Category Archives: NSA Spying

Tracking Phone Calls Long Before the Patriot Act

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U.S. secretly tracked billions of phone calls for decades

Starting in 1992, the Justice Department amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries, a model for anti-terror surveillance after Sept. 11, 2001.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. government started keeping secret records of Americans’ international telephone calls nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, harvesting billions of calls in a program that provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance that followed.

For more than two decades, the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries linked to drug trafficking, current and former officials involved with the operation said. The targeted countries changed over time but included Canada, Mexico and most of Central and South America.

Federal investigators used the call records to track drug cartels’ distribution networks in the USA, allowing agents to detect previously unknown trafficking rings and money handlers. They also used the records to help rule out foreign ties to the bombing in 1995 of a federal building in Oklahoma City and to identify U.S. suspects in a wide range of other investigations.

The Justice Department revealed in January that the DEA had collected data about calls to “designated foreign countries.” But the history and vast scale of that operation have not been disclosed until now.

The now-discontinued operation, carried out by the DEA’s intelligence arm, was the government’s first known effort to gather data on Americans in bulk, sweeping up records of telephone calls made by millions of U.S. citizens regardless of whether they were suspected of a crime. It was a model for the massive phone surveillance system the NSA launched to identify terrorists after the Sept. 11 attacks. That dragnet drew sharp criticism that the government had intruded too deeply into Americans’ privacy after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked it to the news media two years ago.

More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and intelligence officials described the details of the Justice Department operation to USA TODAY. Most did so on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the intelligence program, part of which remains classified.

The DEA program did not intercept the content of Americans’ calls, but the records — which numbers were dialed and when — allowed agents to map suspects’ communications and link them to troves of other police and intelligence data. At first, the drug agency did so with help from military computers and intelligence analysts.

That data collection was “one of the most important and effective Federal drug law enforcement initiatives,” the Justice Department said in a 1998 letter to Sprint asking the telecom giant to turn over its call records. The previously undisclosed letter was signed by the head of the department’s Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Section, Mary Lee Warren, who wrote that the operation had “been approved at the highest levels of Federal law enforcement authority,” including then-Attorney General Janet Reno and her deputy, Eric Holder.

The data collection began in 1992 during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, nine years before his son, President George W. Bush, authorized the NSA to gather its own logs of Americans’ phone calls in 2001. It was approved by top Justice Department officials in four presidential administrations and detailed in occasional briefings to members of Congress but otherwise had little independent oversight, according to officials involved with running it.

The DEA used its data collection extensively and in ways that the NSA is now prohibited from doing. Agents gathered the records without court approval, searched them more often in a day than the spy agency does in a year and automatically linked the numbers the agency gathered to large electronic collections of investigative reports, domestic call records accumulated by its agents and intelligence data from overseas, it even use 800 numbers for business too!

The result was “a treasure trove of very important information on trafficking,” former DEA administrator Thomas Constantine said in an interview.

The extent of that surveillance alarmed privacy advocates, who questioned its legality. “This was aimed squarely at Americans,” said Mark Rumold, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “That’s very significant from a constitutional perspective.”

Holder halted the data collection in September 2013 amid the fallout from Snowden’s revelations about other surveillance programs. In its place, current and former officials said the drug agency sends telecom companies daily subpoenas for international calling records involving only phone numbers that agents suspect are linked to the drug trade or other crimes — sometimes a thousand or more numbers a day.

Tuesday, Justice Department spokesman Patrick Rodenbush said the DEA “is no longer collecting bulk telephony metadata from U.S. service providers.” A DEA spokesman declined to comment.

HARVESTING DATA TO BATTLE CARTELS

The DEA began assembling a data-gathering program in the 1980s as the government searched for new ways to battle Colombian drug cartels. Neither informants nor undercover agents had been enough to crack the cartels’ infrastructure. So the agency’s intelligence arm turned its attention to the groups’ communication networks.

Calling records – often called “toll records” – offered one way to do that. Toll records are comparable to what appears on a phone bill – the numbers a person dialed, the date and time of the call, its duration and how it was paid for. By then, DEA agents had decades of experience gathering toll records of people they suspected were linked to drug trafficking, albeit one person at a time. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, officials said the agency had little way to make sense of the data their agents accumulated and almost no ability to use them to ferret out new cartel connections. Some agents used legal pads.

“We were drowning in toll records,” a former intelligence official said.

The DEA asked the Pentagon for help. The military responded with a pair of supercomputers and intelligence analysts who had experience tracking the communication patterns of Soviet military units. “What they discovered was that the incident of a communication was perhaps as important as the content of a communication,” a former Justice Department official said.

The military installed the supercomputers on the fifth floor of the DEA’s headquarters, across from a shopping mall in Arlington, Va.

