War Without End

Alpha

I just heard James Bamford (author of 'Body of Secrets' which also includes a chapter on the USS Liberty cover-up) interviewed on MSNBC about his new 'Pretext for War' book as it is about how the war in Iraq was for the Likud in Israel:

Available on Amazon - click here

Alpha

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14202-2004Jun3.html

washingtonpost.com > Nation > National Security > Espionage

A critic of Washington's intelligence world turns his sights on the Iraq invasion. Reviewed by Douglas Farah
Sunday, June 6, 2004; Page BW03 A PRETEXT FOR WAR

9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies

By James Bamford

Doubleday. 420 pp. $26.95

As debate continues to rage about the flaws in the American occupation of Iraq, James Bamford takes a fresh look at the run-up to the 2003 conflict, to examine how pre-war intelligence spurred the onset of war. Bamford, author of two earlier investigative studies of the National Security Agency, The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, sets out in A Pretext for War to show that key figures in the Bush administration -- national security adviser Richard Perle, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith -- locked in a plan to wage war in Iraq well before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He charges that these four leading hawks manipulated the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency in a desperate attempt to justify a regime change in Iraq that they had been strategizing to bring about for years. He suggests further that the administration's rush to war grew out of a key and chronic blind spot in American policy circles: the failure to recognize the central role of the Palestinian cause in igniting Arab rage against the United States.

Bamford makes this case largely in the last third of his book. He uses the first two-thirds to meticulously lay out how the Sept. 11 aircraft were hijacked, the numerous intelligence and logistical failures that led to al Qaeda's successful strike and the reaction to the attacks in official Washington. Highly readable and well-researched, this account offers new insights into how the Sept. 11 hijackings occurred, while also showing how terribly ill-equipped and unprepared our defense systems were to deal with these kinds of attacks.

Other writers have also chronicled the overall failures and some of the panic, but Bamford found much new information that underscores just how chaotic and dangerous things really were in Sept. 11's immediate aftermath. For example, Bamford notes that two Air National Guard jets were scramble-ready and perhaps could have intercepted at least one of the suicide airliners, yet were assigned that day to unarmed bomb practice. Even if they had scrambled earlier, however, the fighter jets had no weapons to shoot down the hijacked jets. In fact, Bamford says, "on September 11, 2001, the entire United States mainland was protected by just fourteen planes spread out over seven bases."

Bamford goes on to track the reactions to the attack inside the NSA and CIA and supplies a chronology detailing when various senior administration officials were notified. For example, CIA director George Tenet received no word until well after the second aircraft had crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center. The top military commanders were just as out of touch. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Henry Shelton, was en route to Europe, and his deputy, Gen. Richard Myers, was on Capitol Hill. "Through it all, the general in charge of the country's military was completely ignorant of the fact that the United States was under its worst attack in nearly two centuries," Bamford writes. "Nor did he know that about forty minutes earlier, the President had decided to declare war."

Bamford dislikes President Bush intensely and makes little effort to hide it. He re-examines the president's actions on Sept. 11, from when he heard of the attacks to his flight across the country before finally returning to Washington, and concludes that "disturbingly, the story George W. Bush often tells of his learning of the attacks cannot possibly be true." He reaches this conclusion by chronicling the appearance of the first video snippets of the crashes on television and determining that the president could not have seen the footage at the time he claimed he did. He also strongly implies Bush was a coward for not returning immediately to Washington, D.C., contrasting his actions to those of Lyndon Johnson after the Kennedy assassination. (While Bush's decision not to return to Washington is debatable, to assume that it arose out of cowardice -- without any confirming testimony from people who would know -- seems overly harsh. The early moments of the attacks were chaotic -- and Washington itself was a target.) Bamford treads less familiar and more interesting ground when he describes the secret sites to which Bush, senior cabinet members and congressional leaders were taken, and the atmosphere inside. Again, others (notably Sen. Tom Daschle) have provided similar accounts, but by skillfully integrating these scenes with his own interviews, Bamford paints a vivid picture of the leadership of the free world bracing for an apocalypse.

In reviewing America's intelligence breakdowns, Bamford focuses mainly on material familiar to most readers from the Sept. 11 hearings: the lack of coordination among intelligence agencies, the lack of human intelligence on al Qaeda and a casual inattention to the al Qaeda threat despite CIA Director George Tenet's 1999 declaration of war on Osama bin Laden. But here, too, Bamford uncovers fresh material, in his scathing report on the workings of the Alec Station, the secret CIA unit dedicated solely to tracking bin Laden and al Qaeda. Bamford effectively makes the case that the group, constantly underfunded and understaffed, made little difference: "After four years and hundreds of millions of dollars, Alec Station had yet to recruit a single source within bin Laden's growing Afghanistan operation. It was more than embarrassing -- it was a scandal."

For Bamford, though, the crowning scandal was the long-incubating plan to force Saddam Hussein out of power by military force. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith and other key members of this war faction -- nicknamed the Vulcans -- had long been laying the groundwork for an invasion of Iraq. Administration insiders such as Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill have already made influential versions of this case in their recently published books, and Bamford relies on Clarke's own account of the immediate post-Sept. 11 security meetings to underline the depth of the administration's Iraq fixation.

Bamford traces the personal relations among the key players spanning several decades. Again he adds some interesting bits to the existing record: e.g., the Pentagon's distrust of the CIA's intelligence; internal turf wars among the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney over what kind of intelligence was used in planning for Iraq; and the Pentagon's establishment of separate intelligence shops to counter the CIA and DIA. Bamford also notes that it was the Vulcans Perle and Feith, together with senior State Department adviser David Wormser, who drafted the basic outlines of Bush's plan to oust Saddam, including the doctrine of preemption, back in the mid-1990s, when they were advising Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu rejected the plan, which gathered dust until Bush's election, when the group returned to the corridors of power. Bamford says that the new fortunes of Perle, Feith and Wormser, together with Bush's personal determination to repay Saddam for his attempt to kill Bush's father, were instrumental in America's decision to go to war.

A Pretext for War suffers from some factual slips -- at one point, for instance, identifying Abram N. Shulsky as head of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans rather than William Luti. There are several repeated paragraphs and a frustratingly incomplete index -- all indications of a too hasty rush to publish.

However, Bamford does add to the public record in significant ways. His deconstruction of the role played by Ahmed Chalabi in feeding false information on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to U.S. intelligence agencies and reporters, especially Judith Miller at the New York Times, is especially timely. Chalabi has recently fallen from grace, and the New York Times is reviewing its reporting on WMD, publicly admitting it should have been more skeptical of some of its sources. The story of "Curveball," an Iraqi defector who provided information that was given great credence by both Pentagon intelligence and the national news media only to be debunked, is also instructive.

On balance, Bamford does a superb job of laying out and tying together threads of the Sept. 11 intelligence failures and their ongoing aftermath, using original research, the public record and a light, fast-paced writing touch. We have of course heard the brunt of Bamford's polemic indictment of Bush and the Vulcans before: that the United States invaded Iraq as the result of a "massive disinformation campaign, abetted by a lazy and timid press." Readers may find such claims a bit sweeping, but A Pretext for War nonetheless provides a useful, new and sobering stream of information -- especially as the fallout from the Vulcans' crusade looms as a potentially decisive issue in a crucial election year. ?

Douglas Farah, on leave from The Washington Post, is consulting on intelligence reform and armed groups. He recently wrote "Blood From Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror."

Alpha

A Charleston paper weighs in with an opinion: Hollings was right!

Charleston (SC) Gazette
June 15, 2004
James Haught
# The ‘why’ for war remains unknown

MILLIONS of words are being written about the Iraq war, but hardly
anyone asks the fundamental, underlying, unanswered question: Why did
the Bush administration start it?

As Americans watch the sickening daily events, we really don’t know why
we got into this mess.

All the official reasons for the war turned out to be phony. Iraq didn’t
possess horror weapons, wasn’t in league with terrorists, wasn’t a
menace to America and wasn’t eager to welcome U.S. troops as liberators.
So why did President Bush order the attack? This should be the
number-one question of 2004, yet it isn’t heard in the election
campaign.

About half of Americans still support Bush’s war. Maybe they don’t even
wonder about the cause. If asked, many of them probably would say the
war was necessary because of the 9/11 suicide assault. But that’s
irrational. No Iraqis were among the self-destroying “holy warriors” of
Sept. 11, 2001. Nearly all of them were Saudis — yet the White House
wouldn’t have dreamed of attacking Saudi Arabia.

Early in the war, some cynical Americans speculated that Bush’s secret
motive was to gain control over Iraq’s oil — or to finish his father’s
old vendetta against Saddam Hussein — or to establish U.S. global
military sway, as advocated by far-right hawks in the Project for a New
American Century. But those allegations seem largely forgotten now.
Nobody seriously thinks it was started to give fat contracts to
Halliburton.

A couple of weeks ago, longtime Sen. Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, D-S.C.,
challenged his colleagues to explain why America is at war — but he got
no comprehensible answer.

Hollings had stirred up a hornets’ nest by contending that Bush ordered
the invasion partly to serve interests of Israel and “to take the Jewish
vote from the Democrats.” In a commentary published by several Southern
newspapers last month, Hollings noted that all of Bush’s purported
reasons for the war were false.

“With Iraq no threat, why invade a sovereign country?” the senator
wrote. “The answer: President Bush’s policy to secure Israel.”

Hollings pointed out that Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Charles
Krauthammer and other key hawks in Bush’s clique spent many years
demanding a U.S. attack on Iraq, partly “to guarantee Israel’s
security.” Because of their influence, he said, Bush came into office
looking for an excuse to invade — and the 9/11 tragedy provided it.

“You don’t come to town and announce your Israel policy is to invade
Iraq,” the senator said, so other pretexts were given for the war.

Ironically, he said, Bush’s war actually is creating more terrorism,
thus worsening danger to Israel.

Immediately after the commentary was published, Hollings was denounced
as anti-Semitic, even by fellow senators. In response, he gave a long,
extemporaneous, May 20 floor speech denying any prejudice, and asking:

“I challenge any one of the other 99 senators to tell us why we are in
Iraq? ... Everybody knows it is because we want to secure our friend,
Israel.”

Hollings said he mistakenly supported the 2002 resolution authorizing an
attack on Iraq. When Bush began talking about Iraq’s secret nuclear
program, he said, he assumed that Israeli agents had detected evidence
of such weaponry and had asked the White House to “knock it out for
them. That is why I voted for it. I got misled.”

Last month, retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni made similar allegations
on “60 Minutes.” He said “everybody I talk to in Washington” knows that
Bush’s far-right advisers wanted to invade Iraq to strengthen Israel’s
position in the Mideast. Zinni said that, likewise, “I was called
anti-Semitic.”

The Village Voice says White House aides meet with leaders of a
Pentecostal (talking in tongues) lobby that wants Israel to reign over
biblical territory, to fulfill prophecies for the return of Jesus.

Meanwhile, some observers think Bush’s simplistic religion, which brands
opponents as “evil,” was a factor in his war. In his news conference
last month, he declared that “freedom is the Almighty’s gift to every
man and woman in the world, and as the greatest power on the face of the
Earth, we have an obligation to help spread that freedom.” In other
words, he thinks he carried out God’s will by ending dictatorship in
Iraq.

Earlier, Bush told biographer Bob Woodward that he didn’t consult his
earthly father about launching the war — “there’s a higher father that I
appeal to.” Fringe candidate Ralph Nader calls Bush a “Messianic
militarist” — a holy warrior.

Last year, Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas met with Bush, and
said afterward that the American president told him: “God told me to
strike at al-Qaida, and I struck them, and then He instructed me to
strike at Saddam, which I did.” The White House later denied this
statement. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen feigned
disappointment about the denial, saying “the purported instructions from
God remain about the only explanation for some of what Bush has done.”

From all of this, can anyone fathom the real reason why 826 young
Americans and thousands of Iraqis have been killed, and a chaotic mess
has been created? If you can see a logical explanation, I wish you’d
spell it out for me.

Haught is the Gazette’s editor.

