An Internecine Intelligence Intrigue

or, Two Halves of the Same Problem

[Image: the front page of James Bamford’s first effort to describe the NSA.]

Published: 2023-03-10

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A Lost Restructure

In 1947 the USA passed the National Security Act, a far reaching statue which re-created and expanded the USA's intelligence services. Among the agencies created were the CIA and the NSA. Both are meant to be extra-territorial and both have inherent contradictions in their charter.

The Central Intelligence Agency was meant to be a publically funded intelligence service for the executive branch of government reporting to its head, the President. A small clause states that the CIA may need to, from time to time, perform actions as chosen by the president. This little clause creates the operations wing, as opposed to the analysis wing. The operations wing is essentially a re-naming of the Organisataion of Special Services, the OSS, which performed wonderfully for the USA during WWII. Having returned in peace time, their question was, do you still need us? This little clause answered, yes, and you'll be formally incorporated into this new agency.

The NSA's charter is essentially signals intelligence. Back in 1947 there was no "digital", the signals are of many types from radio to paper. Any decent foreign intelligence service will use cryptography to mask the meaning of its signals and/or the use of steganography to hide its signals in plain sight. The NSA's primary job was to decrypt or reveal this foreign communication and to establish secure communications services for branches of the executive. This second mission is essentially of defence whereas the initial is of offence.

Thus, both agencies are internally conflicted in their charter, and are also essentially linked. The conflicts are that both agencies are similarly offensive and defensive. The inter-link is that the CIA needs the NSA's services both for access to foreign "secret" information and the NSA's abilities to issue secure communications. I hope you can see where this leads.

To make matters worse, any senior bureaucrat will attempt to increase the budget of the agency they run to demonstrate their success to their workforce. Thus, the CIA and NSA are constantly competing for congressional funding and arguing over which greyer areas between them belong to each agency.

By the time that we reach the 21st Century the USA claims to have somewhere between 13 and 17 "intelligence agencies" all of which are theoretically under the purview of the Director of National Intelligence. Of the rest of these agencies the most powerful, or at least obvious, is the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), but also includes other lesser known agencies like the National Reconaissance Office. The NRO is essentailly responsible for the USA's satellite spying systems.

One should not forget that the USA has now 5 branches of the military, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and "Space", each of which will also have an intelligence section.

One of the public narratives for why it was that the USA could not prevent the "attacks" of 9/11 is that there was insufficient communications between its existing intelligence agencies. Most commonly fingered are failings between the leading three agencies of the FBI, CIA and NSA. The USA government's response to this "intelligence failure" was to create yet another "intelligence agency", the Department of Homeland Security, and to create "fusion centers" wherein intelligence from these sprawling intelligences services could be exchanged.

A sign of the nature of the dysfunction of the USA government is that it saw the creation of yet another intelligence agency as the solution to a failure of its intelligence agencies to actually do their job. As we know, the public discourse, or narrative, does not match reality or political calculation.

A magnificent advance in cryptography had been published in 1976 by Diffie and Helman, "New Directions in Cryptography". This paper is the foundation for all modern cryptogrphy. Due to the advent of quantum computing the most recent advances in cryptography, resistent to attacks from this new form of computing, are called post-Quantum cryptography. They have yet to be used in public infrastructure as their computational expense far exceeds that of existing work. There is a lead time for novel ciphers, the encoding of their algrothims into semi-conductor circuits.

James Bamford

Mr. Bamford first came to some prominence for his book "Puzzle Palace". It was the first book to examine in depth the NSA, an agency so unknown at the time that its acronym was often translated as "No Such Agency". He has since written many more volumes on USA intelligence agencies.

In a recent interveiw with Scott Horton they discuss intelligence failures and ask why there is almost no accountability for them? The two discuss a whole sequence of these "failures" or failures to account for their failures. We begin with Michael Hayden's fabrication of evidence for "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq. It was this effort to fix fabricated facts to the policy which lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people and refugee flows of millions more in Iraq due to the USA instigated war. Needless to say, Hayden was not reprimanded but promoted. At a similar time, the NSA had turned its surveillance tools from "the rest of the world" to its citizens which is completely illegal. When asked about this by Senator Ron Wyden, under oath, James Clapper denied that the NSA was doing this to "millions of Americans". The Snowden relevalations which came soon thereafter exposed his lie. Indeed, William Binney, a previous Technical Director of the NSA, and one of the USA's best cryptanalysts had exposed the fraud used within the NSA to develop a parallel surveillance system at exhorbitant expense to the one he had already developed. His existing system, Thin Thread, contained protections against spying on residents, that the new more expensive “Trailblazer” did not. In his effort to expose the fraud, waste and abuse he was supported by other senior members of the NSA, including Thomas Drake, and others like congressional staffer Diane Roarke.