The system they built ultimately allowed the drug agency to stitch together huge collections of data to map trafficking and money laundering networks both overseas and within the USA. It allowed agents to link the call records its agents gathered domestically with calling data the DEA and intelligence agencies had acquired outside the USA. (In some cases, officials said the DEA paid employees of foreign telecom firms for copies of call logs and subscriber lists.) And it eventually allowed agents to cross-reference all of that against investigative reports from the DEA, FBI and Customs Service.

The result “produced major international investigations that allowed us to take some big people,” Constantine said, though he said he could not identify particular cases.

In 1989, President George H.W. Bush proposed in his first prime-time address using “sophisticated intelligence-gathering and Defense Department technology” to disrupt drug trafficking. Three years later, when violent crime rates were at record highs, the drug agency intensified its intelligence push, launching a “kingpin strategy” to attack drug cartels by going after their finances, leadership and communication.

THE START OF BULK COLLECTION

In 1992, in the last months of Bush’s administration, Attorney General William Barr and his chief criminal prosecutor, Robert Mueller, gave the DEA permission to collect a much larger set of phone data to feed into that intelligence operation.

Instead of simply asking phone companies for records about calls made by people suspected of drug crimes, the Justice Department began ordering telephone companies to turn over lists of all phone calls from the USA to countries where the government determined drug traffickers operated, current and former officials said.

Barr and Mueller declined to comment, as did Barr’s deputy, George Terwilliger III, though Terwilliger said, “It has been apparent for a long time in both the law enforcement and intelligence worlds that there is a tremendous value and need to collect certain metadata to support legitimate investigations.”

The data collection was known within the agency as USTO (a play on the fact that it tracked calls from the U.S. to other countries).

The DEA obtained those records using administrative subpoenas that allow the agency to collect records “relevant or material to” federal drug investigations. Officials acknowledged it was an expansive interpretation of that authority but one that was not likely to be challenged because unlike search warrants, DEA subpoenas do not require a judge’s approval. “We knew we were stretching the definition,” a former official involved in the process said.

Officials said a few telephone companies were reluctant to provide so much information, but none challenged the subpoenas in court. Those that hesitated received letters from the Justice Department urging them to comply.

After Sprint executives expressed reservations in 1998, for example, Warren, the head of the department’s drug section, responded with a letter telling the company that “the initiative has been determined to be legally appropriate” and that turning over the call data was “appropriate and required by law.” The letter said the data would be used by authorities “to focus scarce investigative resources by means of sophisticated pattern and link analysis.”

The letter did not name other telecom firms providing records to the DEA but did tell executives that “the arrangement with Sprint being sought by the DEA is by no means unique to Sprint” and that “major service providers have been eager to support and assist law enforcement within appropriate bounds.” Former officials said the operation included records from AT&T and other telecom companies.

A spokesman for AT&T declined to comment. Sprint spokeswoman Stephanie Vinge Walsh said only that “we do comply with all state and federal laws regarding law enforcement subpoenas.”

Agents said that when the data collection began, they sought to limit its use mainly to drug investigations and turned away requests for access from the FBI and the NSA. They allowed searches of the data in terrorism cases, including the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people in 1995, helping to rule out theories linking the attack to foreign terrorists. They allowed even broader use after Sept. 11, 2001. The DEA’s public disclosure of its program in January came in the case of a man charged with violating U.S. export restrictions by trying to send electrical equipment to Iran.

At first, officials said the DEA gathered records only of calls to a handful of countries, focusing on Colombian drug cartels and their supply lines. Its reach grew quickly, and by the late 1990s, the DEA was logging “a massive number of calls,” said a former intelligence official who supervised the program.

Former officials said they could not recall the complete list of countries included in USTO, and the coverage changed over time. The Justice Department and DEA added countries to the list if officials could establish that they were home to outfits that produced or trafficked drugs or were involved in money laundering or other drug-related crimes.

The Justice Department warned when it disclosed the program in January that the list of countries should remain secret “to protect against any disruption to prospective law enforcement cooperation.”

At its peak, the operation gathered data on calls to 116 countries, an official involved in reviewing the list said. Two other officials said they did not recall the precise number of countries, but it was more than 100. That gave the collection a considerable sweep; the U.S. government recognizes a total of 195 countries.

At one time or another, officials said, the data collection covered most of the countries in Central and South America and the Caribbean, as well as others in western Africa, Europe and Asia. It included Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Italy, Mexico and Canada.

The DEA often — though not always — notified foreign governments it was collecting call records, in part to make sure its agents would not be expelled if the program was discovered. In some cases, the DEA provided some of that information to foreign law enforcement agencies to help them build their own investigations, officials said.

The DEA did not have a real-time connection to phone companies’ data; instead, the companies regularly provided copies of their call logs, first on computer disks and later over a private network. Agents who used the system said the numbers they saw were seldom more than a few days old.

The database did not include callers’ names or other identifying data. Officials said agents often were able to identify individuals associated with telephone numbers flagged by the analysis, either by cross-referencing them against other databases or by sending follow-up requests to the phone companies.

