990s the PRC stole, possibly from a U.S. national

weapons laboratory, classified thermonuclear weapons information that cannot be

identified in this unclassified Report. Because this recent espionage case is currently

under investigation and involves sensitive intelligence sources and methods, the

Clinton administration has determined that further information cannot be made public

without affecting national security or ongoing criminal investigations.

The W-88, a miniaturized, tapered warhead, is the most sophisticated nuclear

weapon the United States has ever built. In the U.S. arsenal, it is mated to the D-5 submarine-

launched ballistic missile carried aboard the Trident nuclear submarine. The

United States learned about the theft of the W-88 Trident D-5 warhead information, as

well as about the theft of information regarding several other nuclear weapons, in 1995.

The PRC has stolen U.S. design information and other classified information

for neutron bomb warheads. The PRC stole classified U.S. information about

the neutron bomb from a U.S. national weapons laboratory. The U.S. learned of the

theft of this classified information on the neutron bomb in 1996.

In the late 1970s, the PRC stole design information on the U.S. W-70 warhead

from the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. The U.S. government first learned of this

theft several months after it took place. The W-70 warhead contains elements that

may be used either as a strategic thermonuclear weapon, or as an enhanced radiation

weapon (“neutron bomb”). The PRC tested the neutron bomb in 1988.

The Select Committee is aware of other PRC thefts of U.S. thermonuclear

weapons-related secrets. The Clinton administration has determined that further

information about PRC thefts of U.S. thermonuclear weapons-related secrets cannot

be publicly disclosed without affecting national security.

The PRC acquired this and other classified U.S. nuclear weapons information as

the result of a 20-year intelligence collection program to develop modern thermonuclear

weapons, continuing to this very day, that includes espionage, review of unclassified

publications, and extensive interactions with scientists from the Department of

Energy’s national weapons laboratories.

**** The full Cox Report is 700 pages but this link is the summary.  So, those questions the New York Times asked in 1999 need to be asked again today of both Hillary and Bill. What say you?

Ah, Yahoo has Been Secretly Sweeping Your Emails

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Primer: Report: Yahoo hack may have compromised up to 3B accounts

Exclusive: Yahoo secretly scanned customer emails for U.S. intelligence

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company complied with a classified U.S. government directive, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said two former employees and a third person apprised of the events.

Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to a spy agency’s demand by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time.

It is not known what information intelligence officials were looking for, only that they wanted Yahoo to search for a set of characters. That could mean a phrase in an email or an attachment, said the sources, who did not want to be identified.

Reuters was unable to determine what data Yahoo may have handed over, if any, and if intelligence officials had approached other email providers besides Yahoo with this kind of request.

Related reading: Verizon is buying Yahoo for $4.8 billion

According to the two former employees, Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer’s decision to obey the directive roiled some senior executives and led to the June 2015 departure of Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos, who now holds the top security job at Facebook Inc.”Yahoo is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States,” the company said in a brief statement in response to Reuters questions about the demand. Yahoo declined any further comment.

Through a Facebook spokesman, Stamos declined a request for an interview.

The NSA referred questions to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which declined to comment.

The demand to search Yahoo Mail accounts came in the form of a classified directive sent to the company’s legal team, according to the three people familiar with the matter.

U.S. phone and Internet companies are known to have handed over bulk customer data to intelligence agencies. But some former government officials and private surveillance experts said they had not previously seen either such a broad directive for real-time Web collection or one that required the creation of a new computer program.

“I’ve never seen that, a wiretap in real time on a ‘selector,'” said Albert Gidari, a lawyer who represented phone and Internet companies on surveillance issues for 20 years before moving to Stanford University this year. A selector refers to a type of search term used to zero in on specific information.

“It would be really difficult for a provider to do that,” he added.

Experts said it was likely that the NSA or FBI had approached other Internet companies with the same demand, since they evidently did not know what email accounts were being used by the target. The NSA usually makes requests for domestic surveillance through the FBI, so it is hard to know which agency is seeking the information.

Reuters was unable to confirm whether the 2015 demand went to other companies, or if any complied.

Alphabet Inc’s Google and Microsoft Corp, two major U.S. email service providers, did not respond to requests for comment.

CHALLENGING THE NSA

Under laws including the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, intelligence agencies can ask U.S. phone and Internet companies to provide customer data to aid foreign intelligence-gathering efforts for a variety of reasons, including prevention of terrorist attacks.

Disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and others have exposed the extent of electronic surveillance and led U.S. authorities to modestly scale back some of the programs, in part to protect privacy rights.

Companies including Yahoo have challenged some classified surveillance before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret tribunal.

Some FISA experts said Yahoo could have tried to fight last year’s directive on at least two grounds: the breadth of the demand and the necessity of writing a special program to search all customers’ emails in transit.

Apple Inc made a similar argument earlier this year when it refused to create a special program to break into an encrypted iPhone used in the 2015 San Bernardino massacre. The FBI dropped the case after it unlocked the phone with the help of a third party, so no precedent was set.

Other FISA experts defended Yahoo’s decision to comply, saying nothing prohibited the surveillance court from ordering a search for a specific term instead of a specific account. So-called “upstream” bulk collection from phone carriers based on content was found to be legal, they said, and the same logic could apply to Web companies’ mail.

As tech companies become better at encrypting data, they are likely to face more such requests from spy agencies.

Former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker said email providers “have the power to encrypt it all, and with that comes added responsibility to do some of the work that had been done by the intelligence agencies.”

SECRET SIPHONING PROGRAM

Mayer and other executives ultimately decided to comply with the directive last year rather than fight it, in part because they thought they would lose, said the people familiar with the matter.

Yahoo in 2007 had fought a FISA demand that it conduct searches on specific email accounts without a court-approved warrant. Details of the case remain sealed, but a partially redacted published opinion showed Yahoo’s challenge was unsuccessful.

Some Yahoo employees were upset about the decision not to contest the more recent directive and thought the company could have prevailed, the sources said.

They were also upset that Mayer and Yahoo General Counsel Ron Bell did not involve the company’s security team in the process, instead asking Yahoo’s email engineers to write a program to siphon off messages containing the character string the spies sought and store them for remote retrieval, according to the sources.

The sources said the program was discovered by Yahoo’s security team in May 2015, within weeks of its installation. The security team initially thought hackers had broken in.

When Stamos found out that Mayer had authorized the program, he resigned as chief information security officer and told his subordinates that he had been left out of a decision that hurt users’ security, the sources said. Due to a programming flaw, he told them hackers could have accessed the stored emails.

Stamos’s announcement in June 2015 that he had joined Facebook did not mention any problems with Yahoo. (http://bit.ly/2dL003k)

In a separate incident, Yahoo last month said “state-sponsored” hackers had gained access to 500 million customer accounts in 2014. The revelations have brought new scrutiny to Yahoo’s security practices as the company tries to complete a deal to sell its core business to Verizon Communications Inc for $4.8 billion.

(Reporting by Joseph Menn; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Tiffany Wu)