The discussion between Horton and Bamford meanaders around the RussiaGate fabrication and notes that there were two UAE agents infested within the Clinton campaign as the FBI and later CIA ran around looking for non-existant Russian agents in the Trump campaign. An interesting aside is the failed and nasty persecution of Russian citizen Maria Butina as an attempt to justify the whole lie.

The most interesting annecdote from the interview for your author was the story of an attempted coup in Montenegro. I had never heard of this, though consider myself reasonably well informed on these matters. (Gulp)

The story begins after the fracture of Yugoslavia due to the NATO war against the Serbian component of Yugoslavia which was designed to break up this previously very successful socialist nation. Montenegro was one of the micro-states created following the dissolution of Yugoslavia. It possesses land on the coast of the Adriatic, a part of the Mediterranean. During its early years, Montenegro had the same challenge which was being considered by Ukraine in the first decade of the 21st Century: to join NATO, to be neutral, or to align with Russia? Bamford relates that Russia wished to build a naval port on the Montenegran coast. Warm water ports are rare for Russia. She has but one on her territory in Sevastopol (though this is in dispute over the war in Ukraine). Russia's other warm port is in Tartus, a leased territory from Syria, just as Sevastopol was leased from Ukraine.

The government in Montenegro took the choice to join NATO which dashed Russia's desire for a naval port. Bamford claims that Russian President Putin was so outraged by this that he instructed his secret services to run a coup d'etat against the government. Bamford claims that one of his sources, and I believe Bamford, was the hit-man to assassinate the Montenegran Prime Minister.

We now meet the meat and potatoes of the story. When running a coup d'etat it is wise to have an evacuation team, a group that can provide transport to conspirators to leave the jurisdiction which might be really annoyed about the treasonous effort. The Russian coordinated group hired an evacuation squad which was composed of 3 ex-FBI agents and an ex-CIA agent. This in itself is difficult to believe. It becomes believable having already understood the extensive failures of USA counter-intelligence. Why not also for the Russians?

After the failed coup attempt, the Montenegrans held a court trial of various individuals involved. The court transcript, translated into English, is the core evidence, along with information from the potential assassin, of Bamford's description of the failed coup. The Montenegrans had issued an Interpol arrest warrant for these four ex-intelligence USA citizens. One of them was identified in Cyprus though was allowed to travel back to the USA. Bamford's alarm is that upon return to the USA none of these ex-intel operatives are troubled for their involvement, and one must assume payment for, participating in this coup d'etat attempt on what had become a USA ally, Montenegro.

Mr. Bamford is a journalist of many decades. Intelligence is his beat. He has trawled over who knows how many pages of the Montenegran court transcripts and has a source he claims to be an operative inside the coup. I ask you to think about this story. Assume what Bamford is describing.

What is going on? Why is this so under-reported? How could the Russians be so stupid as to hire ex-FBI and ex-CIA persons as their "run-away team"? Why are the USA ex-operatives not prosecuted or even investigated (apart from one interview) by the USA authorities?

I have no answers for you. I ask you to think. I offer a few guiding principles.

Always prefer incompetence over an organised conspiracy. I consider this the Occam's Razor of analysis. Organized conspiracies are real. They happen all the time. So too does incompetence; it just happens to be more common. Next, consider the tension between personnal aggrandizement and applying principle. If doing nothing requires no effort and one is to be rewarded, why engage in the risk one exposes oneself to when fighting for a principle? Then consider the transition between an internal investigation and a public court. There are different rules and a loss of control. Recall, the courts are not the executive, nor the legislative, but a theoretically independent branch of government. They have their own people, their own ideology, and their own rules of procedure.

If one believes in the "separation of powers", the separation of the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government, I ask which are the more accountable? Via which branch can one hope for redress of greivence by another?

Where does the secrecy lie?

Sources

1/27/23 James Bamford on the Many Failures of American Counterintelligence, Scott Horton interviews James Bamford, Scott Horton Show, 2023-01-27

• Download

The Puzzle Palace, INSIDE AMERICA'S MOST SECRET INTELLIGENCE ORGANIZATION, James Bamford, 1983,09-23

New Directions in Cryptography, Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Helman, 1976

Index of formal scientific papers, D. J. Bernstein, his website

William Binney & VIPS at Symphony Space, an interview with William Binney, Ray McGovern and Diane Roark, Art Murphy, uploaded 2017-11-14

Culture

NENA | 99 Red Balloons [1984] (Official HD Music Video), NENA, their youtube channel, uploaded 2021-04-21 (Note the date)

But, first, the German version:

Then, their English version:

All credit is to Caitlin Johnstone’s article on the insanity of the recent “balloon” story.

Blow it up?

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