To keep the program secret, the DEA sought not to use the information as evidence in criminal prosecutions or in its justification for warrants or other searches. Instead, its Special Operations Division passed the data to field agents as tips to help them find new targets or focus existing investigations, a process approved by Justice Department lawyers. Many of those tips were classified because the DEA phone searches drew on other intelligence data.

That practice sparked a furor when the Reuters news agency reported in 2013 that the DEA trained agents to conceal the sources of those tips from judges and defense lawyers. Reuters said the tips were based on wiretaps, foreign intelligence and a DEA database of telephone calls gathered through routine subpoenas and search warrants.

As a result, “the government short-circuited any debate about the legality and wisdom of putting the call records of millions of innocent people in the hands of the DEA,” American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Patrick Toomey said.

A BLUEPRINT FOR BROADER SURVEILLANCE

The NSA began collecting its own data on Americans’ phone calls within months of Sept. 11, 2001, as a way to identify potential terrorists within the USA. At first, it did so without court approval. In 2006, after The New York Times and USA TODAY began reporting on the surveillance program, President George W. Bush’s administration brought it under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the government to use secret court orders to get access to records relevant to national security investigations. Unlike the DEA, the NSA also gathered logs of calls within the USA.

The similarities between the NSA program and the DEA operation established a decade earlier are striking – too much so to have been a coincidence, people familiar with the programs said. Former NSA general counsel Stewart Baker said, “It’s very hard to see (the DEA operation) as anything other than the precursor” to the NSA’s terrorist surveillance.

Both operations relied on an expansive interpretation of the word “relevant,” for example — one that allowed the government to collect vast amounts of information on the premise that some tiny fraction of it would be useful to investigators. Both used similar internal safeguards, requiring analysts to certify that they had “reasonable articulable suspicion” – a comparatively low legal threshold – that a phone number was linked to a drug or intelligence case before they could query the records.

“The foundation of the NSA program was a mirror image of what we were doing,” said a former Justice Department official who helped oversee the surveillance. That official said he and others briefed NSA lawyers several times on the particulars of their surveillance program. Two former DEA officials also said the NSA had been briefed on the operation. The NSA declined to comment.

There were also significant differences.

For one thing, DEA analysts queried their data collection far more often. The NSA said analysts searched its telephone database only about 300 times in 2012; DEA analysts routinely performed that many searches in a day, former officials said. Beyond that, NSA analysts must have approval from a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court each time they want to search their own collection of phone metadata, and they do not automatically cross-reference it with other intelligence files.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., then the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, complained last year to Holder that the DEA had been gathering phone data “in bulk” without judicial oversight. Officials said the DEA’s database was disclosed to judges only occasionally, in classified hearings.

For two decades, it was never reviewed by the Justice Department’s own inspector general, which told Congress it is now looking into the DEA’s bulk data collections.

A SMALLER SCALE COLLECTION

Holder pulled the plug on the phone data collection in September 2013.

That summer, Snowden leaked a remarkable series of classified documents detailing some of the government’s most prized surveillance secrets, including the NSA’s logging of domestic phone calls and Internet traffic. Reuters and The New York Times raised questions about the drug agency’s own access to phone records.

Officials said the Justice Department told the DEA that it had determined it could not continue both surveillance programs, particularly because part of its justification for sweeping NSA surveillance was that it served national security interests, not ordinary policing. Eight months after USTO was halted, for example, department lawyers defended the spy agency’s phone dragnet in court partly on the grounds that it “serves special governmental needs above and beyond normal law enforcement.”

Three months after USTO was shut down, a review panel commissioned by President Obama urged Congress to bar the NSA from gathering telephone data on Americans in bulk. Not long after that, Obama instructed the NSA to get permission from the surveillance court before querying its phone data collection, a step the drug agency never was required to take.

The DEA stopped searching USTO in September 2013. Not long after that, it purged the database.

“It was made abundantly clear that they couldn’t defend both programs,” a former Justice Department official said. Others said Holder’s message was more direct. “He said he didn’t think we should have that information,” a former DEA official said.

By then, agents said USTO was suffering from diminishing returns. More criminals — especially the sophisticated cartel operatives the agency targeted — were communicating on Internet messaging systems that are harder for law enforcement to track.

Still, the shutdown took a toll, officials said. “It has had a major impact on investigations,” one former DEA official said.

The DEA asked the Justice Department to restart the surveillance program in December 2013. It withdrew that request when agents came up with a new solution. Every day, the agency assembles a list of the telephone numbers its agents suspect may be tied to drug trafficking. Each day, it sends electronic subpoenas — sometimes listing more than a thousand numbers — to telephone companies seeking logs of international telephone calls linked to those numbers, two official familiar with the program said.

The data collection that results is more targeted but slower and more expensive. Agents said it takes a day or more to pull together communication profiles that used to take minutes.

The White House proposed a similar approach for the NSA’s telephone surveillance program, which is set to expire June 1. That approach would halt the NSA’s bulk data collection but would give the spy agency the power to force companies to turn over records linked to particular telephone numbers, subject to a court order.