Alpha

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040614-646366,00.html

Monday, Jun. 14, 2004

One Expert's Verdict: The CIA Caved Under Pressure

By MICHAEL DUFFY/WASHINGTON

The CIA that George Tenet leaves behind next month is a shadow of its imaginary self, a butt of jokes rather than the envy of the world. It is an agency that has become self-protective and bureaucratic; it is too reliant on gadgets rather than spies to steal secrets. Sometimes the CIA has simply been too blind to see what is hiding in plain sight. Tenet restored the agency's morale, but he leaves behind a string of spectacular intelligence failures. And that may not be the worst of it. In his new book A Pretext for War, intelligence expert James Bamford alleges that the CIA not only failed to detect and deter the secret army of Muslim extremists gathering over the horizon in the late 1990s but also failed to take action when a group of Administration hard-liners, backed by the Pentagon chief and Vice President Dick Cheney, began to advance the case for war with Iraq in secret using data the CIA widely believed weren't supportable or were just plain false. Instead of fighting back, Bamford argues, the CIA for the most part rolled over and went along. The result was a war sold largely on a fiction, confected from unchecked rumor and biased informants.A Pretext for War is probably the best one-volume companion to the harrowing events in the war on terrorism since 1996, chiefly because it focuses on the most difficult to pierce subject: the hidden machinery of U.S. intelligence. Bamford is a veteran chronicler of the spy world whose The Puzzle Palace, published in 1982, is still considered the classic account of the mysterious National Security Agency (NSA), which electronically snoops on friends and enemies overseas. His account of 9/11 and its aftermath is studded with new details, including some about the undisclosed location known as Site R, an underground bunker on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border where the Vice President spent much of his time in 2001. Deep under Raven Rock Mountain, Site R "is a secret world of five buildings, each three stories tall, computer filled caverns and a subterranean water reservoir." It is just 7 miles from Camp David. Bamford maintains that before 9/11, the U.S.'s entire spook network was pretty much out to lunch. It was a community that had done its job well in the cold war and was looking for a reason to exist. By the late 1990s the NSA was becoming obsolete, unable to keep up with the pace of technological change. The NSA netted millions more conversations at its worldwide listening posts than it could translate or interpret. The agency spent billions to eavesdrop on chatter overseas that moved by satellite — only to see the world move to harder-to-steal digitized cellular, e-mail and instant-messaging communications. Meanwhile, at the NSA's sprawling Fort Meade, Md., campus, the agency's director could not send an email to all the NSA's 38,000 employees. Why? The NSA had 68 separate e-mail systems. Things were not much better at the CIA. In a devastating chronology, Bamford reports that even as late as 2000, the agency was stuck in an old cold war way of doing things — training its agents, recruiting spies overseas and keeping headquarters happy. One agent explains that CIA recruiting overseas was about as rigorous as going to an opening-night mixer at a Las Vegas convention: American agents overseas sometimes competed with one another to see who could collect the most business cards at official receptions in foreign capitals. Then they would return to their embassy to determine the night's winner. Each card, the agents told themselves, represented a potential spy for the U.S. In fact, the agent said, "none of these people had anything useful ... It was just numbers. It's all quantity."With tradecraft like that, it is little wonder the CIA "never once even tried to infiltrate" al-Qaeda, according to Bamford. He says agents working at the CIA's vaunted Alec station, the shop inside the agency responsible for tracking and killing Osama bin Laden, seemed more interested in flying to Afghanistan and Paris to meet with various Afghan warlords who promised to provide details of bin Laden's whereabouts in exchange for bags full of cash. Bamford asserts that the CIA's Afghan assets never came through with very much on the Saudi terrorist, but the CIA kept them on the dole anyway. About the only thing going well was the 50-year war between the CIA and the FBI. Alec station's chiefs were so turf conscious about which agency had "the lead" in the hunt for bin Laden that they routinely left their FBI counterparts in the dark about what they were learning from overseas — a habit that turned out to be a fatal error. Sloppy surveillance permitted two of the hijackers to elude the CIA as early as January 2000, but then the agency repeatedly failed to inform the FBI or half a dozen other government officers who could have assisted in the hunt. Indeed, at the CIA, keister covering was in full swing long before the attacks of 9/11. In January 2000 the head of Alec station told his bosses he still had the two men under surveillance when in fact he had lost them in Bangkok. That bureaucratic chore completed, Alec station then dropped its chase altogether. It would be more than a year before a conscientious FBI agent assigned to the CIA re-examined the evidence and realized how badly the agency had blundered. The two names were finally given to the State Department on Aug. 23, 2001.But the intelligence community's shaky performance also made the agency vulnerable to another kind of attack: the one mounted by a group of hard-line neoconservatives who took over at the Pentagon and in the Vice President's office when Bush became President. Long suspicious of the CIA if not openly hostile to it, the neocons came into power asserting internally that the agency couldn't shoot straight and therefore its judgments couldn't be trusted. The Bush hard-liners had long believed that stability could come to the Middle Eastand Israel — only if Saddam Hussein was overthrown and Iraq converted into a stable democracy. Led by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, they were installed at various national-security choke points in the government, and nothing moved without their O.K. Bamford comes very close to stating that the hard-liners were wittingly or unwittingly acting as agents of Israel's hard-line Likud Party, which believed Israel should operate with impunity in the region and dictate terms to its neighbors. Such a world view, Bamford argues, was simply repotted by the hard-liners into U.S. foreign policy in the early Bush years, with the war in Iraq as its ultimate goal. Bamford asserts that the backgrounds, political philosophies and experiences of many of the hard-liners helped to hardwire the pro-Israel mind-set in the Bush inner circle and suggests that Washington mistook Israel's interests for its own when it pre-emptively invaded Iraq last year. The result was a war built on sand — and a CIA that lacked the will to take on its masters. Douglas Feith, a senior Pentagon official, set up several secret offices in the Pentagon that received data from Israel's own intelligence teams and coordinated its findings with them, partly as a way to get around CIA caution in the region. Bamford reveals that the original source of the spurious allegation that Saddam harbored "mobile biological-weapons labs" did not come from the brother of a top aide to Ahmad Chalabi whose code name was Curveball, but from an Israeli tip going back to 1994. Bamford quotes anonymous CIA agents who say that they suspected that much of the hard-liners' intelligence on weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was bogus but there was pressure from within and without to shut up about it. Bamford implies that Tenet, the ultimate staff guy, is partly to blame for this failure of nerve. When Secretary of State Colin Powell was putting together his now discredited speech to the U.N. last year about Saddam's WMD program, he stood virtually alone against the hard-liners, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley, all of whom seemed keen to pump up the Secretary's talking points. Cheney's staff handed Powell a 50-page draft of allegations; the Secretary rejected most of them as unsupportable, with the hard-liners, Rice and even Tenet fighting him every step of the way during run-through sessions at CIA headquarters. And as it turned out, Powell didn't fight hard enough. Could Tenet have stopped the rush to war? Bamford suggests he could have. "Off on the sidelines, George Tenet was one of the few who knew the truth," he writes, adding that Tenet preferred to work behind the scenes on minor disagreements about the data "instead of speaking out" against the grand scheme. That's a harsh indictment of the man who kept America's secrets under two Presidents. But one of Tenet's colleagues was even less generous, saying simply, "We caved."

Alpha

Subj: Billmon re Time on Israeli connection
Date: 6/16/04 9:53:30 PM Pacific Daylight Time
From: jblankfort@earthlink.net
Sent from the Internet (Details)

June 14, 2004 http://billmon.org/

Time to Slime Time?

I'm guessing Time magazine is going to get a white-hot blast from the right-wing wind tunnel just about any, well, time now. Here's a paragraph from Michael Duffy's review of James Bamford's new book, A Pretext for War, that's just about guaranteed to put the National Review and the Anti-Defamation League on the warpath:
The Bush hard-liners had long believed that stability could come to the Middle East and Israel — only if Saddam Hussein was overthrown and Iraq converted into a stable democracy. Led by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, they were installed at various national-security choke points in the government, and nothing moved without their O.K. Bamford comes very close to stating that the hard-liners were wittingly or unwittingly acting as agents of Israel's hard-line Likud Party, which believed Israel should operate with impunity in the region and dictate terms to its neighbors. Such a world view, Bamford argues, was simply repotted by the hard-liners into U.S. foreign policy in the early Bush years, with the war in Iraq as its ultimate goal. Bamford asserts that the backgrounds, political philosophies and experiences of many of the hard-liners helped to hardwire the pro-Israel mind-set in the Bush inner circle and suggests that Washington mistook Israel's interests for its own when it pre-emptively invaded Iraq last year. This isn't going to be pretty - even if Time was only reporting what Bamford wrote, and even though truth is an absolute defense, even in blood libel cases. A free cyberdrink to the first Whiskey Bar patron who produces a link to an article or press release claiming that Duffy and/or Time is anti-Semitic.

Cowboy · Posted: Thu Jun 17, 2004 6:12 am Post subject:

Nowicki's letter to the Wall Street Journal

Letter from Marvin E. Nowicki, Ph.D., published in The Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, May 16, 2001, page A-23:

Tragic "Gross Error" In a 1967 Attack

In regard to Timothy Naftali's review of James Bamford's book "Body of Secrets" (Leisure & Arts, May 9): Mr. Naftali doesn't quite have it right concerning the book portion dealing with the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty in 1967. I know because I am the person to whom Mr. Natfali [sic] refers as the "chief Hebrew-language analyst" aboard the U.S. Navy (not Air Force) EC121 aircraft. He says that I recall one of my teammates telling me of hearing references to "a U.S. flag" from Israeli pilots.

For the record, we (my teammate and I) both heard and recorded the references to the U.S. flag made by the pilots and captains of the motor torpedo boats. My personal recollection remains after 34 years that the aircraft and MTBs prosecuted the Liberty until their operators had an opportunity to get close-in and see the flag, hence the references to the flag.

My position, which is opposite of Mr. Bamford's, is that the attack, though terrible and tragic especially to the crew members and their families on that ill-fated day in June 1967, was a gross error. How can I prove it? I can't unless the transcripts/tapes are found and released to the public. I last saw them in a desk drawer at NSA in the late 1970s before I left the service.

MARVIN E. NOWICKI, PH.D.
Ashley, Ill.
_________________
Dr. Marvin Nowicki was the US Navy supervisor on the EC-121 aircraft who heard the actual Israel Air Force radio transmissions, in Hebrew, on 8 June 1967 and thereafter listened to the tapes in Hebrew (Nowicki was an NSA/Navy trained Hebrew linguist). Nowicki sent an e-mail to James Bamford with five enclosures on 20 March 2000.

Bamford claims the Nowicki letter told him that the tapes establish that the Israelis knew they were attacking a US ship. Read the Nowicki e-mail and decide if you agree with Bamford's interpretation. Dr. Nowicki did not agree with Bamford's interpretation. He wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal, summarized below, in which he explicitly stated the tapes proved the attack was made in error.

Text of mail sent to James Bamford (3 March 2000)

Dear Jim,

As a followup to our e-mail and telephone exchanges, I am enclosing sensitive information about U.S. intelligence collection techniques that I engaged in during a career in the U.S. Navy spanning over 20 years. Like you, I am interested in preserving certain historical events surrounding SIGINT collection. I believe it is important that future generations understand and appreciate the efforts of the Cold War warriors.

In this correspondence, I am concentrating on a single event that involved the USS Liberty in June 1967. As you know, Jim Ennes and members of the Liberty crew are on record stating the ship was deliberately attacked by the Israelis. I think otherwise. I have first hand information, which I am sharing with you. I was present on that day, along with members of an aircrew in a COMFAIRAIRRECONRON TWO (VQ-2) EC-121M aircraft flying some 15,000 feet above the incident. As I recall, we recorded most, if not all, of the attack. Further, our intercepts, never before made public, showed the attack to be an accident on the part of the Israelis. [emphasis added]

To support my claim, I am forwarding four enclosures of information. My story is over 30 years old but there are certain events that are embedded in my memory, including a scary night flight into the battle zone and the attack on the Liberty. Enclosure 1 begins with a narrative entitled, "Assault on the Liberty: The untold story from SIGINT." Enclosure 2 provides a postscript to the attack in the years that followed. Enclosure 3 gives my views of additional evidence of a mistaken attack by the Israelis, contradicting Jim Ennes in his book. Enclosure 4 discusses Ennes' cover-up conundrum, asks who was ultimately responsible, and why the presence of our VQ mission was never revealed.

In addition, I am enclosing personal information about my 24-year career in the and Naval Security Group. I am doing this for the purpose of helping you see how I might assist you with other aspects of your historical account of SIGINT. You may, for example, be interested in stories how we hunted Soviet TU-95 Bears [Soviet turbo prop reconnaissance aircraft] in the Atlantic and searched for SA-2 [missile] sites in southern Algeria during flights into the Sahara. A chronology of my duty stations and professional experience is found in Enclosure 5.

Finally, on a cautionary note I would appreciate it if you would cull any information that crosses the bar of national security, in addition to the names of colleagues cited herein. I do not have permission to use their names. If you have any questions or need clarification, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you and good luck with your book.

Sincerely,
Marvin E. Nowicki, Ph.D.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nowicki Enclosure 1

Assault on the Liberty: The untold story from SIGINT

In June 1967, on the day of the Israeli surprise attack on its Arab neighbors, the USS Liberty was nearing her station in the waters off the coasts of Israel and Egypt in the Eastern Mediterranean. Five days before, the naval vessel had pulled into Port Rota, Spain, for technical support, replenishment, and embarkation of Arab linguists from NSA and NSG. During the port call, a number of CT personnel from NAVSECGRUDEPT Rota visited the ship. Some dependents including my six-year old son (years later to become a naval aviator) were given a tour of the ship. Little did I know, that a few days afterward I would fly over the ship in a VQ-2 EC121M aircraft as the Liberty was being attacked by Israeli aircraft and motor torpedo boats on June 8.

On June 5, the Israelis began all-out attacks on her Arab neighbors in Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Early that morning, our aircrew from VQ-2 and NAVSECGRUDEPT Rota received emergency tasking orders to proceed to the scene of hostilities in the Middle East. Within several hours of the tasking message, our VQ-2 EC121M was airborne en route to Athens, Greece, where we would stage missions into the East Med. Our logistical and SIGINT support would come from a temporary US Air Force base set up at the Athens airport. Although only the day before I had returned from TAD aboard a VQ-2 EA3B aircraft from the Norwegian Sea, and much to chagrin of my wife, I and four other CTIs were ordered to Athens aboard the EC121M. Nobody in our crew knew anything about the disposition of the USS Liberty, which had begun conducting SIGINT operations off the coast of Israel.

The usual complement of VQ aircrew members was on board our lumbering "Willy Victor." Although slow, it was capable of sustained flight of 12 to 18 hours, depending on such factors as weather, fuel, altitude, intercept activity, and crew fatigue. We might, for example, hold orbit during a mission for an extra period of time if SIGINT activity proved particularly fruitful.

Our aircraft crew consisted of the front-end crew of pilot (mission commander), co-pilot, navigator, engineer, and radio-operator. In those days, VQ-2 had no secure air-ground communication capability (this would come later in the early 1970s with KY8 and KW6 communication equipment). The back-end crew was made up of the Evaluator (senior ELINT officer), a junior ELINT officer or two, three or four AT (avionics technician) ELINT operators, and three CTT ELINT operators. A couple of aircraft maintenance technicians flew with us; they would maintain the aircraft and remain on the ground in Athens. In addition, we five "spook" linguists were from NAVSECGRUDEPT Rota to intercept VHF/UHF radio-telephone signals. As I remember, our spook crew consisted of me (a CTIC dual-trained in Russian-Hebrew languages and senior CT), two junior CTI petty officers trained in Hebrew ([deleted] and [deleted]), and two junior CTI petty officers trained in Arabic (I don't remember their names). When we took-off from Rota, we had no idea how long the deployment would last, so we packed for a long trip--30 days.

The transit flight to Athens from Rota took about eight hours. Most of the crew rested in the bunk beds in the rear of the aircraft and ate chow cooked in the plane's galley. Usually, the junior VQ-2 enlisted personnel were responsible for in-flight cooking duties. On occasion, we enjoyed hot, delicious chow. Other times we ate cold "horse-cock" sandwiches. Crew members took turns resting in the relief bunks.

