On May 5 gadfly journalist Wayne Madsen published an intriguing report at
Online Journal about the maladministration's abuse of the NSA. It appeared after the exposure of the NSA's spying on the U.N. before the invasion of Iraq. I see no evidence that this report has been discussed in detail here, and it seems especially timely now.
Madsen may be imperfectly reliable about facts. Yet he worked at the NSA in the 1980s, and appears to have good sources of information there. His May report made several key points, the most important of which were: (a) neocons (especially minions of Cheney and Rumsfeld) were using the NSA to spy upon those they suspected of opposing their policies, including U.S. citizens; (b) the head of NSA schemed to conceal the illegality of such spying; (c) the NSA was browbeating staffers who resisted this perversion of their mission; (d) a series of leaks showed that some in the NSA were fighting back and trying to embarrass Bush and Co.
He reports, for example, that rebel staffers leaked information that the NSA had evidence that A. Q. Khan was selling nuclear components to Saudi Arabia. More strikingly, to my mind, Madsen states that they revealed the NSA had eavesdropped on the phone calls between Colin Powell and Gov. Bill Richardson regarding a N. Korean delegation's visit to NM. I do not know what to make of his claim that the NSA has evidence that United Flight 93 on Sept. 11 was shot down by U.S. fighter planes, so I set it aside from discussion.
In the following selections, Madsen describes how the head of NSA, Gen. Michael Hayden, tried to cover up John Bolton's role in ordering the NSA to spy upon U.N. delegations that were thought unsupportive of Bush's plan to invade Iraq. He goes on to describe how Hayden pressured concerned NSA staffers to Cheney up:
The three key participants who have emerged as orchestrating the misuse of NSA and other U.S. intelligence resources to conduct surveillance of those who opposed neoconservative plans to invade Iraq and ratchet up tensions with North Korea, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, the Palestinian Authority headed by the late Yasir Arafat, and the former government of Haiti are Bolton; NSA's director and the new Deputy Director for National Intelligence General Michael V. Hayden; and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and Iraq and current National Intelligence Director John Negroponte. Hayden served alongside Condoleezza Rice in the National Security Council under President George H. W. Bush.
In the lead up to the Iraq War, Negroponte, Bolton, and Hayden, as well as other leading neoconservatives in the Pentagon and White House, directed an e-mail and telephone surveillance campaign against UN Security Council delegates to determine the voting intentions of wavering countries on the council's resolution authorizing military action against Iraq....
A January 31, 2003, Quick Response Capability memo sent by Frank Koza, the chief of the Regional Targets group within NSA's National Security Operations Center (NSOC), to NSA's counterparts in the Echelon communications intelligence monitoring tasking system--Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand--authorized a "surge" telephone and e-mail intercept operation on the offices and homes of government officials of UN Security Council members and "non-UN Security Council Member UN-related and domestic comms."...
Negroponte and Bolton received intercept data from Hayden's staff at NSA. Secret Security Council negotiations to reach a compromise with Iraq and seek more time for UN weapons inspectors were scuttled when Negroponte and Bolton were made privy to private telephone conversations of UN delegates, including the Mexican and Chilean ambassadors.
Leading neoconservatives working for Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were kept apprised of the sensitive surge surveillance operations....
To ensure that systematic violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and NSA's United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (USSID 18) in permitting electronic surveillance of U.S. persons on behalf of Bolton and Negroponte went unhindered, Hayden directed his Directorate of Security and Counterintelligence at NSA to browbeat any analyst or operator who showed the slightest tendency to question authority. Hayden's personally-chosen deputy director, William Black, who serves in a position always considered to be somewhat independent from the transitory NSA director, buckled to Hayden's dictates rather than challenge them....
[NSA's General Counsel's office] provided legal cover for repeated violations of FISA and USSID 18. In responding to internal complaints, NSA's Inspector General's office became a virtual rubber stamp for Hayden and defaulted to ruling against all whistleblowers.
The political surveillance operations directed against current and former U.S. government officials and serving and retired U.S. military officers who opposed the neoconservative game plan was primarily carried out by NSA's super-classified "black ops" organization, the Special Collection Service (SCS)--a joint NSA/CIA "higher-than-Top Secret" joint activity headquartered in Beltsville, Maryland.
Tasking was conducted through NSA's Signals Intelligence Directorate (SID) and authority was granted by Hayden to largely bypass USSID 18 legal restrictions by using off-the-books "training missions" as a cover. Although training mission intercept data collected on U.S. persons is to be destroyed after completion of the mission, intercepts of phone calls made by scores of U.S. government and private persons found their way into the hands of Bolton, Cheney, and other neoconservative elements within the Bush administration.
To deal with actual or perceived troublemakers at NSA, Hayden's handpicked security chief at NSA, Kemp Ensor III, instituted a Kafkaesque system that abruptly yanked personnel security clearances without explanation; wiretapped black (non-secure), gray (secure), and personal telephones; subjected employees to psychiatric examinations and evaluations; concocted trumped up charges against employees involving such things as tax problems and personality disorders, and punished highly-trained and skilled technicians, analysts, and linguists by sending them to non-secure "Red Badge" warehouses and other logistics facilities to perform manual labor duties.
In the midst of the current constitutional crisis, the allegation that Cheney and others obtained data from what purportedly were `training' exercises, and therefore not for dissemination, could be quite damaging, if true. The focus in the current scandal has been on Bush because ultimately he's responsible for systematically violating the law. But in this instance, it appears that Cheney received prohibited data, and his office may have ordered it to be collected in the first place.
UPDATE: Here is another report about fake "training" exercises from May 2005, in which Madsen says "possible affected individuals include" Colin Powell, Richard Armitage, Joseph Biden, Jimmy Carter, Brent Scowcroft, and Bill Richardson, among others.
United States Signals Intelligence Directive (USSID) 18, the NSA’s “Bible” for the conducting of surveillance against U.S. persons, allows “U.S. material,” i.e., listening to U.S. persons, to be used for training missions. However, USSID 18 also requires that all intercepts conducted for such training missions are to be completely destroyed after completion of the training operation. In the case of Bolton and other Bush administration hard liners, the material in question was not deleted and was transmitted in raw intercept form to external agencies for clearly political purposes – a violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and USSID 18, which only allows such raw training mission intercepts to be transmitted when evidence of criminal activity is uncovered during the training mission. Unlike signals intelligence (SIGINT) data stored in the “Anchory” (formerly known as the SIGINT On-line Intelligence System or “SOLIS”) database, training intercepts are completely off-the-books and, in the case of raw intercepts provided to Bolton and others, the NSA and its Signals Intelligence Directorate (SID) can claim “plausible deniability” in stating that only “official” intercept transcripts were provided to users outside the agency. Because they are to be destroyed after completion of training missions, the training intercepts do not appear in any agency logs and cannot be obtained by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee unless they are subpoenaed directly from Bolton and his colleagues....
Intelligence community insiders claim that a number of State Department and other government officials may have been subject to NSA “training” surveillance and that transcripts between them and foreign officials likely ended up in the possession of Bolton and his neo-conservative political allies, including such members of Vice President Dick Cheney’s staff as David Wurmser (a former assistant to Bolton at State), John Hannah, and Lewis “Scooter” Libby.
Calling Mr. Fitzgerald...