In the Artic, NATO vs. Putin

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4/3/2015 – OFFUTT AIR FORCE BASE, Neb.  — Two B-52 Stratofortresses from the 5th Bomb Wing, Minot Air Force Base, N.D., and a pair from the 2nd Bomb Wing, Barksdale Air Force Base, La., completed today simultaneous, roundtrip sorties from their U.S. bases to the Arctic and North Sea regions, respectively.

The training mission, coined POLAR GROWL, allowed the aircrews to hone their navigation skills and enhanced their ability to work with Allied partners, while demonstrating U.S. Strategic Command capacity.

“These flights, demonstrating the credible and flexible ability of our strategic bomber force in internationally-recognized flight information regions, are the culmination of months of planning and coordination,” said Adm. Cecil D. Haney, U.S. Strategic Command commander. “They are one of many ways we demonstrate interoperability, compliance with national and international protocols and due regard for the safety of all aircraft sharing the air space.”

Each of the two legs of POLAR GROWL provided unique training opportunities, all while testing the bomber force’s command and control apparatus’ ability to support two synchronized flight paths. The bomber crews flying the North Sea route participated in dissimilar air intercept maneuvers with fighter aircraft flown by the Royal Canadian Air Force, the U.K.’s Royal Air Force and the Royal Netherlands Air Force. In addition to conducting dissimilar air intercept maneuvers with Royal Canadian Air Force fighters, bomber crews on the Arctic leg of the mission transited around the North Pole, providing the crews invaluable training in polar navigation.

“Today’s dynamic global security environment is an interdependent world where international partnerships are foundational,” Haney continued. “Exercises and operations such as these bomber flights enable and enhance relationships with our Allies and partners, and allow others to understand what capabilities U.S. Strategic Command brings to the equation.”

The U.S. regularly conducts combined training and theater security cooperation engagements with Allies and partners. The combined training provided in POLAR GROWL follows the participation of B-52s in NATO Exercise NOBLE JUSTIFICATION in October 2014 and the deployment of B-52s and B-2s to RAF Fairford, U.K., in June 2014, both of which provided occasions to train alongside U.S. Allies and partners.

“The long-range nature of the mission, coupled with the opportunity to interact, in real-time, with Allied aircraft was an invaluable experience that simply can’t be replicated out of the cockpit,” said Maj. Nathan Barnhart, 343rd Bomb Squadron instructor radar navigator. “Training like this ensures we are ready to respond to any and all mission directives across the globe.”

Flown in support of both U.S. European Command and U.S. Northern Command, POLAR GROWL was specifically designed to demonstrate U.S. commitment to Allies and enhancement of regional security, and not directed at any country.

Additionally, U.S. forces conduct all flights in accordance with the procedures outlined in the International Civil Aviation Organization international standards and recommended practices. By conducting flights that follow the ICAOs fundamental objectives, regional safety is enhanced to prevent any chance of misunderstanding.

The B-52 Stratofortress is capable of delivering large payload of precision nuclear or conventional ordnance over long ranges, while also providing decision makers the ability to rapidly project military power and generate decisive effects.

*** The United States and NATO is performing these operations because of Putin.
For the interactive map go here.
Russia has been ramping up its military presence in the Arctic, reopening abandoned Soviet-era bases, boosting its troop presence, building new facilities, and refurbishing infrastructure and air fields across a region that stretches from Russia’s borders with Norway and Finland to the seas off Alaska. The push reflects a new emphasis under President Vladimir Putin on the Arctic as a region of strategic importance that is also rich in oil and gas reserves.
The push comes as melting sea ice opens up those Arctic energy resources, prompting a scramble by Russia and other Arctic nations — Denmark, Canada, the United States, and Norway – to stake competing territorial claims. Mouse over and click each dot to see details of Russia’s Arctic expansion.
***
Putin is being quite shrewd while Jens Stoltenberg, the newly assigned Secretary General of NATO was real stupid.

Oslo (AFP) – Russian ships docked at what was once a secret Norwegian naval base in the Arctic have prompted concern from the NATO country’s former top military leaders, anxious about its resurgent eastern neighbour roaming nearby.

 

Norway’s jagged Arctic coastline has regained its strategic importance since tensions between Russia and NATO members have spiked to levels not seen since the fall of the Soviet Union.

The rocky relations have led some to criticise the shutting down of Olavsvern Naval Base, a massive complex burrowed into a mountain near the northern town of Tromsoe, that has been closed since 2009.

Shuttering it was driven by the then seemingly reduced threat from Moscow and its massive Northern Fleet based on Russia’s nearby Kola Peninsula.

“We sold the only base worthy of the name that we had up there. It’s pure madness,” former vice admiral Einar Skorgen, who commanded Norway’s northern forces, told AFP.

Skorgen and other critics say Norway has robbed itself of a crucial foothold in the far north, forcing its submarines to travel hundreds of extra miles from their bases to defend the region.