In my usual workaholic fashion, as soon as we cleared Rota with "wheels in the well" and heading east over the Mediterranean, I pulled the security curtains around the spook intercept positions and turned on my receiving equipment. The security curtains ostensibly shielded our work from uncleared VQ crewmembers, of which there were always a few on board. Of course, these people had a pretty good idea what we were doing but such were the security regulations of that day. My intercept position consisted of one VHF receiver, one UHF/VHF receiver with a spectrum analyzer, and a four-track voice recorder. The other four COMINT positions were similarly outfitted with voice recorders and twin receivers; they, however, lacked spectrum analyzers. The spectrum analyzer gave me at the "supervisor's position" a visual view of radio activity in the form of "spikes" between 100-150 MHz and 200 and 500 MHz. It was a handy tool to spot new signals.

It was my habit to search for Russian voice activity anytime I was airborne with VQ-2. On this such flights, our tracks to Athens took us within VHF intercept range of several Russian naval anchorages but well outside range of radio activity from the Middle East. I worked virtually the entire flight and did manage to record several VHF voice signals from Russian vessels emanating from the Soviet Fifth Eskadra in their anchorages.

The usual operating procedure that we spooks adhered to included activating the recording system (four track tapes) with time dubs and frequency notations, while manually writing down gists of voice activity on logs, and notifying the Evaluator of what we were recording. The Evaluator in turn would direct his operators to conduct an ELINT search for corresponding radar activity. Reciprocally, ELINT might intercept a radar signal from an unfriendly target and tip us off to search for correlating voice activity. After a flight was over, the Evaluator and senior spook (others could be involved) would sit-down and compare notes for the fusion report, called the PMFR (post-mission flight report). The Evaluator was responsible for releasing this TOP SECRET Codeword message into the SPINTCOMM system after landing.

On this particular transit flight, our intercepts were sparse so that we decided not to issue a report. Also, on non-tasked transit flights such as this one, PMFRs were not required to be transmitted to our consumers: DIRNSA, COMSIXTHFLT, CINCUSNAVEUR, CIA, JCS, to name a few (the list of addresses was about one page long). PMFRs were sent by SPINTCOMM ordinarily at immediate precedence to action addressees and priority to information addressees.

Upon landing at the international airport in Athens late that afternoon and after servicing the aircraft for the next take-off, the majority of the crew boarded USAF transit buses to go to our "semi" contracted hotel, the Hotel Seville, in Iraklion, a suburb of Athens, not too far from the airport. We always stayed at the Hotel Seville; it was managed by a friendly Australian by the name of [deleted], along with a very friendly female, [deleted], a local Greek. The place was clean, fairly comfortable, with a kitchen and bar open virtually all the time. While the crew was getting settled in, we--the Evaluator, one or two VQ officers, and I--were still on the base, having made our way to the USA-512J compound to stow mission materials and receive an intelligence update from the US Air Force.

USA-512J was a US Air Force Security Service (AFSS) station set-up in 1966 in conjunction with DIRNSA on the Greek Air Force side of the Athens international airport to process, at least preliminarily, the SIGINT collected from USAF ACRP C130 and US Navy VQ-2 EC121M and EA3B aircraft operating in the East Med. The USA-512J site was a temporary facility consisting of a secure fenced-in compound patrolled by Security Police. Several special mobile vans were parked in the compound, including one for SPINTCOMM, one for maintenance, one for administration, and one or two for operations (voice transcription positions, an ELINT read-out position, and various research data banks and file cabinets). All vans were heated and air conditioned.

Our individual security clearances had been sent ahead of us via SPINTCOMM by our parent commands in Rota, giving SI cleared members of the aircrew immediate access to the compound and its facilities. The USA-512J briefers told us they did not know much about what was going on in the Middle East that day, except for what was being reported in the press. The ACRP platform had not returned yet from its Mideast mission that day. Later, we would find out that the ACRP brought back practically complete coverage of the Israelis attacks on June 5, although the Hebrew voice materials were not processed for another day or two. The ACRPs had no Hebrew linguists in those days, and a linguistic support team of NSA civilians would not to arrive for another 24 hours.

After completing business at the 512J compound, we too proceeded to the Hotel Seville, where we gathered our aircrew together, telling them in whispers what little we knew about the situation. We advised them to remain in the hotel in case we received emergency tasking. Actually, we expected to receive orders to fly the next day, but surprise, surprise! A phone tip to the Mission Commander told us we were to get airborne as soon as possible. We were in disbelief and mystified. Surely, our taskers did not expect us to fly into the combat zone in the dead of the night! Oh, but they did!

Within a few hours, we were airborne from Athens en route to the coasts of Egypt and Israel. The transit flight usually took about three hours to get to the track some 25-50 miles off the coasts. Egypt claimed territorial limits of 12 miles out to sea, while Israel claimed six miles, and we always remained well beyond those lines of demarcation. While in the past we had used several variations of a basic flight path over international waters, the normal track pattern consisted of a dogleg after we joined the track northeast of Alexandria, Egypt. We would then fly eastward off Port Said and the Sinai to a point north of El Arish, and then dogleg northeast along the Israeli coast to a point west of Beirut, Lebanon. The track was then reversed and repeated as needed for the duration of the 12 plus hour mission. Ordinarily we flew the tracks at altitudes ranging from 12,000 to 18,000 feet with the EC121M. The EA3B, which wasn't used too often on these East Med missions, flew considerably higher, above 30-35,000 feet. The track profile, paralleling the Egyptian and Israeli coasts although not terribly important for intercepting VHF/UHF voice activity, was very important to sorting out and locating Egyptian and Israeli radars in ELINT through ADF. In addition to regular ADF, the EC121M aircraft was equipped with a special piece of intercept equipment called "Big Look." With Big Look, it was possible to intercept, emulate, identify, and reverse-locate the source of radar signals. So a parallel track to the coasts was very advantageous.

En route to the track this night, our mission commander reassessed our situation in the dark as we headed toward the area of hostilities. I vividly recall this night being pitch black, no stars, no moon, no nothing. The mission commander considered the precariousness of our flight. He thought it more prudent to avoid the usual track. If we headed east off the coast of Egypt toward Israel, we would look on radar to the Israelis like an incoming attack aircraft from Egypt. Then assuming the Israelis did not attack us, when we reversed course, we would then appear on Egyptian radar like Israeli attack aircraft inbound. It, indeed, was a very dangerous and precarious situation.

But our mission commander had the good sense to adjust our flight into the combat zone. The new approach called for us to proceed between Crete and Cyprus and then fly diagonally toward El Arish in the Sinai along an established civilian air corridor. Upon reaching a point some 25 NM northeast of El Arish, we would reverse course and hold orbit wherever desired. This is the same southeasterly/northwesterly track that the ACRP C130s ordinarily flew, because the civilian air corridor at least partially masked the flights. While this diagonal track is not good for ELINT purposes and Big Look, it certainly appeared to be a lot safer than the dogleg along the coasts in the middle of the night. That was nuts!

When we arrived on station after midnight, needless to say the "pucker factor" was high; the crew was on high, nervous alert. Nobody slept in the relief bunks on that flight. The night remained pitch black. What in the devil were we doing out here in the middle of a war zone was a question I asked myself several times over and over during the flight. The adrenalin flowed.

As it turned out, though, the flight was uneventful, except for a few radio checks from the belligerents. The Israelis were home rearming and reloading for the next day's attacks, while the Arabs were bracing themselves for the next onslaught come daylight and contemplating some kind of counter-attack. Eerily, our COMINT AND ELINT positions were quiet.

As dawn broke, that changed; our receivers came alive with signals mostly from the Israelis as they began their second day of attacks. We spooks furiously gisted voice activity mostly from the Israeli pilots, while the Evaluator married up that activity with airborne radars intercepted from the ELINT positions. The Egyptians launched an abortive air attack on an advancing Israeli armored brigade in the northern Sinai but their aircraft were shot out of the sky by IAF Mirage aircraft. We monitored as much as we could but soon had to head for Athens because of low fuel. We were glad to get the heck out of there.

En route to Athens, the Evaluator and I wrote as much of the PMFR as we could, but some of our spook tapes required replaying at USA-512J. When we arrived in the compound, our tasking for next several days awaited us. Happily, the taskers realized we needed rest, and so our next flight would not be until the morning of June 7, followed by another morning flight on June 8. That was okay with us because the ACRP had already taken off to provide SIGINT coverage of June 6.

Other good news awaited us. We were informed that three civilian Hebrew linguists from DIRNSA were arriving to help process the Israeli intercept materials. USAFSS had many linguists for the ACRP flights at 512J, all qualified in Arabic and Russian languages, but not a single Hebrew linguist. As it turns out, the ACRPs were blindly copying any voice signal that sounded Hebrew. They were like vacuum cleaners, sucking every signal onto their recorders, with the intercept operators not having a clue as to what the activity represented. Much of the Israeli air activity always stood out like a sore thumb, though, compared to the Arabs. The Israeli aircraft used mostly UHF transceivers, while the Arabs only used VHF transceivers of Soviet origin.

Following a review of our tapes and confirming the shootdown of Egyptian Sukhoi-7 aircraft (this was the first time I ever heard a real, live shootdown), we released the PMFR and headed for the Hotel Seville and a well-deserved rest. We were all beat; it had been a long time since some of us last slept. I turned in right away but several of the VQ airedales, known for partying particularly after fate-tempting flights drank beer, rolled the dice for more beer, and pinched the hotel barmaids before finally collapsing for the night.

The next day, June 7, we launched about mid-morning so that we would have little overlap with the ACRP, which was on station at dawn. Our flight was filled with reams of intercept activity showing Israeli attacks on the Arabs all day long. In reality, I do not recall much of the nature of the attacks, except that we got reels and reels of tape showing Israeli tank attacks in the Sinai and air battles between Israeli Mirages and Egyptian Migs. I think we had intercepts of the Israelis doing battle with the Jordanians and Syrian as well. We returned to Athens after dusk.

On returning to the 512J compound to refine and release the PMFR, I recall the presence of the NSA civilians toiling away on the many backlogged tapes from our and ACRP flights. I recognized two of three civilians from earlier NSG and NSA duty assignments at Ft. Meade, Maryland. With the NSA civilians in place and the USAF Arab/Russian linguists and traffic analysts providing technical support, we would be able to take the guess work out of our work in the sky. They gave us callsigns, frequencies, unit identities, and other technical data to better cover the war with our intercept equipment.

On June 8, the day of the attack on the Liberty, our track profile was almost the same as our first flight in the night. We were "wheels in the well" from Athens about mid-morning, arriving on the track at noontime, flying from Crete/Cyprus diagonally to El Arish and reverse. When we arrived within intercept range of the battles already in progress, it was apparent that the Israelis were pounding the Syrians on the Golan Heights. Soon all our recorders were going full blast, with each position intercepting signals on both receivers. The Evaluator called out many airborne intercepts from Arab and Israeli aircraft. We were going crazy trying to cope with the heavy activity.

After a couple of hours of hard work, I received a heated call on the secure intercom from Hebrew linguist [deleted]. [deleted] excitedly proclaimed something to the effect, "Hey, Chief, I've got really odd activity on UHF. They mentioned an American flag. I don't know what's going on." I asked him for the frequency and rolled up to it. Sure, as the devil, Israeli aircraft were completing an attack on some object. I alerted the Eval, giving him sparse details, adding that we had no idea what was taking place. The activity subsided. After some time passed, Petty Officer [deleted] called me again. He told me about new activity and that the American flag is being mentioned again. I had the frequency but for some strange reason, despite seeing it on my spectrum analyzer, couldn't hear it on my receiver, so I left my position to join him to listen at his position. I heard a couple of references to the flag during an apparent attack. The attackers weren't aircraft; they had to be surface units (we later found out at USA-512J it was the Israeli motor torpedo boats attacking the Liberty). Neither [deleted] nor I had ever heard MTB attacks in voice before, so we had no idea what was occurring below us. I advised the Eval; he was as mystified as we were.

We continued recording voice activity for another two hours. All the while, the Israelis sustained their attacks on the Arab targets. Finally, it was time to return to Athens. We recorded voice activity en route home until the intercepts finally faded. On the way home, the Eval and I got together to try to figure out what we copied. Despite replaying portions of the tapes, we still did not have a complete understanding of what transpired except for the likelihood that a ship flying the American flag was being attacked by Israeli air and surface forces.

By the time we arrived at the USA-512J compound, collateral reports were coming in to the station about the attack on the USS Liberty. The first question we were asked us, did we get any of the activity? Yes, we dared to say we did. The NSA civilians took our tapes and began transcribing. It was pretty clear that Israeli aircraft and motor torpedo boats attacked a ship in the East Med. Although the attackers never gave a name or a hull number, the ship was identified as flying an American flag. We logically concluded that the ship was the USS Liberty, although we had no idea she was even in the area and could become the object of such an attack. Our intercepts further showed that perhaps the attack was a mistake.

We next deliberated on what to do with our information. Should we issue a CRITIC or simply put the information in our PMFR? After much deliberation, we decided against the CRITIC because our information was already hours old (to meet CRITIC criteria, information should be within 15 minutes of the event). Beside there was the question of VQ-2 properly introducing such a report into the CRITICOMM system, since there was neither national authority nor any precedent to do so. Instead, we finally issued the PMFR with appropriate highlighted information to all our addresses at either flash or immediate precedence. I don't recall.

It had been quite a day and other days remained before us. We returned to the Hotel Seville for rest and relaxation, feeling a sense of exhilaration but not comprehending the chaos and calamity taking place on the Liberty at that very moment as she struggled to leave the attack area.

The next morning, on June 9th, when we arrived at USA-512J for the pre-mission briefing we found out the NSA civilians had transcribed most of our intercept and were sending the raw information back to DIRNSA via SPINTCOMM. Later that day, the civilians were informed to pack up the tapes to be couriered to Ft. Meade as soon as possible. (This would be the last I would see the tapes and transcripts until I received orders to NSA over a year later, discussed below.)

