(July 9) — A former Russian intelligence officer who may have provided information that helped uncover two of the worst spies in U.S. history — Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames — is among the four Russians swapped for 10 sleeper agents in an elaborate Cold War-style spy swap today.
Preparation for biggest spy swap since Cold War began weeks before
By Karen DeYoung
President Obama's national security team spent weeks before the arrest of 10 Russian spies preparing for their takedown and assembling a list of prisoners Moscow might be willing to trade for the agents, senior administration officials said Friday.
WOLF BLITZER: But now to a striking gap in America’s homeland security. It’s been over a month since President Obama named his choice to become the new director of National Intelligence, but James Clapper still hasn’t been confirmed for the job and there is no telling when or if he will be. Our Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr is working the story for us.
Barbara, what’s going on here?
BARBARA STARR: Well, you know, Wolf, Russian spy swaps, al Qaeda at the door step, and no director of National Intelligence in this country, a lot of concerns about really who is minding the store.
Summer time confirmation hearings for General David Petraeus to run the war in Afghanistan and Elena Kagan to join the Supreme Court quickly planned and carried out. But there’s another critical nomination out there that’s been anything but.
China-Pakistan: China and Pakistan signed four memorandums of understanding in health, power generation and the construction of two major highways in Gilgit-Baltistan, The Associated Press of Pakistan reported 9 July.
According to the road construction agreements, China will construct the 165-kilometer (103-mile) Jaglot-Skardu road and the 135-kilometer (84-mile) Thakot-Sazin road. The projects will cost $965 million with 85 percent financing by China and 15 percent by Pakistan. The memorandums were signed after Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari addressed the Pak-China Economic Cooperation Forum.
The significance of the road agreements is that the location of the roads is in the Himalayas, the most rugged regions of Pakistan that adjoin China. They will facilitate increased contacts to China. . It is unusual for there to be published in one week multiple new events about infrastructure projects in the same remote region of the Himalayas. It makes one suspect that the Chinese have found valuable mineral deposits about which they are not talking in public.
They also have a military dimension because they will improve the lines of communication in the far north of Pakistan which was the setting for the Kargil War in 1999.
The following three pieces comprise a logical tutorial for any President desiring to get a grip on reality in spite of being trapped in a bad system and surrounded by a combination of partisan apparatchiks who are themselves completely out of touch with reality; or professional intelligence and military officers that have lost touch with their responsibility for assuring “the truth at any cost.” It is time we stop lying to ourselves and put this country back together with reality-based decision-making in the context of balanced sustainable budget.
ROBERT D. STEELE is a retired Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer and also qualified as an S-1/Adjutant, with service at all levels from platoon to Service Headquarters. After four years active duty (the balance in the Individual Ready Reserve) and a decade in the clandestine service of the Central Intelligence Agency (including three tours overseas focused on terrorist and extremist targets), he resigned from the CIA to accept a Marine Corps invitation to be the senior civilian responsible for creating the Marine Corps Intelligence Center (today a Command) and served as the study directory for the flagship study, Overview of Planning and Programming Factors for Expeditionary Operations in the Third World. He resigned from the Marine Corps civil service in 1993 to lead the modern Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) revolution, and is the author of the DIA, NATO, and SOF OSINT Handbooks, as well as personally responsible for training 7,500 officers from 66 countries. His latest book, INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability, outlines a course of action for creating public intelligence in the public interest across all organizations, beginning with the United Nations. Mr. Steele founded OSS.Net, Inc. and Earth Intelligence Network, the latter a 501c3 public charity, and is the foremost proponent for a Swedish concept enhancing Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, and Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making (M4IS2). Mr. Steele holds graduate degrees in international relations and public administration from Lehigh University and the University of Oklahoma. He has also earned a certificate in intelligence policy from Harvard University and a diploma in defense studies from the Naval War College.
SSI Publications by Mr. Robert D. Steele
EDIT: None of these are “handbooks” in the classical sense of the word, but all are strategic guides that set the standard for holistic approaches to human intelligence, information operations, and analytic intelligence.