On top of that, three Russian ships have spent the winter docked deep within the mountain hideaway, once a closely guarded military facility.

“We are the only country along with Russia to have a permanent presence in the Barents Sea, where we share a common border. Obviously our navy should be stationed there, including our submarines,” Skorgen said.

“If the ships aren’t there where they are needed, they might as well be scrapped altogether.”

The way the base changed hands and ended up being rented to Russian research vessels — some of them seismic survey ships reportedly linked to state-owned energy giant Gazprom — has added further fuel to their anger.

When no buyers answered the armed forces’ initial advert on Norway’s version of eBay, a Norwegian businessman clinched the deal in 2013 for a mere 40 million kroner ($5 million, 4.6 million euros) — a steal given that NATO ploughed nearly 4 billion kroner into its construction.

“There are no longer any secrets surrounding this base,” said its new landlord Gunnar Wilhelmsen.

“Not since the military and NATO agreed to put it on sale over the Internet, along with photographs of every nook and cranny.”

– Historic ‘blunder’ –

Nonetheless, the potential for Russian military activity aboard research vessels has many military experts worried, particularly former top-ranking officers who are more prone to speaking their mind.

“Russia is a country where the state has a say over all commercial or semi-state business. It’s clear, very few people know what happens on these vessels,” said retired vice admiral Jan Reksten, formerly second in command of the Norwegian military.

He said the sale of Olavsvern was “a double loss” as “Norway’s armed forces lost an important base and now there are Russian vessels docked there.”

In an ironic twist to the tale, the decision to close the base was taken by the leftist government of Jens Stoltenberg, who has gone on to become NATO’s current secretary general and who has warned countries not to lower their guard when it comes to Russia.

Kjell-Ola Kleiven, a blogger writing on security issues in Norway, calls the affair the “biggest blunder in recent history” in an oil-rich country which boasts the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund.

“With 7,000 billion kroner in the bank,” he wrote, “you would have thought that the Norwegian nation had the means and savvy to retain ownership of Olavsvern base.”

Despite the protests, Norway’s current right-wing government has shown no signs of reversing the decision made by its predecessors.

“There are no plans to re-establish military installations in Olavsvern,” Audun Halvorsen, political advisor to the defence minister, told AFP in an email.

“The owner of the site can use it as he sees fit and the armed forces do not have the authority to impose restrictions, nor any mandate to monitor civilian ships that dock there,” he added.

“Any suspected irregular activity is a matter for the police and legal authorities.”

Obama Advisor Pro Iran Lobby, Not Valerie

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Obama Adviser on Iran Worked for Pro-Regime Lobby

The White House released a list of its high-ranking officials who took part in a video conference with President Obama late Tuesday. Among them appears Sahar Nowrouzzadeh, who has formerly worked for the National Iranian-American Council.

The White House brief, which was disclosed by The Daily Beast, listed Sahar Nowrouzzadeh as the National Security Council Director for Iran. Nowrouzzadeh appears to be a former employee of the alleged pro-Tehran regime lobbying group, NIAC (National Iranian-American Council).

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Breitbart News has found that a person with the same name has previously written several publications on behalf of NIAC. According to what appears to be her LinkedIn account, Nowrouzzadeh became an analyst for the Department of Defense in 2005 before moving her way up to the National Security Council in 2014.
A NIAC profile from 2007 reveals that Sahar Nowrouzzadeh appears to be the same person as the one who is currently the NSC Director for Iran. The profiles indicate that she had the same double major and attended the same university (George Washington).

Critics have alleged that NIAC is a lobby for the current Iranian dictatorship under Ayatollah Khamenei. A dissident journalist revealed recently that NIAC’s president and founder, Trita Parsi, has maintained a years-long relationship with Iranian Foreign Minister, Javad Zarif.

NIAC was established in 1999, when founder Trita Parsi attended a conference in Cyprus that was held under the auspices of the Iranian regime. During the conference, Parsi reportedly laid out his plan to introduce a pro-regime lobbying group to allegedly counteract the influence of America’s pro-Israel and anti-Tehran regime advocacy groups.

NIAC has been investing heavily in attempts to influence the talks in favor of an agreement with the state sponsor of terror. In recent days, its director, Trita Parsi, has been spotted having amiable conversation with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s brother.

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The possible revelations about the NSC Director’s apparent past with the alleged pro-regime group come as the U.S. has reportedly struck an agreement with Iran and the rest of the P5+1 world powers on Tehran’s nuclear weapons program.
***
So what else is not being addressed in the negotiations?
Experts: Iran Housing Nuke Materials in North Korea, Syria

LAUSANNE, Switzerland — A top State Department official on Monday dismissed reports that Iran may be hiding key nuclear-related assets in North Korea and implied that she was unaware of the possibility, despite the publication this weekend of several articles by top analysts expressing alarm at the extent of nuclear cooperation between Tehran and Pyongyang.

Marie Harf, a spokeswoman for the State Department, dismissed as “bizarre” the reports, which described the transfer of enriched uranium and ballistic missile technology back and forth between the two rogue regimes.