The next East Med missions are now a blur in mind. I know we covered the remainder of the Six Day War, which ended on June 10, 1967. The Syrians retreated from the Golan Heights area; their military if not destroyed was seriously degraded. The Egyptians lost the Sinai while suffering severe losses of personnel and equipment. Perhaps the Jordanians lost the most to the Israelis. In addition to losing a significant amount of personnel and military gear, they had to cede Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Probably about two weeks after the Six Day War we were relieved by another aircrew from Rota. The NSA civilians remained in Athens for a couple of more weeks and then returned home to Ft. Meade.

While the Six Day War was by far the most memorable and exciting time of my tour of duty in Rota, I had other unforgettable flights aboard VQ-2 aircraft on numerous missions. On average VQ-2 would fly six to twelve missions per month against Israel and Arab Mid East targets, unless higher priority Soviet targets were the order of the day (e.g., Soviet Fleet Exercises in the Mediterranean or Norwegian Sea). There were many of those. By the time I left Rota in July 1968, I had accumulated over 2,000 hours in the air in VQ-2 aircraft.
_________________
Nowicki Enclosure 2

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Postscript to the attack on the Liberty

As mentioned in Enclosure 1, the next time I saw those voice tapes collected by our VQ-2 platform revealing the attack on the Liberty was over a year later when I was ordered to NSA for duty in 1968. I was assigned to G643, which was the organization responsible for the Israeli military problem. By this time, the tapes had been completely re-transcribed by a senior Hebrew linguist in the section. One of my first orders of business on reporting to G643 was to reread the complete transcripts. Up to this point, I always felt the evidence we collected showed the Israelis attacked the Liberty by mistake in the heat of battle. All my conversations with colleagues in G643 and reading of the voice transcript confirmed as much to me. Further, I assumed that NSA had shared this evidence with senior government officials who inquired into the attack on the ship. I certainly assumed that the Liberty's CO, her cleared officers, and CT personnel knew about the tapes and the fact they were collected by an airborne platform. I continued to make this assumption, but by the time I arrived at NSA a year later it was no longer a burning issue with anyone. The tapes and transcripts were simply filed away in the bottom of a desk drawer in G643. Nobody seemed to be interested in hearing about the USS Liberty any longer.

And so for the next dozen years, not much was said about the USS Liberty incident. The American public was told the attack was an accident. Only the Liberty crew was making rumblings about the attack being intentional while floating the idea of a grand conspiracy by the US government in collusion with the Israelis. I started thinking about that VQ flight again, feeling it should be made public. None of the senior officers with whom I was associated, however, was interested or concerned. Several months before I retired in 1979, I even wrote a personal letter to the Commander of the Naval Security Group, Rear Admiral Eugene Ince, saying I thought it was time to make the information public. Admiral Ince surely knew about the VQ-2 tapes because he was the senior NSG officer on the staff of CINCUSNAVEUR in 1967 during the attack on the Liberty. I received no reply from him.

I retired on July 1, 1979 with nothing further said about the tapes, which incidentally I last sighted during a TAD trip to NSA in the late 1970s. The tapes and transcripts were still in the bottom of a desk drawer in the Israeli military section in G643.

Forward 20 years, during which time Jim Ennes writes his book and the crew from the USS Liberty gets organized, subsequently going on record with strong words that the Israelis intentionally attacked the ship and that senior US authorities helped cover up the fact.

As we know, the world-wide-web and computers are wonderful technologies. It was through this medium that an old friend of mine from service in Kami Seya, Japan in the 1950s accidentally surfaced. After communicating with each other by e-mail for almost a year, a reference to the USS Liberty cropped up between [deleted] and me. [deleted] mentioned that he was on the Liberty and was wounded. My response, with sorrow and regrets, was that indeed it was a small world because I was above him that terrible day. I could tell by the tone in his reply that he was still upset (and rightfully so). He was really troubled when I told him my view of events. He wasn't buying the accident-pitch at all.

In a period of a week or two we exchanged e-mails at a furious pace, trying to gauge what each other knew about the attack. First assuring him I am not an Israeli hawk, only a former CTI who was trained in Hebrew and who worked the Israeli military problem for several years, I told him the attack was a mistake. Did he know a VQ-2 EC121M aircraft was there that day? No, he didn't know that, and didn't think anyone else knew of it either. He ostensibly contacted Jim Ennes, who likewise said he did not know of our presence. I asked [deleted] how did the Liberty crew know the Israelis attacked them intentionally. His reply: "the Israelis saw our flag." How did you know that, [deleted]? Well, someone in the CT crew heard the Israelis talking on their radios about the American flag. But [deleted], I reminded him, the Liberty had no Hebrew linguists aboard (she embarked only NSG and NSA Arabic linguists in Rota), so how did you know the Israeli aircraft and boats were discussing the American flag? He didn't know, so again he asked Ennes. Ennes responded that it was his understanding the Israelis used English during their attacks. My rejoinder to [deleted] was: this could not be the case; in all my years of working the Israeli air problem, their military personnel spoke only Hebrew. The only time the Israelis ever (repeat ever) used English was after they started receiving American F4 and A4 aircraft in 1969/70 (well after the Six Day War), and those conversations were limited to maintenance check-flights probably when American advisors were nearby. English was never used in combat situations involving those aircraft or any others to my knowledge. Besides, our VQ tapes and voice transcripts showed only Hebrew spoken that day during the attack.

At one point in our conversation, [deleted] urged that if I felt so strongly about this I should go public with my information. My riposte was that, while I would be willing to do so, I would want to be certain those voice tapes and transcripts were still existed at NSA. I doubted they were but who knows; they still could be in the desk drawer in G6. I, however, do not have the wherewithal to check for them.

On a final note, I can identify several NSG and NSA personnel who could vouch for my version of the attack. Besides I believe there is other evidence to support a case of a mistaken attack, discussed in the next Enclosure 3.
_________________
Nowicki Enclosure 3

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Exculpatory evidence supporting a mistaken attack

In addition to the VQ2 voice materials that I contend support a case for a mistaken attack on the USS Liberty by Israeli forces on June 8, 1967, the following discussion is germane to my argument that the erroneous attack was carried out by the Israelis in the heat of battle. Much of my counter-argument is based on the Jim Ennes' narrative in his book, Assault on the Liberty (Random House, NY, 1979), and my experience that includes 20 years of naval service. Ennes says he and the Liberty crew are convinced the Israelis deliberately attacked the ship. He further argues that certain high-level US Government officials colluded with the Israelis to hide the intentional attack. His argument does not hold up to scrutiny.

First, to defend my hypothesis of an accidental attack one must consider the psychological frame of mind of the Israeli warriors. For most of them this was their first real test in war. Their fathers before them craved out the State of Israel under constant wartime pressure from the Arab states before and after 1948. Now the sons were being challenged to defend the nation. Apparently, they could expect no help from the United States, if Israel initiated the attacks. President Johnson said as much (see Ennes, p. 210).

For weeks and months before June 1967, the leaders of the Arab states in Cairo, Damascus, and Amman publicly threatened coordinated annihilation of Israel. By May 1967, taking the threats seriously, the Israeli leaders devised a battle plan that incorporated a preemptive attack to wipe out the Arab military forces in Egypt in one felt swoop, with subsequent follow-on attacks on the Syrians and Jordanians. Everything depended on this new generation, "sabra," the youth of Israel. The sabras must defend their nation, they were told. This was a war of survival. Their very lives and the lives of their families and the future of Israel depended on them!

Add to the above picture, the Israelis now being in their third day of war when the hapless Liberty arrives in the East Med. The sabras were attacking every Arab military target in their gunsights, and were doing a complete job. Along comes a slow moving ship toward the Israeli coast from the direction of Port Said, Egypt. An early morning Israeli airborne reconnaissance mission (Noratlas aircraft discussed below) is flown over the ship. As it turns out, the Liberty is not identified by the Israelis as she continues to steam toward Israel (see reasons discussed below).

Nobody knew the identity and function of this mystery ship, and that includes some US naval authorities in the Mediterranean. For example, senior officials on the USS Saratoga, operating near Crete, referred to the Liberty as the USNS Liberty, a civilian-manned contract ship (see Ennes, p. 75, footnote 4). Further, those authorities who knew did not know the precise location of the Liberty in the war zone off the coast of El Arish, Egypt. Additionally, our VQ crew had no idea of the Liberty's presence that fateful day.

The track of the USS Liberty in the battle zone had to look ominous to the planners in the Israeli war room and the "pumped up" Israeli sabras. Just as our VQ2 mission commander was concerned about our safety on an ominous track on the June 5/6 night flight, the approach of the Liberty to El Arish must have appeared ominous to the Israelis as the vessel came toward them from Egypt. Moreover, as the Liberty passed Port Said close-in shore during the night of June 7/8 heading easterly, the crew reported seeing the sky around the city filled with smoke and fire. The Liberty was very close to the shore that morning, so close that a "little prop plane" could be seen every few moments skimming the sand dunes on the beach (see Ennes, p. 50).

Following the first Israeli reconnaissance morning flight by the flying boxcar (a Noratlas) at 080600 (local), the Liberty crew notices its flag is fouled. Besides, the flag was "dark with soot and badly tattered." It was replaced sometime after 080720 (local), well after this Noratlas reconnoitered the Liberty. The ship was barely in international waters (see Ennes, pp. 50-51).

One or more Israeli Noratlas aircraft overfly the Liberty at least six times between 081030 and 11245 (local) (see Ennes' narrative and sequence of events inside the cover of his book). After the overflight at 0600, the next overflight occurs at 1030. It was made at near masthead level, reminiscent of our VQ2 low level flights (explained below).

While I will concede it is likely this Noratlas crew observed the American flag, we have no way of actually knowing that fact, nor if identified, when the information reached the war room in Tel Aviv. We on the VQ2 EC121M did not hear any such reporting by radio; only later in the afternoon did we hear references to flag during the attacks.

Therefore, I must conclude that the report to Tel Aviv authorities was probably passed to the war room post facto. We have no idea what time any of the Noratlases recovered at home nor the time the intelligence information about the American flag was made available in the war room. I think it was probably during the MTB attack because the torpedo boats halted their attacks when they could have finished off the Liberty.

According to Ennes, the three MTBs left the port of Ashdod at 1200 local, some 125 miles away, heading for the Liberty at 35 plus knots. They commenced a machine gun attack and launched torpedos at 1435 local. Three minutes later, the sabras mysteriously broke off the engagement. If the boat commanders had wanted to sink the Liberty, they could have done so at this time. Instead, they ceased fire and retreated, returning later to offer assistance to the stricken Liberty. I contend it was during the attack the identification of the American ship became known to the Israeli war planners. I also believe our VQ-2 voice intercepts showed this identification causing the cease-fire.

In reconstruction of the attack, the Liberty crew makes much of flying the American flag, as if it would somehow protect them in harm's way (see Ennes, p. 152). Little does the crew appreciate the difficulty of identifying a ship from an aircraft merely on the basis of a flag or even a hull number (GTR 5 displayed by the Liberty). Based on my experience of flying many "low and slow" reconnaissance flights over ships in the Med and Atlantic with VQ2, unless the flights are almost overhead, target identification is virtually impossible. High-powered binoculars are not much good in a bouncing low-level aircraft. Even post facto photos do not always reveal identification. See, for example, Ennes' photo of the ship on page 146. This crisp overhead photo does not clearly show the identity of the American ship. So how could the attacking Israeli forces conclude this was a friendly ship?

Additionally, in an interesting commentary Mr. Ennes takes Captain McGonagle to task about identifying flags. The MTBs were flying the Israeli flag prior to the torpedo attack (pp. 148-148). Ennes says his captain must have erred (Ennes' emphasis) during the Naval Court of Inquiry; because "it would have been practically impossible to identify a tiny and wildly fluttering Star of David [flag] a mile away..." Mr. Ennes also doesn't understand why the Israeli MTB's did not recognize the hull number, GTR 5, in their July 6, 1967 account (pp. 171-173). He claims the Israeli sailors had to understand the significance of GTR 5. I would challenge him; I believe I know American sailors who could not decipher such a hull number.

I point out the above in the interest of showing the difficulty of identifying vessels by flags and hull numbers in the heat of battle. Further, identification of a ship's flag by high-performance jet fighters would be even more difficult. Consider that the Israeli pilots are engaged in a war situation, flying combat air patrols (CAPs) and flying to and from the front. They could hardly be expected to identify a small fluttering flag on a ship far below them. My son, an ex-Navy F18 pilot, confirms my contention. While the Liberty crew thinks these pilots were intent on identifying them, in fact the pilots were probably engaged in more pressing activity to protect their country.

At 1400, when the Israeli aircraft commenced their attack, the Liberty crew had no idea who the attackers were, even mis-identifying them as Arab MIGs (pp. 69, 75, 97).

At 1430 or so, as the Israeli MTBs approached the Liberty, the senior boat commander may have tried to ascertain the true identity of the ship. Captain McGonagle of the Liberty reported seeing a flashing light from the middle boat. He told his gunners to hold their fire while he attempted to communicate with the MTBs by a hand-held Aldis lamp. One Liberty gunner evidently did hear the captain and opened up with a burst of machine-gun fire. Near simultaneously, the rear gun mount opened fire, "blanketing the center boat." The captain called for all gunners to cease fire but by this time the MTBs returned fire and shortly thereafter launched torpedoes (p. 81). The attack was abbreviated, lasting only three minutes from 1435 to 1438 local. It was during this attack that the Israelis finally identified the American ship. Without such identification, the MTBs would surely have sunk the Liberty.

Less than two hours later, at 1614 local, the American Embassy in Tel Aviv announced in a Flash precedence message to all concerned American authorities that the Israelis erroneously attacked a "may be Navy" ship and apologized for their misdeed (p. 99).

Even the Liberty did not know who her attackers were. According to Liberty log, approximately 15 minutes later, at 1632 local, the crew finally identified the nationality as Israeli as the MTBs returned again, this time to offer assistance to the listing Liberty.