The author explores the centrality of Human Intelligence in meeting the needs of the U.S. Army, as well as the Department of Defense, and the whole of government, for relevant information and tailored intelligence essential to creating a national security strategy; for defining whole of government policies that work in harmony; for acquisition of the right capabilities at the right price in time to be useful; and for operations, both local and global.
In the Age of Information, the primary source of National Power is information that has been converted into actionable intelligence or usable knowledge. Information Operations is the critical ingredient in early warning, peacekeeping, stabilization & reconstruction, and homeland defense.
This monograph is the third in the Strategic Studies Institute's “Studies in Asymmetry” Series. In it, the author examines two paradigm shifts–one in relation to the threat and a second in relation to intelligence methods– while offering a new model for threat analysis and a new model for intelligence operations in support to policy, acquisition, and command engaged in nontraditional asymmetric
BAGHDAD — An American soldier in Iraq who was arrested on charges of leaking a video of a deadly American helicopter attack here in 2007 has also been charged with downloading more than 150,000 highly classified diplomatic cables that could, if made public, reveal the inner workings of American embassies around the world, the military here announced Tuesday.
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
BAGHDAD — The military said Tuesday that it has charged an Army intelligence analyst in connection with the leak of a controversial video and the downloading and transfer of classified State Department cables, in a case that is likely to further deter would-be whistleblowers.
Click on headlines to read each full story.
Phi Beta Iota: PFC Manning swore an oath to defend the Constitutions, not the chain of command and not the secrecy of immoral, illegal, and unaffordable policies that are funded by the U.S. taxpayer and done “in our name” but not at all in our interest. Sunshine is the best disinfectant.
His charge sheet rests on “discrediting the Armed Forces” which is laughable–it is the behavior of our leaders that is a discredit to all of America; and on subverting “good order and discipline.” His behavior in revealing the webs of deceit and incompetence that characterize our military, our “diplomats,” and our spies is precisely what America needs in order to re-establish good order and discipline in harmony with our Constitution.
America needs MORE leaks, MORE “misbehavior,” because we now suffer a “system” that is so far removed from the Founding Fathers' vision, and so deeply divorced from the principles enshrined in our Constitution, that we must, without question, consider PFC Manning to be a “just man” whose best place in a time of injustice is to be in jail as an example to us all. BRAVO ZULU for courage and intelligence in the face of the enemy–he is us. If the lawyer for the defense has any integrity at all, this will be a public jury trial and the PFC will walk free, as he should. It's time to trash this pathological system and get back to the basics of freedom and a foreign policy of commerce and peace.
Civil Disobedience (Resistance to Civil Government) is an essay by Henry David Thoreau that was first published in 1849. It argues that people should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that people have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice. Thoreau was motivated in part by his disgust with slavery and the Mexican-American War.
Resistance also served as part of Thoreau's metaphor which compared the government to a machine, and said that when the machine was working injustice it was the duty of conscientious citizens to be “a counter friction” (i.e., a resistance) “to stop the machine”.
As the end game begins for NATO and the US in Afghanistan, and as the potential mineral wealth of that unhappy land is revealed, one confronts despair when contemplating the fate of the Afghans. With the Taliban poised to move once more into the coming power vacuum and exploit a resurgent drug trade as well as establish a protection racket parasitic to the future mining industry, one looks for some glimmer of hope for the Afghan people.
After all, Afghanistan has never been conquered except by the Mongols. The much decentralized, tribal society that makes them vulnerable to decentralized gang rule has confounded each centralized invader who attempted to bring about their own version of order. Is there hope that the Afghan people will be able to expel the Taliban as they expelled the others? After all, the first government of the Taliban was not overthrown by the Afghans themselves, but by military invasion with the passive consent of the Afghan people.
Now, with the outside military forces beginning their final period in-country, and with little if any evidence of a viable government staffed by officials who will not bolt the country with their pockets stuffed, what can give the ordinary Afghans the means to resist as they have resisted other occupations?
The answer, I believe, lies in the essence of government. Government operates by communication. People in government gather, refine, transmit information, both from the populace to the seat of power and in reverse after policies and laws are defined based upon the information gathered. People have political power to the extent that they are included in this process of information flow to the exclusion of others.