The existence of an illicit Iranian nuclear infrastructure outside of the Islamic Republic’s borders would gut a nuclear deal that the administration has vowed to advance by Tuesday, according to these experts and others.

If Iran is not forced to disclose the full extent and nature of its outside nuclear work to the United States, there is virtually no avenue to guarantee that it is living up to its promises made in the negotiating room, according to multiple experts and sources in Europe apprised of the ongoing talks.

Gordon Chang, a North Korea expert who has written in recent days about Iran’s possible “secret program” there, described the State Department’s dismissal of these reports as naïve.

“Let me see if I get this straight: The country with the world’s most highly developed technical intelligence capabilities does not know what has been in open sources for years?” Chang said. “No wonder North Korea transfers nuclear weapons technology to Iran and others with impunity.”

“The North Koreans could go on CNN and say, ‘Hey, Secretary Kerry, we’re selling the bomb to Iran,’ and the State Department would still say they know nothing about it,” Chang said. “No wonder we’re in such trouble.”

Other Iranian experts specializing in the country’s military workings also have raised recent questions about Tehran’s collaboration with North Korea.

Ali Alfoneh and Reuel Marc Gerecht, both senior fellows at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), have revealed that a nuclear reactor destroyed in Syria in 2007 by Israel was likely a North Korean-backed Iranian project.

Gerecht told the Free Beacon in a follow-up interview that key issues regarding Iran’s past military work and outside collaboration are being ignored in the negotiating room as diplomats rush to secure a tentative deal by Tuesday night.

“It certainly appears that the administration has backed away from [previous military dimensions] questions,” Gerecht said. “The plan appears to be to let the [International Atomic Energy Agency] continue its so far fruitless effort to gain access to sensitive sites, personnel, and paperwork, but to keep these questions out of the talks.”

“The administration is doing this because it fears the Iranians would walk out,” he added. “Any military work revealed by the Iranians would prove the Supreme Leader and [President] Rouhani liars.

Despite concerns from countries such a France over the issue, the United States has attempted to accommodate Iran, Gerecht said.

“The White House wants to believe that monitoring of known sites will be sufficient. It’s a bit mystifying given the Iranian track record and the CIA’s longstanding inability to penetrate the nuclear-weapons program (it’s just too hard of a target to do this reliably),” he explained. “But since they fear a breakdown, they bend their credulity in Iran’s favor. This has been the story of the negotiations from the beginning.”

Alfoneh also told the Free Beacon that Iran should be pressed by the United States to disclose the full extent of its nuclear relationship with North Korea.

“I certainly think the Islamic Republic should come clean concerning its past record of nuclear activities: Did the Islamic Republic ever try to build a nuclear weapon? If not, how are we to understand the opaque references to Tehran-Pyongyang nuclear cooperation in the 1990s?” Alfoneh said.

“As long as the Islamic Republic does not provide a clear record of its nuclear activities in the 1980s and 1990s, and as long as we do not know the full scope of Tehran-Pyongyang nuclear cooperation, there is always the risk of the two states renewing that cooperation, which in turn would jeopardize any agreement the Islamic Republic and the P5+1 Group may reach,” he said.

Another potential complication includes the ability of international inspectors to discern the extent of Iran’s nuclear work in Syria.

“Syria’s current chaos makes it virtually impossible for inspectors to do their job even if the Syrians were compliant,” according to Emanuele Ottolenghi, a onetime advisor to foreign ministries in Europe.

There is no way to determine whether Syria is housing any other nuclear sites on behalf of the Iranian, according to Ottolenghi, another senior fellow at FDD.

“Syria has covered up its nuclear activities after the 2007 [Israeli Air Force] raid on Deir al-Azour,” he said. “After four years of inconclusive efforts, the [International Atomic Energy Agency] ended up deferring the issue to the [United Nations Security Council] after declaring Syria in non-compliance.”

Hillary’s Server, a Rod Serling Drama

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A hacker source employed a tool called “The Harvester” to search a number of data sources to look for references to the domain name Clintonemail.com. The source says it appears Clinton established multiple email addresses, including hdr@clintonemail.com, hdr18@clintonemail.com, hdr19@clintonemail.com, hdr20@clintonemail.com, and hrd21@clintonemail.com.

Other email addresses include h.clinton@clintonemail.com, Hillary@clintonemail.com, contact@clintonemail.com, and mau_suit@clintonemail.com.

It’s not clear whether Clinton used any or all of these email addresses. It’s also unclear whether her aides used them.

The Benghazi Panel: A House panel Tuesday formally requested Hillary Clinton to testify about the private server and email account she used while serving as secretary of state.

Rep. Trey Gowdy, chairman of the Select Committee on Benghazi, sent a request to Clinton’s personal attorney, David E. Kendall, requesting that Clinton appear before the committee no later than May 1 for a transcribed interview about the server and email.