In conclusion, even without taking into account the VQ intercepts, I think Jim Ennes's book makes a strong case the Israelis mistakenly attacked the USS Liberty. The main reason is because they mistook her for an enemy ship. Consequently, I agree with Ennes's citation on page 154. He says the Naval Attachè in Tel Aviv evaluated the attack as "...erroneous attack from trigger happy eagerness to glean some portion of the great victory being shared by IDF Army and Air Force and which the Navy was not sharing." The sabras carried out their duty. Other evidence of a mistaken attack follows in the next enclosure.
_________________
Nowicki Enclosure 4

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Cover-up conundrum, Who was responsible, Why VQ flight never divulged

In his book, Ennes discusses the initial struggle US government officials faced trying to rationalize the presence of the USS Liberty off the coasts of Israel and Egypt following the attack (pp. 125-126). Should the US admit that the Liberty was an intelligence-gathering ship sent to eavesdrop on radio conversations? Surely, the countries would be offended. So to stall for time until there was forthcoming clarification about the attacks, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in the Pentagon issued a press release confirming Liberty was in the East Med and the target of an erroneous attack admitted by the Israelis. The press release informed (falsely) that the mission of the Liberty was to "assure communications between U.S. Government posts in the Middle East and to assist in relaying information concerning the evacuation of American dependents and other American citizens from the countries in the Middle East."

US Navy commands subsequently issued their own conflicting versions of the Liberty's presence, some true, some false. One officer on board the USS America stated (accurately), "...[the Liberty] was there to spy for us. Russia does the same thing. We moved in close to monitor the communications of both Egypt and Israel. We have to. We must be informed of what's going on in a matter of seconds." Vice Admiral Martin, COMSIXTHFLT, said (falsely), "I emphatically deny she was a spy ship" (p. 130).

Two days after the attack on June 10, US military officials in the Pentagon, quoted in a UPI wire-service story, said they were satisfied the Israeli attack on the Liberty was a tragic mistake of warfare. Due to security constraints, the story did not divulge the source of the confirmation. By this time, NSA (and others) would have received our PMFR and the field reports from the NSA civilians in Athens. NSA was also trying to rationalize why the Liberty was there in the first place. In their report, Walter Deeley, Frank Raven, Jane Brewer, and two Navy officers gave the technical reasons for sending the Liberty to the East Med. One reason was to provide VHF and UHF communication coverage (p. 132).

Mr. Ennes appears to bask in the (inaccurate) report of the Shreveport Times editorial some weeks after the incident, that the Liberty was attacked to stop her from exposing Israeli preparations for the Syrian invasion (pp. 142-143). Mr. Ennes, of course, knew the Liberty had no such capability; she had no Hebrew linguists. In addition, Mr. Ennes places credence in a report that the Naval Court of Inquiry received during the time the court was in session (p. 152). Admiral Kidd, the senior Court Officer, stated he received a Top Secret report that showed Israeli aircraft identifying a ship displaying an American flag. I will believe that the source was possibly our VQ-2 platform.

About a submarine in the area Mr. Ennes and other members of the crew believe that a US sub was in the area, recording and photographing all events (pp. 64, 206, 218). While I cannot discount this possibility, I can eliminate the mystery submarine being the USS Amberjack, operating in the East Med at that time. A colleague of mine on TAD from Rota, [deleted] was aboard the Amberjack. He stated to me on several occasions the sub was not his unit, as they operated in the Alexandria area during the Liberty attack. (Note: On a USS Liberty's webpage (www.halcyon.com/jim/ussliberty/cyanide.htm) a suggestion is made that the submarine was possibly the Amberjack.)

In several passages of his book Mr. Ennes says the Israelis must have known of the identity and presence of the intelligence-gathering Liberty. He credits the Israelis with having one of the best intelligence services in the world (p. 211). If that is correct, why didn't the Israelis know that the Liberty had no capability against Israeli targets? With no linguistic capability, the ship could not possibly discredit an Israeli concocted story of self-defense or a scheduled surprise attack on Syria on June 8 (delayed 24 hours because of the Liberty's presence, according to Mr. Ennes' supposition). Moreover, as we know, NSG and NSA linguists were embarked in Rota. According to Mr. Ennes' logic, the Israeli intelligence service surely knew of the identity of these linguists who were only Arabic-qualified. I think Mr. Ennes gives too much credit to Israeli intelligence and has little understanding of the complexity of intelligence systems supporting tactical forces.

On another Liberty webpage (www.halcyon.com/jim/uissliberty/summary.txt), Mr. Ennes boldly proclaims in "Assault on the Liberty: A summary" that "The [Israeli] reconnaissance pilots were heard by intercept operators in Germany and in Lebanon reporting to their headquarters that they could see an American flag and men sunbathing on deck." I challenge this statement. VHF and UHF communications are normally limited to short range. It is rare these communications can be intercepted by ground stations more than 100 miles from the source. My personal experience, for instance, aboard the USS Little Rock in 1966, when [deleted], [deleted] and I conducted hearability tests from the Little Rock during a voyage from Beirut, Lebanon across the East Med (close to Cyprus) suggests the improbability of VHF/UHF intercept from Lebanon, much less Germany. From Beirut to the location of the Liberty, it is over 200 miles, about the limit of airborne (e.g., VQ, ACRP) intercepts (and this was before the days of satellite intercepts).

So finally remains the real question: who was at fault for the Liberty incident? At the risk of sounding pretentious and arrogant, I want to offer my views about where to put the onus. I consider several key players: NSA, Pentagon, Naval Commanders, Liberty's CO, NSG officers, the Israelis, all with some manner of culpability.

But who was most responsible? At the risk of being despised by the Liberty crew, I can overlook the Israelis for their part. The young sabras were determined to save a fragile nation in a time of war. Complicating matters for them, they possessed imperfect intelligence information on this mystery ship in their waters.

Second, NSA, Pentagon, and U.S. Navy and Theater Commanders (including LANFLT, NAVEUR, and SIXTHFLT) all shared much responsibility. After all, it was they who put the ship in harm's way. But, after sending the ship's tasking and attempting to move the ship away from the battle zone, their ability to control the ship was limited by an inefficient communication system that plagued this era of the Cold War. These were the days before the advent of efficient communications systems with computers and satellites. Anyone who had spent any time in a Comm Center (General Service or SPINTCOMM) was aware of gigantic problems in these facilities, especially the relay centers on which the Liberty relied for the bulk of her communications support. The problems of sending key messages to the Liberty by naval authorities (see Appendix A, pp. 225-233 and Appendix N, pp. 269-275) were also compound by an inoperative Liberty TRSSCOMM system (which seemed to be down much of the time).

Third, Mr. Ennes and his CT crew must bear some responsibility. Had they spent some time in Division 333 (NAVSECGRUDEPT Rota) with division head, [deleted], during the Rota port call, they might have been aware of the VQ and ACRP missions in the East Med. While their Rota indoctrination may not have done any good in the end, Mr. Ennes and crew might have better advised the CO on the unfolding dangerous events.

Finally, having said the above, it leaves only one real responsible person: the CO, Captain McGonagle. In the Navy, every CO and commander of a naval unit understands responsibility for the safety of personnel and equipment entrusted to him. If not explicit, it is implicitly understood. Captain McGonagle failed in this responsibility. If, for example, he had acted like our VQ-2 mission commander who instinctively changed our track on that June 5/6 night flight, Captain McGonagle might have averted the tragedy by altering the ship's track on his own initiative. Moreover, the captain failed to take into account a key failing of human behavior in dealing with seniors, which simply goes like this: "out of sight, out of mind." Translated, this axiom means when the task begins military commanders are invariably on their own. Indeed, Captain McGonagle alone was ultimately responsible for the safety of his ship and crew.

Now, returning to the last issue at hand: why for 33 years--until now did the VQ-2 flight remain unknown to the American public? I have no idea. I suppose it was due to a myriad of circumstances including national security considerations. It could be because of the reluctance of government officials to acknowledge US airborne platforms eavesdropping on comrades, especially a friend like Israel. Or, it could be due to an incomplete inquiry. Jim Ennes talks about the post facto investigation on pages 163 and 215. The investigators did not enjoy all the facts. He states the Department of Defense, under Walter Deeley, conducted a full-blown investigation into the incident, with the DOD and JCS even sending a Major General to head-up a fact-finding team in the Mediterranean. Their job was for an on-the-spot inquiry, including a review of the mishandled of communications. Why didn't the investigative team pursue me and my colleagues at NAVSECGRUDEPT Rota and VQ2? Ennes also stated the Liberty's Lieutenant Bennett was subsequently assigned to NSA, where he tried to gain access to CIA files (there is no mention of NSA files or the tapes). Why didn't LT Bennett contact G6, especially [deleted] and his Hebrew linguists in the Israeli military section in G643?

On a last note, like Mr. Ennes, who writes his book because the story "cries out to be told" and because he feels he is uniquely qualified to tell all, I too feel qualified with a story to be told. Unfortunately our stories contradict. While Mr. Ennes and the Liberty crew had the misfortune of enduring the consequences of the attack, they did not know their attackers. I did.
_________________
Nowicki Enclosure 5

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Naval Career of Marvin E. Nowicki (1955-1979)

Jan 1955 Fresh off the farm and out of high school in southern Illinois, joined the US Navy. Attended boot camp at Great Lakes, IL

Jun 1955 Graduated from Class A Teleman School in San Diego, CA

Aug 1955 Graduated from Class A CTO-branch school in Imperial Beach, CA

Dec 1955 Completed on-the-job training in traffic analysis in GENS-2 at NSA, Ft. Meade, MD

Advanced to CTSN

Jul 1957 Completed two years and half of duty working in Process and Reporting (P&R) on RU naval problem at Kami Seya, Japan

Advanced to CT3 and then CT2

Jul 1958 Finished one-year of duty in P&R on CHICOM naval problem on the mountain top at the US Army (ASA) base, Linkou, Taiwan. The battle over Quemoy and Matsu was the hot topic during latter part of my tour. Worked extensively with CIA operatives in Taipei who collected and shared HF comms intercepts with us.

Advanced to CT1

Dec 1961 Completed three-year tour of duty at NSA working in P&R in A24 division analyzing the Soviet navy communications in the Far East. My assignment was on the in-area submarine problem.

During NSA tour, spend six months in 1960 on TAD in Key West, FL, intercepting, reporting, and developing a database on Cuban military targets. This was the time when the USS Sea Poacher was shot-up by the Cuban navy as Castro was consolidating his hold on the country.

Changed CT branches, from CTO to CTR

Jul 1962 Finished 24 weeks of Russian language training at Anacostia Naval Station in DC. Couple items of interest: Two Norwegians were in my class, and in the class following mine was Fred Randall. Fred was aboard the VQ-1 EC121M that was shotdown by the North Koreans in 1969.

Oct 1962 Completed 12 weeks of advanced Russian R/T training at NSA, Ft. Meade, MD. Advanced to CTRC but soon was automatically converted to CTIC.

Feb 1965 Completed three-year tour of duty at NAVCOMMSTA, Sidi Yahia, Morocco in NAVSECGRUDEPT, working Soviet Merchant Shipping problem. We monitored the Merships communicating on HF comms with Moscow and their home fleet headquarters in the Black Sea. Within a year or two after completion of my tour of duty, the responsibility for monitoring the Merships was transferred to NAVSECGRUACT Edzell, Scotland.

Highlights of Sidi Yahia tour: (a) tracked and reported numerous RU MerShip arms carriers transiting into the Mediterranean from the Black and occasionally the Baltic Seas. Our information allowed the US Navy to locate and photograph these arms carrying ships entering the Med on voyages to Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Somalia, Iraq, and other third world countries aligned with the Soviet Union. (b) Got in on the tail-end of the Cuban Missile Crisis. NAVSECGRUDEPT Sidi Yahia provided the majority of heads-up and tracking data on Soviet arms carriers heading to Cuba in fall of 1962; (c) Helped work out bugs in NSA's "machine formatted" RU world-wide MerShip reporting system. Also drafted RU MerShip handbook.

Mar 1966 Finished 52 weeks of "special Arabic" (code name for Hebrew language) training at the NSA National Cryptologic School.

Apr 1966 While still attached to NSA, along with four NSA-assigned CTI Hebrew linguists, spent 30-day TAD to VQ-2 in Rota, Spain, conducting airborne surveys (hearability tests) of Israeli military tactical communications. A series of very long 18-hour VQ-2 airborne collection flights were flown off the coast of Israel from Wheelus AFB, Tripoli, Libya. At this stage of embryonic collection efforts of tactical comms from Mid East targets, Wheelus Air Force base was the nearest air facility with secure SI storage facilities. USA512J (discussed above) in Athens, Greece was not yet operational.

Jul 1968 Completed two plus years of duty in NAVSECGRUDEPT Rota, assigned to the new Division 333 (the linguistic TAD pool) as a dual linguist (RU/HE) to support VQ-2 airborne missions and other direct support (DirSup) missions; was plank-owner in Division 333; was one of the first two CTIs to qualify as aircrewmen by VQ-2. The other qualifier was [deleted], a classmate in the Hebrew language course at NSA. [deleted] was our division officer, and [deleted] was a fellow TAD'er who spent many days away from Rota aboard airplanes, ships, and submarines. He was aboard the USS Amberjack during the Six Day War.

Much of my time in Rota was spent on TAD with VQ-2. The VQ-2 mission was to conduct airborne electronic reconnaissance to collect information on areas and targets of naval and national importance. We flew EA3B and EC121M missions in the eastern and central Med, Baltic, and North Atlantic against Russian, Arab, and Israeli targets. Occasionally, we made flights into the Adriatic to cover Serbo-Croatian and Albanian targets.

Also, early in my Rota tour, spent 30 days TAD aboard the USS Little Rock during its East Med operations in 1966. The purpose of the TAD was to conduct VHF/UHF hearability tests of Israeli and Egyptian tactical communications from the Little Rock track between Beirut and Crete. The NSG station on Cyprus was unable to hear VHF/UHF targets (but was in a good location to collect HF communications). The Little Rock hearability tests yielded very little intercept; targets were mostly confined to northern Israel and Syria.

Highlights of Rota tour: (a) collected tactical comms of Israeli attacks on USS Liberty and Six Day War; (b) searched for RU SAM-2 sites in Algeria's part of the Sahara Desert from Wheelus AFB; (c) hunted RU TU95 Bears flying reconnaissance of US Atlantic Fleet carrier groups. Our VQ hunts were flown from Bodo, Norway, Keflavik, Iceland, Scotland, Lajes, Azores; and Rota; (d) supported COMSIXTHFLT units with information collected by numerous VQ high/low level missions against Russian naval units of the Fifth Eskadra operating in the Med; (e) collected and transcribed hundreds of hours of RU/HE tactical comms in support National and DirSup tasking.

Advanced to Warrant Officer (WO-1).

Dec 1971 Finished three-year tour of duty at NSA in G group (Frank Raven, Chief). Initially assigned as traffic analyst in G6 ([deleted]), actually working in G643 ([deleted]) on the Israeli military problem. With approximately one year left on my tour, became chief of G643 and later the chief of G64, responsible for all Mid East targets. At end of tour was relieved by USAF Lt. Colonel. Finally, prior to the completion of the NSA tour, attended the Senior Military Cryptologic Supervisors Course sponsored by the National Cryptologic School.

Highlights of NSA tour: (a) helped institute the first computerized program handling and processing voice transcript in G64; (b) assisted with development of database on Israeli military, particularly its Air Force; (c) was member of A/G task force cobbled together by Frank Raven (G group) and Walter Deeley (A group) to track and report on immense Soviet military build-up of Arab military forces in the wake of destruction in the Six Day War.

Advanced to Chief Warrant Officer (CWO-2) and then Lieutenant Junior Grade in the Limited Duty Officer (LDO) program.

August 1975 Completed four-year assignment in the Cryptologic Support Group (CSG) in Rota, Spain. The CSG was a new concept providing SIGINT support to the collocated Fleet Ocean Surveillance Information Facility (FOSIF) in Rota. FOSIF's mission was also a new concept to furnish all-source intelligence to COMSIXTHFLT on any targets affecting the fleet commander and subordinate units, especially from Russian Navy units operating in the Med. Together the FOSIF and CSG were an entirely new approach in all-source intelligence support. Before, there was no place in the navy or national community where information could be brought together, analyzed, and collated with other information tactically.

Our FOSIF/CSG operation was sponsored by NIC, CINCUSNAVEUR, and DIRNSA. First located in the Fleet Weather Center on the Rota Naval Station, it was later moved to NAVSECGRUDEPT Rota spaces at the Bullseye site. NAVSECGRUACT Rota offered completely secure spaces and improved point-to-point communications with SixthFlt, other customers, and suppliers of intelligence. NAVSECGRUACT Rota offered access to the overall SIGINT community (e.g., overhead, airborne, BULLSEYE, land-based, DIRNSA) so that all-source information could be furnished to SixthFlt by FOSIF/CSG on a real-time basis.

Highlights of this plank-owning FOSIF/CSG assignment: (a) assembled and fused myriad SIGINT and other intelligence data for the afloat commander, a task never before accomplished in the USN; (b) provided continuous 24/7 intelligence support to the fleet on the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, and the follow-on Soviet military resupply of its Arab friends by air and sea; and (c) spent much time on the road closing the philosophical gap that had developed over the years between the "ocean blue" navy and the national SIGINT community, with the help of local imaginative and progressive leaders and thinkers. Here I refer to my boss, Commander [deleted], eventually to make Admiral and become Commander of Naval Security Group, and Commander [deleted], OIC of FOSIF Rota, eventually to make Rear Admiral.

Finally, it is noteworthy that shortly after activation of FOSIF/CSG in Rota, a second FOSIF/CSG was activated in PacFlt at Kami Seya. Later FOSICs (Fleet Ocean Surveillance Intelligence Centers) were launched at CINCUSNAVEUR, London, CINCLANTFLT, Norfolk, and CINCPACFLT Hawaii. All were colocated with NSG units or commands.

Advanced to Lieutenant (LDO).

June 1979 Completed a four year tour of duty as the first Officer in Charge of NAVSECGRUDET Brunswick, ME. A subunit of NAVSECGRUACT, Winter Harbor, ME (for logistical purposes), my new unit for launched by CINCLANTFLT and DIRNSA to provide RU linguistic and cryptologic support to a new type of airborne intelligence collector home-based at the Naval Air Station, Brunswick, ME. This new airborne collector was known as Special Projects (also variously known as [deleted], [deleted], etc.). It was attached to the Patrol Squadron VP-26 for logistics and cover purposes. With specially configured EP3 aircraft, Special Projects was able to collect a myriad of raw intelligence information including SIGINT, ELINT, VISINT, acoustical, and nuclear intelligence data from Soviet surface, submarine, and airborne targets, using high and low altitude flight profiles

Highlights of this tour: (a) as plank-owner, literally built the Brunswick SecGru operation from the ground up. On my arrival, NAVSECGRUDET Brunswick did not exist. On departure, it was a fully operational NSG unit that included 10 RU linguists and

Alpha · Posted: Thu Jun 17, 2004 4:54 pm Post subject: Consequential Lies

TomPaine.com
June 16, 2004

Consequential Lies
By Ray McGovern

The 9/11 commission has found "no credible evidence" of an Iraq/Al Qaeda link. But that doesn't mean Bush's spin machine will be put out to pasture. In fact, Bush and Cheney gave speeches earlier this week timed to drive the connections story home once again. But beyond perpetuating election-boosting misinformation among the American people, such creativity with the truth has much more frightening consequences. Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern explains.

As the notion evaporates that the United States could implant democracy in Iraq at gunpoint or that “weapons of mass destruction” will ever be found, the Bush administration has resurrected the argument that Saddam Hussein had longstanding ties to Al Qaeda.

Speeches by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney earlier this week were timed to pre-empt and cast doubt on a 9/11 commission finding released on Wednesday that there is “no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States.”

The all-too-familiar notion fostered by Bush and Cheney, however, is that Iraq was indeed involved in the attacks of 9/11, even though this is as spurious as the claim about WMD. Spurious or not, it has been extremely effective in playing on the trauma of 9/11 to whip up support for war on Iraq. A year ago 69 percent of Americans believed that Iraq was largely responsible for 9/11, and polls this spring show that a majority still believe this to be the case.

Successful as its PR approach on this key issue has been in rallying support for the war, the administration is not about to cede the field to the commission. A “senior administration official” has already reacted to the commission report, insisting, “We stand by what (Secretary of State) Powell and (CIA Director) Tenet have said" on links between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

With violence steadily increasing in Iraq and the 9/11 commission hearings about to resume, the White House spin machine shifted into a tried and tested gear—a technique described as “most brilliant” by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels: “It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”

The refrain struck up again on Monday with Cheney claiming that Saddam Hussein had “long established ties” with Al Qaeda. Cheney offered no details, but the president elaborated the following day, citing “evidence” on ties between Iraq and “Al Qaeda operative” Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—evidence the CIA considers inconclusive at best. George Tenet told the Senate in February that, although Zarqawi had had contacts with Al Qaeda, he appeared to be “autonomous,” and U.S. officials now say it has become increasingly clear that Zarqawi was operating independently.

As for 9/11, never mind the admission the president tucked into an impromptu interview on Sept. 17, 2003: “We’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September 11th.” That admission received little play in the mainstream press, and it will be interesting to see if anyone remembers it this time around. If need be, it can be dusted off as proof that the president never held Saddam Hussein directly responsible for 9/11, just as the administration has argued (erroneously) that it never said an attack from Iraq was “imminent.”

Consequential Lies...

The continual spinning—not only about cosmic issues like Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda and WMD but also more limited episodes like the “Jessica Lynch Story”—constitutes what might be called consequential lies, not only for what they do to U.S. credibility, but also for the effect that have day to day on the ground in Iraq.

Consider the explanation offered, with no hint of shame, by U.S. Army Corporal Michael Richardson in Iraq to the London Evening Standard in June 2003:
“There was no dilemma when it came to shooting people…I just pulled the trigger…If they were there, they were enemy, whether in uniform or not…There’s a picture of the World Trade Center hanging up by my bed and I keep one in my flak jacket. Every time I feel sorry for these people I look at that. I think, they hit us at home and now it’s our turn. I don’t want to say it’s payback but, you know, it’s pretty much payback.”

The lies about WMD have been no less consequential. Consider Iraqi Gen. Amir Saadi, a British-educated chemist and erstwhile liaison between the Iraqi government and UN weapons inspectors. He was the first of the 55 “most wanted” senior officials to surrender. He did so on April 12, 2003, and took pains to ensure that German TV filmed his surrender lest he disappear down the memory hole. Yet he has been in solitary confinement ever since.

According to Pentagon and intelligence officials, Charles Duelfer, who took over from David Kay as head of the group still searching for WMD believes that Saadi “has not fully answered questions.” Rather, it seems to be a case of coming up with the “wrong” answer.

Saadi has been consistent in telling UN and U.S. inspectors that Iraq’s WMD were destroyed in 1991. David Albright, president of the DC-based Institute for Science and International Security—which has longstanding relationships with Iraqi scientists—suggests that Saadi has not been released because his release would provide further acknowledgment that Iraq did not have such weapons after 1991.

Half-Truths…

What Saadi has been saying is what Saddam’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, told us when he defected in 1995. Everyone from Bush and Cheney on down gave Kamel—who spent 10 years running Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, biological, and missile development programs—fulsome praise for the intelligence windfall he provided about previously unknown weaponry. But no U.S. official told the rest of the story—i. e., that Kamel said that at his order all such weapons were destroyed in 1991, a claim now confirmed by documentary evidence (not to mention the conspicuous absence of WMD).

Benjamin Franklin said, “Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Just ask 19-year-old Abdullah Mohammed Abdulrazzaq, captured by U.S. troops at 2:30 one morning last September in the Baghdad apartment he shared with his widowed mother. Abdulrazzaq was hooded, handcuffed, tortured with electricity and shuttled back and forth among several prisons in Iraq, including Abu Graib. What were his interrogators most interested in learning from this 19-year-old? What he could tell them about the weapons of mass destruction. And as we know, Abdulazzaq’s case is far from unusual.

…and Little Lies

These too have consequences. Remember the unproven allegation about Jessica Lynch being raped? Around midnight on May 12, 2003, Master Sgt. Lisa Girman and three other Army MPs decided to retaliate by abusing Iraqi prisoners at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq, according to a report by Lt. Col. Jerry Phillabaum, commander of her MP battalion. Phillabaum wrote that Girman got it into her head that the rapist might be among the prisoners she was guarding, and decided to exact what he termed “vigilante justice.”

The inference from the disclosures of the past few weeks that the Bush administration apparently paged through the telephone books to find lawyers willing to justify torture and abuse is outrageous enough. It is equally sobering to reflect on the fact that meretricious rhetoric from our highest officials can produce the same effect.

Ray McGovern is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. He had a 27-year career as a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990.

Miami Herald
June 7, 2004

Taking the fall for the disaster in Iraq
BY RAY McGOVERN

You could see what was in the works for CIA Director George Tenet by the way Bush administration officials promoted Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack. Woodward, playing the role of court historian, portrays President Bush as dissatisfied after a briefing by Tenet and his deputy on weapons of mass destruction in late 2002.

''This is the best we've got?'' asks Bush.

Tenet reportedly assured Bush that it was ''a slam-dunk case'' that Iraq had such weapons, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who was present, has confirmed Woodward's account. This provides useful yarn for White House spinners attributing the debacle in Iraq to faulty intelligence and absolving Bush. The slam-dunker is left hanging on the rim of the basket twisting in the wind, so to speak, until he falls of his own weight.

You would not know from Woodward's book that the Oct. 1, 2002, National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi WMD -- used with Congress to hype the threat -- was written several months after the administration decided to make war on Iraq.

That decision had little to do with such weapons. It had very much to do with the imperative seen by Bush's neoconservative advisors to use military force to gain dominant influence over oil-rich Iraq and to eliminate any possible threat to Israel's security.

Secretary of State Colin Powell has admitted that the target audience for the hyped-up NIE was Congress. That estimate and its various drafts formed the centerpiece of the successful campaign to persuade our elected representatives to relinquish to the executive the war-making power vested solely in them by the framers of the Constitution.

Always eager to please, Tenet put the intelligence community to work in support of his masters' effort to play fast and loose with the Constitution. Virtually all of the NIE's conclusions have since been proven wrong. But no matter; it achieved its primary purpose.

Sadly, this is what happens when a CIA director lets himself become ''part of the team'' in the way that the president's political advisors are part of the team. Such behavior is antithetical to the director's statutory duty to tell the emperor when he is wearing no clothes. In an unguarded moment a few months ago, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich -- like Vice President Dick Cheney a frequent visitor to CIA headquarters -- told the press, ``George Tenet is so grateful to the president (presumably for not firing him on Sept. 12, 2001) that he will do anything for him.''

''Anything'' now includes taking the fall for the policy and human disaster of Iraq. As things there go from worse to worse, even some Republican leaders are saying that those responsible must be held to account.

Tenet is the first sacrificial lamb because -- team player that he is -- he can be counted upon to set a good example by taking his ''superb'' performance appraisal and leaving quietly -- burning no bridges. And when in the coming weeks the Senate Intelligence Committee and the 9/11 Commission issue reports strongly critical of the performance of U.S. intelligence, administration spokespersons will stop the buck at Tenet's desk, saying, ``Yes, it was a bad show, but now he's gone.''

This will blow convenient smoke over the actual reasons for the war and protect its neoconservative authors.

For Tenet, though, it renders a certain poetic justice, because the unforgivable sin in intelligence analysis is telling policymakers what you think they want to hear -- in the case of Iraq, justifying with cooked ''intelligence'' what they have already decided to do.

Sycophancy has no place in intelligence work -- and especially not on issues of war and peace.
__________________________________________________
Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years and is the author of “A Compromised CIA: What Can Be Done?” in Patriotism, Democracy and Common Sense, to be published this summer by the Eisenhower Foundation.