The request comes after Kendall told Gowdy that the server had been wiped clean and that it would be impossible to recover the 30,000 emails Clinton deleted last year.

Gowdy, in his request to Kendall, also asked Clinton to “reconsider” her refusal to turn over the server to a neutral third party, which he called “highly unusual, if not unprecedented.” Gowdy’s letter to Hillary’s lawyer is here:

There is more breaking today:

The Associated Press reported today that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also used an iPad to send emails from her private account. This appears to undermine Clinton’s initial explanation that her decision to use a private email server was motivated by her desire to carry a single device (a BlackBerry).

Emails obtained by the AP show that Clinton occasionally mixed up personal correspondence with work-related matters. For example, Clinton once responded to an email about drone strikes in Pakistan from senior aide Huma Abedin with a series of questions about interior decorating.

The Associated Press reported today that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also used an iPad to send emails from her private account. This appears to undermine Clinton’s initial explanation that her decision to use a private email server was motivated by her desire to carry a single device (a BlackBerry).

Emails obtained by the AP show that Clinton occasionally mixed up personal correspondence with work-related matters. For example, Clinton once responded to an email about drone strikes in Pakistan from senior aide Huma Abedin with a series of questions about interior decorating.

Hillary emailSo, now new questions need to be asked.

1. How many at State knew about the alias server?

2. Did the Accountability Review Board led by Pickering know about the offsite server and non-governmental email accounts?

3. Who decided where to apply the countless FOIA requests for Benghazi documents and why was the private server not included?

4. Patrick Kennedy, the Deputy Secretary of State, clearly omitted the procedures and government document laws with regard to Hillary, question is did she demand he look the other way and or why did he not report this or admit the condition during his congressional testimony?

5. With each unique email account on that server, were they assigned to different users at State, or in Hillary’s private spy-network or all of the above?

6. Is the White House about to give executive privilege to Hillary’s server and emails?

7. Is the Department of Justice taking over cases to represent some of the complicit government employees in the Hillary caper?

There is also something called the Executive Secretariat at the State Department, at it appears by description, it was used excessively by Hillary and her team. Where are those emails? Did the Secretariat Office get some kind of exemption from subpoenas and FOIA requests?

The Executive Secretariat (S/ES), comprised of the Executive Secretary and four Deputy Executive Secretaries, is responsible for coordination of the work of the Department internally, serving as the liaison between the Department’s bureaus and the offices of the Secretary, Deputy Secretary, and Under Secretaries. It also handles the Department’s relations with the White House, National Security Council, and other Cabinet agencies.

The Secretariat Staff (S/ES-S) works with the various offices of the Department in drafting and clearing written materials for the Secretary, Deputy Secretary, and Under Secretary for Political Affairs. This staff also is responsible for taking care of advance preparations for the Secretary’s official trips — domestic and international — and staffing the “mobile office” and keeping the Secretary’s schedule on track during the trip.
The Operations Center (S/ES-O) is the Secretary’s and the Department’s communications and crisis management center. Working 24 hours a day, the Operations Center monitors world events, prepares briefings for the Secretary and other Department principals, and facilitates communication between the Department and the rest of the world. The Operations Center also coordinates the Department’s response to crises and supports task forces, monitoring groups, and other crisis-related activities.

 

What About the P5+1 and Iran/North Korea

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If you are inclined to read about the technical cooperation agreement between North Korea and Iran go here.

 

Ed Schroeder’s Military Intelligence Report: Does Iran Have Secret Nukes in North Korea?

In October 2012, Iran began stationing personnel at a military base in North Korea, in a mountainous area close to the Chinese border. The Iranians, from the Ministry of Defense and associated firms, reportedly are working on both missiles and nuclear weapons. Ahmed Vahidi, Tehran’s minister of defense at the time,denied sending people to the North, but the unconfirmed dispatches make sense in light of the two states announcing a technical cooperation pact the preceding month.

The P5+1—the five permanent members of the Security Council and Germany—appear determined, before their self-imposed March 31 deadline, to ink a deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran regarding its nuclear energy program, which is surely a cover for a wide-ranging weapons effort. The international community wants the preliminary arrangement now under discussion, referred to as a “framework agreement,” to ensure that the country remains at least one year away from being able to produce an atomic device.

The P5+1 negotiators believe they can do that by monitoring Tehran’s centrifuges—supersonic-speed machines that separate uranium gas into different isotopes and upgrade the potent stuff to weapons-grade purity—and thereby keep track of its total stock of fissile material.

The negotiators from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China are trying to get Tehran to adhere to the Additional Protocol, which allows anytime, anyplace inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog. If Iran agrees to the IAEA’s intrusive inspections, proponents of the deal will claim a major breakthrough, arguing for instance that Iran will not be able to hide centrifuges in undisclosed locations.

There were so many North Korean nuclear and missile scientists, specialists, and technicians at Iran’s facilities that they took over their own coastal resort there.