Cowboy · Posted: Thu Jun 17, 2004 11:27 pm Post subject: Re: Consequential Lies

Alpha · Posted: Sun Jun 20, 2004 11:18 am Post subject: THE ROAD TO WAR

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/ae/books/reviews/2632805

June 18, 2004, 10:36AM

THE ROAD TO WAR
James Bamford aims big guns at Bush administration over U.S. role in Iraq
By JAMES D. FAIRBANKS

A PRETEXT FOR WAR:
9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse
of America's Intelligence Agencies.
By James Bamford.
Doubleday, 420 pp. $26.95.

THIS book's title leaves no doubt as to its major thesis. Bamford is one of the growing number of critics who believe the Bush administration was determined to get rid of Saddam Hussein long before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and that it used these attacks as a pretext for the war in Iraq.

He also agrees with those who charge that the invasion of Iraq diverted resources that should have been used in the pursuit of al-Qaida, inflamed Muslim anger against the United States and increased support for al-Qaida. Osama bin Laden's goal in attacking Americans, according to Bamford, was always to provoke us to strike back and "personally wage the battle against the Muslims."

The author's previous books, The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, provided detailed examinations of the National Security Agency, the government's largest and most secretive spy agency. As a former Naval Security Group communications technician, Bamford apparently has good contacts within the intelligence community, though it is sometimes difficult to know how much weight to place on information that comes from unnamed intelligence officials.

Several of those interviewed by Bamford acknowledged that American defenses had never anticipated and were unprepared for the kind of attack launched Sept. 11, 2001. The first section of this book details the confusion that existed throughout the national government in the hours immediately after the first plane struck the World Trade Center.

Virtually the entire nuclear command structure would eventually be activated, but in the first several hours after the attack many of the nation's leaders knew less about what had happened than ordinary citizens watching television news. Bamford writes that the network news programs were the best source of information because the intelligence community was busy emptying its buildings and running for cover.

Bamford's portrait of the president is not flattering. He describes a befuddled chief executive "strangely uninterested in further information" when first told of the attack. He writes that in one of the most critical moments in American history the country had essentially become leaderless.

Bamford notes, perhaps a bit unfairly, the stark contrast between the actions of George W. Bush after 9/11 and Lyndon Johnson after the assassination of President Kennedy. Despite concerns that the assassination might be part of a larger conspiracy to topple the American government, Johnson insisted on flying straight back to Washington to reassure the nation and calm its fears. Bush made a secret flight to an underground bunker at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Neb., and remained hidden from the American public for most of the day.

Part two of the book is a critique of the many intelligence failings that allowed the 9/11 attacks to occur. Departmental jealousies may have kept the CIA from passing on intelligence when one of the hijackers, a known al-Qaida operative, arrived in New York. Bamford quotes an unnamed FBI official as charging that the CIA officials responsible have "blood on their hands ... three thousand deaths on their hands."

As testimony before the Sept. 11 Commission later revealed, al-Qaida had never tried to hide the fact that it was at war with America. Bamford gives a detailed account of the 1996 Israeli attack on a refugee camp at Qana in southern Lebanon, an event little noted in the American press but denounced by the rest of world and described here as the "match lighting the fuse that would eventually lead to the World Trade Center."

In the third and most controversial section of the book (titled "Deception"), Bamford argues that the Bush administration engaged in a systematic effort to mislead both Congress and the public regarding the threat posed by Iraq and its relationship to al-Qaida.

His most startling charge is not that the administration misled the nation regarding the threat posed by Iraq but that the administration's grand design for the Middle East was based on a plan originally prepared for the Israeli government.

According to Bamford, the basic blueprint for the administration's Middle East policy had been drawn up in the mid-1990s by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, three neoconservatives who would be named to influential positions in the Bush administration.

Described as a kind of "American privy council" to former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the three proposed what they called a "Clean Break" plan, which involved getting the United States to pull out of the peace negotiations in order to let "Israel take care of the Palestinians as it saw fit." Under the "Clean Break" plan, Israel would launch pre-emptive attacks against its major Arab enemies and replace Saddam Hussein with a puppet leader friendly to Israel.

Bamford records that Netanyahu wisely rejected the plan but that the Perle group found a more receptive audience for their recommendations inside the Bush administration. The fact that several of the key players most aggressively pushing the Iraqi war had originally outlined it for the benefit of another country raises "the most troubling conflict of interest questions," he writes.

A possible conflict of interest is but one of many troubling questions raised in A Pretext for War. Many of these questions are currently being pursued in Senate hearings and through other inquiries, so the final chapter in the story of America's first pre-emptive war is still to be written.

James D. Fairbanks teaches political science at the University of Houston-Downtown.

Alpha

SHOW: Fresh Air (12:00 Noon PM ET) - NPR

June 8, 2004 Tuesday

LENGTH: 5443 words

HEADLINE: James Bamford discusses his book, "A Pretext for War"

ANCHORS: TERRY GROSS

BODY:
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

My guest, James Bamford, is the author of the new book, "A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies." He writes about weaknesses in American intelligence before 9/11, reconstructs how the military and the Bush administration responded on 9/11, explores the motivations behind the invasion of Iraq and charges that intelligence agencies were pressured to come up with findings that would justify the invasion. Bamford has written extensively about national security issues and is the author of two best-selling books about the highly secretive National Security Agency, "The Puzzle Palace" and "Body of Secrets."

The United States has turned against Ahmad Chalabi, who was the head of the Iraqi National Congress and who, at one time, was a likely leader of the new Iraq. What is some of the information that we got from him that turned out to be false?

Prof. JAMES BAMFORD (Author, "A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies"): Well, Chalabi supplied a number of defectors to the United States that provided false information. Some of the information came from defectors that indicated that the Iraqis had these bioweapons labs, which raised a lot of concern at the time and a lot of media coverage but turned out to be false. The few vehicles they did find ended up not being for biological warfare but for, I think, developing helium for balloons of some sort, weather balloons or launching systems or something. But they certainly didn't have to do with biological weapons labs. So that was part of the problem.

A lot of the information that came from the people he supplied was false. And a number of people suspect that the key reason Chalabi kept pushing these people on the US and also on the press--but I think one of the primary motives behind Ahmad Chalabi was to get himself put in as the president of Iraq. He had been wanting that for years and years and years. And as I write in my book, he had known many of the neoconservatives in the Bush administration for more than a decade and had become very good friends with them. And they were very much supporting his taking over Iraq. And then they would have had their own puppet in there.

GROSS: Some of the money that actually helped support Chalabi went through a group called the Rendon Group, which was backed by the CIA. What was the Rendon Group?

Prof. BAMFORD: Well, the Rendon Group is one of these sort of shadowy, private companies that do a lot of clandestine work for the CIA and other parts of the government. And the Rendon Group specializes in disinformation campaigns; it ran an anti-Saddam disinformation campaign for a number of years. And it's been used by the United States in many conflicts to broadcast the US message and to help eliminate the message of whoever the United States is opposing. So its background is basically used by the government in a lot of sort of clandestine information-operations activities.

GROSS: So, in this case, the Rendon Group was hired to turn world opinion against Saddam Hussein?

Prof. BAMFORD: That's right, yeah. This was after the Gulf War. And the CIA put a fair amount of money into it, and they really wanted to change the view of the world towards Saddam Hussein.

GROSS: So with the help of the CIA, Chalabi became a real force in terms of, you know, informing or misinforming people about what was happening in Iraq and a real force in terms of being groomed as a future leader of Iraq. But at some point the CIA started to turn against him. Why?

Prof. BAMFORD: Well, the CIA started having problems with both accountability of money and, also, the information he was providing. And it didn't look like he was in control of as much people and groups as he claimed he was, so the CIA turned away from him in the mid-1990s. Largely it was over issues of credibility, money and information.

GROSS: And you say that eventually he got support from a group of neoconservatives, including three people who became national security advisers to President George W. Bush: Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser. They drew up a plan that, you say, became a blueprint for the war in Iraq. The plan was actually drawn up for Israel and for then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; he had hired them as consultants. What was the plan that they came up with for him?

Prof. BAMFORD: Well, the plan actually that they came up for Israel, for Netanyahu, to implement was very similar to what the plan was that we ended up implementing as we went into war with Iraq. And that was to overthrow Saddam Hussein and replace him with somebody friendly to both the United States and Israel. Part of the original plan, the one that they had proposed for Israel, involved not just Iraq but also invading Syria and Lebanon. And one of the reasons that they wanted to give for doing that was, basically, a pretext to get the US on board and to get the US public support. And they were going to announce that part of the reason that they were doing this was to try to eradicate the drug dealing that's going on in Lebanon and, also, to look for weapons of mass destruction. And another reason was to eliminate counterfeiting of US money that was going on there. So there was a number of pretexts that they were going to use to justify their invasion of Syria and Lebanon.

GROSS: Netanyahu rejected this plan. Do you know why?

Prof. BAMFORD: Well, I don't think he thought it was in Israel's interest to go to war with three of its neighbors at that point. It was a very--it would have been an extremely adventurous move for the Israeli government to launch a war on a number of its fronts, especially without any real provocation. None of these countries were invading Israel. And I think Netanyahu felt he had enough on his plate without declaring a Middle East war.

GROSS: Now how do you think that report figures into the American invasion of Iraq?

Prof. BAMFORD: Well, the way it figures in is that the key people behind this initial report back in 1996, which was called "A Clean Break"--that was their title for it--were three of the key players who ended up implementing this war in Iraq that we're having right now. And that was Richard Perle, who became head of the Defense Policy Board, which is a very major player in declaring policy for the US government in terms of the Department of Defense, and Douglas Feith, who now is the number-three man in the Pentagon, basically, the undersecretary of Defense for policy. And his job is creating policy; he's responsible for much of the war planning and the post-war planning. And the third person is David Wurmser, who was originally with the State Department and now is Vice President Cheney's Middle East adviser.

So these three players played a major role in the run-up to the war in Iraq after the September 11th attacks. And they were the same three major players who were the key people behind this "Clean Break" report, which was the original report to Israel suggesting that the Israeli government launch this war against Iraq and several of its other neighbors.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is James Bamford. He's written extensively about intelligence in America and particularly about the National Security Agency. His new book is called "A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies."

Now we've been talking about Douglas Feith, Richard Perle and David Wurmser, three national security advisers to President George W. Bush, and their role in advocating war in Iraq. What was their connection to Ahmad Chalabi?

Prof. BAMFORD: Well, actually, Terry, the connection between these people and Ahmad Chalabi goes back a long ways. Chalabi had known Richard Perle and the deputy Defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, for a long, long time, more than 10 years, maybe up to 15 years. They got to know each other through a mutual fund, Albert Wohlstetter, who was a professor at the University of Chicago. And he introduced several of these people together. Chalabi had actually been a student of Wohlstetter, and Wohlstetter knew both Perle and Wolfowitz very well. So they all got to know each other in the late '80s, and from then on they thought that Chalabi was an ideal candidate to take over Iraq. For a long time Chalabi had been groomed, basically, to be the next president of Iraq, as soon as they were able to get rid of Saddam Hussein.

GROSS: Now what were some of the disagreements between the neoconservatives, who you've been describing, and the CIA about Chalabi and what his role should be in Iraq?

Prof. BAMFORD: Well, I think the major disagreements were that the CIA felt that Chalabi wasn't trustworthy; that he didn't really control very many people; that he didn't have very much support within Iraq. He'd left Iraq when he was 12 years old and hadn't really been back there since. And the CIA had a lot of other things on its agenda. It was looking for other ways to have a coup in Iraq. It wanted, basically, a coup among generals to take over the country from Saddam Hussein and not have this uprising led by Ahmad Chalabi. And that was the main difference. The neocons, led by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, pretty much, were pushing to have Chalabi lead this massive insurrection.

But the CIA looked at it largely like what happened on the Bay of Pigs, where originally the Eisenhower administration, later the Kennedy administration, came up with this plan to put a small group of rebels in the country that would inspire this much larger revolution and overthrow Castro. And it turned out to be an enormous debacle, and I think that's one of the things that they were afraid of with Chalabi.

GROSS: My guest is James Bamford, author of the new book "A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is James Bamford. And he's written extensively about intelligence in the United States, including the National Security Agency. His new book is called "A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies."

You write a lot about how information was cherry-picked to make the case for war. I mean, your title of the book is "A Pretext for War." You write how one CIA officer, who was one of your sources, said that--and he was, by the way, in a unit charged with finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He said that his boss said, 'If President Bush wants to go to war, it's your job to give him a reason to do so.' Can you tell us about what he described to you about this?

Prof. BAMFORD: Yes. This person was a former case officer. The person went through the farm, the training school. And this person, this case officer, was outraged. And there was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction. I interviewed a lot of people at the CIA, and not one of them came up with any hard information saying that there was any indications of weapons of mass destruction before we went to war. And there was a tremendous amount of pressure, on the other hand, from the vice president's office, from Cheney's office, to come up with something. He went through the CIA a number of times, and according to one of the people at CIA I interviewed, the implication was that they were supposed to find something and preferably something nuclear. So there was a lot of pressure from outside the agency on the agency to come up with something to justify the war.

GROSS: Do you think it would have been appropriate for, say, George Tenet to protect his men from that kind of pressure to find something that didn't seem to be there? You could also argue that it was right to press them to find this because it might have been there, and it was their job to find it if there was any chance that it existed, you know. So that pressure would be pressuring them to find that needle in the haystack, even if it was only a needle.

Prof. BAMFORD: Well, there's automatically a lot of pressure on them to find something. The problem comes when you push somebody to justify a war by finding something that isn't there, and I think that's the problem that we had. George Tenet, at the very beginning, seemed to stand up against the administration at the early stages during the summer and fall of 2002. There was a point where the administration was trying to push the issue of Saddam doing a deal with people in Niger, a West African country, for uranium in order to build up a nuclear weapons supply in Iraq. And at first George Tenet fought against that. He argued that the president should have that reference to the Niger nuclear deal taken out of his public, nationwide address in Cincinnati in October of 2002. So that took a lot of gumption, basically, to stand up against the White House and say--basically, demand that it be taken out of his speech.

But then after that it seemed like George Tenet pretty much gave up and sort of threw up his hands and said, 'I'm not going to fight this anymore.' I mean, that was the impression I got because he never again took a strong stance on something like that. And you could see it just a few months later during the president's State of the Union address, where that same reference was put back in. And this time George Tenet not only didn't fight against it; he didn't even bother reading the president's State of the Union address, which is rather extraordinary considering that we're about to go to war based on what the president is saying during his State of the Union address and the director of Central Intelligence doesn't even bother to read the address.

So it seemed to me that at some point there around October of 2002, George Tenet, after his sort of battle with the White House over taking out the Niger material from the Cincinnati speech, kind of threw up his hands and said, 'OK, you win. I give up,' and from then on became a team player with the White House and the hard-core neoconservatives.

GROSS: Do you have any inside information from your sources about the American secrets that Ahmad Chalabi is alleged to have given to Iran? You know, we've been reading in the newspapers that he's alleged to have told Iran that the United States had broken its code and that, therefore, we were able to interpret certain Iranian intelligence secrets; that means Iran would now change its code, and we'd no longer have access to that source of information.

Prof. BAMFORD: Well, I do know that the National Security Agency spent many, many years trying to break the Iranian code. It was a very, very difficult cipher system to break. And code-breaking these days is a very, very difficult occupation, having written two books on the National Security Agency. The problem is that the crypto systems these days are extremely complex and very hard. The basic way that the NSA had to break that code, the Iranian cipher, was by using people to penetrate the organization. The Iranian Embassy in Baghdad--that's where it was penetrated. And they used people, basically code clerks, to get in there and do things to the crypto system to make it usable for NSA.

One of the things that's done these days is to try to bug a keyboard. If you could bug the keyboard, then you're bugging the system before the information actually gets encrypted. Or else bug the monitor, or you could bug a power cord. You could do various things that way. And apparently that was one of the things that they had done, one of those ways of tapping into the Iranian communications system.

So the loss of that information, which allegedly Ahmad Chalabi gave to the Iranian government, was tremendously detrimental to the United States because whether the NSA will be able to redo that again is almost impossible to say. The NSA tries very hard breaking these codes, and if somebody gives that code away, then it could be years or decades or never before they're ever able to break that code again. And if you remember World War II, the biggest success that we had during World War II in terms of intelligence was breaking the German Enigma code. So those things are very frail. And if somebody like Chalabi, if he's allegedly accused of doing, gave the information that the US had broken that encryption system to the Iranian government, then the US could be without any intelligence on Iran for many years.

GROSS: Do you think that Chalabi is now out of the game in Iraq, or is he trying to reinvent himself now that he no longer has American backing?

Prof. BAMFORD: Well, Chalabi, if anything, he's certainly a survivor. He's been surviving for years and years and years in northern Iran and living in London and making deals with these neoconservatives. So he's a dealmaker and a survivor. And I think right now he's trying to sort of capitalize on the fact that the US is dissing him at this point by saying, 'Look, I'm not one of these US stooges, and I can be trusted.' And he's trying to capitalize on that and use it to his advantage to become one of the elected, if not the elected, president of Iraq when these elections are due sometime before next January.

GROSS: That would be the ultimate paradox, wouldn't it, if he became the president of the new Iraq based on his self-description of not being an American stooge, of being in opposition to America?

Prof. BAMFORD: And I'm sure there'll be a lot of people thinking conspiracy theories; that this has been sort of a Machiavellian way of planning the whole thing all along. He was getting nowhere because he was looked at as an Iraqi stooge, and all of a sudden he's completely disgraced in the United States and then he succeeds in becoming president. And, you know, to think that that was part of the plot would be very Machiavellian, right? So it's a little beyond my comprehension at this time, but stranger things have happened.

GROSS: James Bamford is the author of "A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies." He's a distinguished visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley. He'll be back in the second half of the show. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

(Announcements)

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Coming up, Lloyd Schwartz considers the music from the 1956 film "Around the World in 80 Days," which is now out on DVD. And we continue our conversation with James Bamford, author of "A Pretext for War."

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with James Bamford, author of the new book "A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies." He's written extensively about national security issues, including two best-selling books about the National Security Agency, "The Puzzle Palace" and "Body of Secrets."

Let's talk a little bit about September 11th. You write in your book about some of the things that happened within American intelligence on that day. Let's start with the fact that two flight attendants on one of the planes had managed to call I guess it was the FAA and tell them what seats were empty. And that gave a lot of information about who the passengers were, who were actually the hostage-takers, who were actually hijacking the plane. What information did they give, and how could the intelligence agencies have used that to figure out who was responsible for what was going on?

Mr. BAMFORD: Well, these flight attendants were extremely courageous. And they were speaking from a phone back in the rear section of the plane, and one of them contacted a ground person in American Airlines back in Boston and another contacted a different person. And they were both talking to different people giving an idea of what was going on on the plane. And it was extremely useful for the intelligence community because they gave the seat numbers, and the US pretty much immediately got the manifest. So they were able to tell very quickly who some of these people were after the event by getting the numbers of the seats where these passengers, the people who were hijacking the plane, were sitting.

In addition to that, the flight attendants were able to give a great deal of information about how the hijacking took place. Apparently, the hijackers, when they first came on the plane, they had a--among the things they had hidden were these boxes with wires hanging out of them. So apparently in addition to having knives, they had a phony bomb, something that looked like a bomb, that they could threaten the crew or the pilot and the co-pilot with. Also, when they went up to the very front part of the plane, they threw everybody out of the first-class section, and then they sprayed that area with something like--some kind of chemical that forced everybody out and made sure nobody would come back into that section, at least for a while.

So the flight attendants were able to give that information, which was very valuable. And they were talking to the ground people right up until the moment the plane hit. And as the plane was getting nearer--well, actually, as it was flying low over New York City, they were saying, 'The plane is flying very low. We're over New York City.' And they described the direction of the plane, and then everything went quiet as the plane just hit the building.

GROSS: What was the military response as the planes were flying toward their targets?

Mr. BAMFORD: Well, the US was not prepared for this at all. The US at that point was defended by seven--or actually, 14 aircraft at seven different air bases, seven air bases that had two fighter planes each. And all the NORAD, the North American Air Defense Command, the group that's supposed to look for early warning, was looking outward; they were looking outside the United States at something coming in. So they didn't even have the equipment to look at what was taking place in real time within the United States. So the US posture at that moment was extremely advantageous to the hijackers. And right after the hijacking, the US went into an enormously chaotic period.

GROSS: Well, let's get to where President Bush was. He was in the classroom reading to children there. In your book you're very critical of President Bush during the time that he's in the classroom reading to students there on September 11th, and you think that there's things he could have done. You criticize him for being slow to react.

Mr. BAMFORD: Yes. One of the things that's interesting is that he's told a number of audiences--and I think it was on his Web site at one point; it might still be there--his version of how he learned about the attack that morning. And he says that prior to going into the class, he was brought into sort of an anteroom to be told about the first plane hitting. And he saw the plane hitting the World Trade Center on the TV monitor in the room. The problem is that couldn't possibly be true because the video of that first plane hitting the World Trade Center wasn't available until at least that night, if not the next morning. There was no video of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center, so he couldn't have seen that. And it's curious as to why he continually says that. So if he actually saw a plane hit the World Trade Center on the monitor, it had to have been the second plane that hit, in which case he would have known that two planes had hit the World Trade Center before he actually went into the classroom.

What transpired after that was that he went into the classroom. He was there for a few minutes. And then his chief of staff, Andrew Card, came in and whispered in his ear that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center and that the United States is under attack. And at that point, video cameras were on President Bush, and he had this very perplexed look on his face. What's ironic is that he says later that at that moment he decided to declare war. Yet it was actually seven minutes that he continued to sit there. He never once asked, 'What's the intelligence? Where's the secretary of Defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? What's our readiness? What's NORAD know about all this?' He never asked any of these questions. He just continued to sit there.

Now seven minutes is a long time, especially when you consider that these planes are flying around; they're hitting the World Trade Center, they're flying towards the Pentagon, they're flying towards the White House or the Capitol. And it was amazing how little was done in that--moments after the president was notified that the US is under terrorist attack. And he says himself that, 'I decided to declare war.'

GROSS: My guest is James Bamford, author of the new book "A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: James Bamford is my guest, and he's written extensively about US intelligence agencies, especially the National Security Agency. His new book is called "A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies."

There was a group established within the CIA called Alex Station. And the sole job of this group was to learn about bin Laden. You say it's the first time there was a group within the CIA devoted not to studying a country but focusing on one person. What you're critical of is the decision within this group not to try to penetrate al-Qaeda by sending somebody undercover, and that was an intentional decision. What was that decision based on?

Mr. BAMFORD: Well, the CIA had a long history of not using its own people to penetrate terrorist groups. I thought it was not a very far-sighted idea. It was based, basically, just on tradition. And if you look back, J. Edgar Hoover, when he ran the FBI, had sort of a similar philosophy. He never used FBI agents to--undercover operations to penetrate the Mafia, for example. He never wanted FBI agents to take off their white shirt and ties. And it wasn't till after he died that the FBI began actually penetrating the Mafia, a very dangerous job, and actually having great successes at it.

And the NS--I'm sorry, the CIA, at this point, was in that same situation where they had always wanted to depend on foreign services, what they call liaison services--the Pakistani intelligence, for example, or ex-mujaheddin--to collect intelligence for it without training its own people to go in there. And the problem you have is when you're depending on a group like the Pakistani intelligence service or a group of ex-mujaheddin, which the CIA used in Afghanistan in the period leading up to September 11th, they couldn't trust these people. They had a lot of doubts about whether the information they were getting from them was true. There was nobody there to supervise them. The Pakistani intelligence had reasons to deceive the United States because they were involved in setting up the Taliban government in the first place. And then the ex-mujaheddin, who the CIA had hired to try to find bin Laden, were just these sort of ex-Afghan fighters who had experience fighting the Russians about a decade earlier but had very little other training.

And so, ironically--and this is one of the biggest ironies of the entire events leading up to September 11th--at the very time the CIA was not even trying to penetrate al-Qaeda, eight Americans had already joined al-Qaeda and were training at one of Osama bin Laden's bases in Afghanistan. One of those was John Walker Lindh, but there are about seven other native-born Americans who had also joined up. And in my book "Pretext for War," I trace the whole events of John Walker Lindh and how he got into Afghanistan and how he became a member of al-Qaeda. And it's almost a blueprint of what the CIA should have done to try to get somebody in there. He went to Yemen; he studied the Koran there. He learned Arabic. Then he was sent to one of the religious schools in Pakistan and became very familiar with the culture over there and was liked by some of the people at the religious school. And then they sent him on to a training school for mujaheddin for guerrilla fighters that were fighting against the Indian government in Kashmir. And after that he said he didn't want to fight in Kashmir; he wanted to fight in Afghanistan.

So they gave him a letter of introduction. He went to Afghanistan, and he went to the Taliban office in Kabul. And they said that his language skills weren't quite good enough to join the Taliban to fight the Northern Alliance, but that there was another group down the street that might be good, because he spoke good Arabic, but he didn't speak very good Pashtun or Dari. So they sent him down to al-Qaeda, which was down the street. And he went down there, and he said he wanted to fight the Northern Alliance. And I think it was about 40 minutes or whatever he was only in there, and they said, 'Fine.' And they sent him to a little halfway house, until they had enough people after a day or two to put on a bus. And they took them all to this bin Laden training camp. And while he was there, he had a number of one-on-one meetings, as well as the other Americans, with bin Laden himself and so forth.

So it's ironic that these people, without even trying, were able to penetrate and actually get into the bin Laden training camps. And they were never required to kill anybody. They never were killed if they said they were going to leave. One person didn't like it and decided to leave halfway through, and they said, 'Fine.' And they just went back to the United States. So it's tragic and ironic at the same time that the CIA never did the same type of clandestine activity that John Walker Lindh did, which was learn Arabic, study the Koran, get acclimated to the culture and attempt to penetrate al-Qaeda.

GROSS: You've devoted most of your career to studying American intelligence agencies. You have a lot of sources inside intelligence agencies. And I'm wondering what your confidence level is now in American intelligence?

Mr. BAMFORD: Well, it's not very good because the intelligence, when I was writing about my last two books, were written during periods that we weren't really focused on terrorism as much. The first book I wrote, "The Puzzle Palace," back in 1982, we were in the middle of the Cold War. And the US was doing a very good job in terms of collecting intelligence on the Russians and what was happening. But they had 50 years of practice practically, and they had a target that wasn't moving anywhere. And they knew pretty much that the only attack was going to come from missiles, so we had satellites overhead that could watch these missiles 24 hours a day.

The period now, though, however, after September 11th with terrorism being the top of the agenda, the intelligence community is not really set up to do that kind of thing. They're not set up to follow people around the world very easily. It's very easy to hide if you really want to hide these days. You can have cell phones that you could throw away after several uses. You can have calling cards that don't give any indication as to who the person is that's making the phone call. And there's all sorts of ways that a person can really hide, as you can see from Osama bin Laden and even Saddam Hussein, who we were after for a very, very long time, and we occupied his country. He stayed hidden for many, many months before the United States was able to locate him. So finding terrorists is a very difficult prospect for the intelligence community, and the prospects are not very good.

GROSS: James Bamford is the author of "A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies."

I want to let you know that on Friday's show, we're going to remember the soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy. He died of cancer Friday at the age of 69. We'll listen back to a 1997 interview with Lacy. Here's what he sounded like. This is a 1996 recording of "Evidence," by Thelonious Monk, the composer and musician who most influenced Lacy. Misha Mengelberg is featured on piano.

(Soundbite of "Evidence")

GROSS: Coming up, Lloyd Schwartz listens to the music from the film, "Around the World in 80 Days," which has been released on DVD. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

LOAD-DATE: June 9, 2004

War Without End

The global war against terror, news about the illegal invasion of Iraq, the corporate puppet presidents, the war criminal Tony Blair, September 11th 2001, the USS Liberty and New World Order crimes against humanity.

IRAQ WAR FOR ISRAEL ACCORDING TO JAMES BAMFORD's NEW BOOK