But no inspections of Iranian sites will solve a fundamental issue: As can be seen from the North Korean base housing Tehran’s weapons specialists, Iran is only one part of a nuclear weapons effort spanning the Asian continent. North Korea, now the world’s proliferation superstar, is a participant. China, once the mastermind, may still be a co-conspirator. Inspections inside the borders of Iran, therefore, will not give the international community the assurance it needs.

The cross-border nuclear trade is substantial enough to be called a “program.” Larry Niksch of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., estimates that the North’s proceeds from this trade with Iran are “between $1.5 billion and $2.0 billion annually.” A portion of this amount is related to missiles and miscellaneous items, the rest derived from building Tehran’s nuclear capabilities.

Iran has bought a lot with its money. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, thought to be Tehran’s chief nuclear scientist, was almost certainly in North Korea at Punggye-ri in February 2013 to witness Pyongyang’s third atomic test. Reports put Iranian technicians on hand at the site for the first two detonations as well.

The North Koreans have also sold Iran material for bomb cores, perhaps even weapons-grade uranium. The Telegraph reported that in 2002 a barrel of North Korean uranium cracked open and contaminated the tarmac of the new Tehran airport.

In addition, the Kim Jong Un  regime appears to have helped the Islamic Republic on its other pathway to the bomb. In 2013, Meir Dagan, a former Mossad director,charged the North with providing assistance to Iran’s plutonium reactor.

The relationship between the two regimes has been long-lasting. Hundreds of North Koreans have worked at about 10 nuclear and missile facilities in Iran. There were so many nuclear and missile scientists, specialists, and technicians that they took over their own coastal resort there, according to Henry Sokolski,  the proliferation maven, writing in 2003.

Even if Iran today were to agree to adhere to the Additional Protocol, it could still continue developing its bomb in North Korea, conducting research there or buying North Korean technology and plans. And as North Korean centrifuges spin in both known and hidden locations, the Kim regime will have a bigger stock of uranium to sell to the Iranians for their warheads. With the removal of sanctions, as the P5+1 is contemplating, Iran will have the cash to accelerate the building of its nuclear arsenal.

So while the international community inspects Iranian facilities pursuant to a framework deal, the Iranians could be busy assembling the components for a bomb elsewhere. In other words, they will be one day away from a bomb—the flight time from Pyongyang to Tehran—not one year as American and other policymakers hope.

The North Koreans are not the only contributors to the Iranian atom bomb. Iran got its first centrifuges from Pakistan, and Pakistan’s program was an offshoot from the Chinese one.

Some argue that China proliferated nuclear weapons through the infamous black market ring run by Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan. There is no open source proof of that contention, but Beijing did nothing while Khan merchandised Chinese parts, plans, and knowhow—its most sensitive technology—from the capital of one of its closest allies. Moreover, Beijing did its best to protect the smuggler when Washington rolled up his network in the early part of last decade. The Chinese, for instance, supported General Pervez Musharraf’s controversial decision to end prematurely his government’s inquiry, which avoided exposing Beijing’s rumored involvement with Khan’s activities.

And there are circumstances suggesting that Beijing, around the time of Khan’s confession and immediate pardon in 2004, took over his proliferation role directly, boldly transferring materials and equipment straight to Iran. For example, in November 2003 the staff of the IAEA had fingered China as one of the sources of equipment used in Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons effort. And as reported in July 2007 by The Wall Street Journal, the State Department had lodged formal protests with Beijing about Chinese enterprises violating Security Council resolutions by exporting to Tehran items that could be used for building atomic weapons.

Since then, there have been continual reports of transfers by Chinese enterprises to Iran in violation of international treaties and U.N. rules. Chinese entities have been implicated in shipments of maraging steel, ring-shaped magnets, and valves and vacuum gauges, all apparently headed to Iran’s atom facilities. In March 2011, police in Port Klang seized two containers from a ship bound to Iran from China. Malaysian authorities discovered that goods passed off as “used for liquid mixing or storage” were actually components for potential atomic weapons.

In the last few years, there has been an apparent decline in Chinese shipments to Iran. Beijing could be reacting to American pressure to end the trade, but there are more worrying explanations. First, it’s possible that, after decades of direct and indirect illicit transfers, China has already supplied most of what Iran needs to construct a weapon. Second, Beijing may be letting Pyongyang assume the leading proliferation role. After all, the shadowy Fakhrizadeh was reported to have traveled through China on his way to North Korea to observe the North’s third nuclear test.

Fakhrizadeh’s passage through China—probably Beijing’s airport—suggests that China may not have abandoned its “managed proliferation.” In the past, China’s proxy for this deadly trade was Pakistan. Then it was China’s only formal ally, North Korea. In both cases, Chinese policymakers intended to benefit Iran.

In a theoretical sense, there is nothing wrong with an accommodation with the Islamic Republic over nukes, yet there is no point in signing a deal with just one arm of a multi-nation weapons effort. That’s why the P5+1 needs to know what is going on at that isolated military base in the mountains of North Korea. And perhaps others as well.