Several months ago I wrote about Edward Snowden’s usefulness to those in the ‘intelligence community’ who feel threatened by rampant outsourcing. I speculated that Snowden’s position as a ‘contractor-traitor’ was helpful to spooks who wanted to protect their power base from private sector competition. Today I’m going highlight another area where the passage of time has shown us how Snowden helped US spooks: international cooperation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, anyone who had read William Colby’s 1978 autobiography, the cynically-titled Honorable Men, would have seen Edward coming.
Colby ends his life story with a handful of Nostradamus-like declarations about where the intelligence community and world politics are headed. I’ll let the horse speak:
This then is the future dimension of intelligence. It must become an international resource to help humanity identify and resolve its problems through negotiation and cooperation rather than continue to suffer or fight over them. To the extent that American intelligence provides its products to help the American people make better decisions, it will lead this process, and its material also will become available for others in the world to use. But I believe we will see, and should welcome, an institutionalizing of this process on the international level, so that information and assessments about world problems can be made conveniently available to all, applying to intelligence as a whole the techniques and experience of such specialized world information centers as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Labor Organization, and the host of semiofficial and private centers and services that are contributing to this same process in their particular fields. This does not mean that intelligence should in any way be consolidated into one gigantic intelligence center, which would collapse of its own weight, but rather that the concept of the intelligence “community” of separate agencies in the United States gradually be expanded to the world level, recognizing specialization where it is appropriate, exchanging different appreciations to seek better comprehensive judgments, and ensuring that each item appears in its appropriate horizontal and vertical proportion in final over-all assessments.
As the nations move into this new era of international dissemination of information, they will come to appreciate the benefits of greater knowledge they will gain. They will also be dissuaded from attempting to conceal information for strategic advantage, realizing the futility of any such attempt in the face of America’s intelligence machinery. And then the words from John (8:23), which Allen Dulles prized so highly and placed in CIA’s entrance hall, will truly characterize the role of American intelligence: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free”– free of war, misery, and ignorance. [End of book.]
Snowden happened, primarily, because factions within US partner-countries’ intelligence services were failing to “appreciate the benefits of greater knowledge” which further integration with US spookery could give them. Germany was probably one of the most painful hold-outs; I say that because so much Snowden-activity has centered around Germany.
US intelligence agents Jacob Appelbaum (Tor Project) and Laura Poitras both reside in Germany; here they are accepting their 2015 Deutscher Filmpreis.
Just in case readers haven’t been following the ‘intelligence community’ developments in Europe post-Snowden, here’s a good summary of recent scandals surrounding Germany’s intelligence organ BND from MS Risk, a consulting firm based out of the Isle of Man (article published May 22nd, 2015):
The BND is actively seeking a more substantial cooperation with NSA, since it relies on NSA intelligence. Especially now that BND needs to track German individuals travelling to Iraq and Syria and fighting for ISIS and similar terror groups and the subsequent return of these individuals back to Germany…
This scandal goes along with the latest trend that finds the states trying to increase their surveillance powers under the justification of the new forms of security threats that have arose. They promote the necessity of these more intrusive measures that should be adopted even if they operate against the individuals’ privacy rights. France’s lower house recently adopted a sweeping new spying bill that would give French intelligence the power to deploy hi-tech tools such as vehicle tracking and mobile phone identification devices against individual without judicial oversight. Moreover, before the British elections, Prime Minister David Cameron had promised to authorise British intelligence agencies to read ‘’all messages sent over the Internet’’ in a package of legal provisions named as the ‘’snoopers’ carter’’ by its opponents. Germany is not an exception as it tries to increase its surveillance abilities against the security threat posed by individuals fighting alongside terror groups and many German nationals that are returning from Iraq and Syria and could potentially organise attacks inside Germany. However, BND’s actions brought the German people’s outrage both against the agency and against the German leadership, complicating the government’s plan towards the adoption of a legislation that would increase BND’s powers as it happened in other European countries.
Two years after the ‘Snowden Revelations’ the intelligence apparatus in Germany, the U.K. and France are working as closely with the USA as ever, and are seeking to become even more abusive against citizens. The US congress has failed to curb the ‘intelligence community’s’ strident abuse of power. In hindsight, the only thing that Snowden accomplished is to project an image of all-powerful US security services across the globe, without having to release much proof to the public. Most of us have to take it on faith that what the journalists speaking for Edward claim about the NSA, etc. is actually true. Snowden is, after all, just one more kid in a long line of “whistle-blowers” who tout American technological superiority… with the help of the ACLU.
Now that we can benefit from two years’ worth of hindsight, it may be worth re-examining some of the floor-shows which went on immediately after Snowden’s flight to Russia. Let’s start with Wayne Madsen’s Disappearing Interview.
On June 29th 2013, The Observer and The Guardian published an interview with Wayne Madsen by Jamie Doward. Madsen talked about the NSA’s cooperation with German and British espionage outfits, as well as cooperation with the intelligence services of Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Spain and Italy. Here’s the nut of the story:
Wayne Madsen, a former US navy lieutenant who first worked for the NSA in 1985 and over the next 12 years held several sensitive positions within the agency, names Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain and Italy as having secret deals with the US.
Madsen said the countries had “formal second and third party status” under signal intelligence (sigint) agreements that compels them to hand over data, including mobile phone and internet information to the NSA if requested.
Under international intelligence agreements, confirmed by declassified documents, nations are categorised by the US according to their trust level. The US is first party while the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand enjoy second party relationships. Germany and France have third party relationships.
In an interview published last night on the PrivacySurgeon.org blog, Madsen, who has been attacked for holding controversial views on espionage issues, said he had decided to speak out after becoming concerned about the “half story” told by EU politicians regarding the extent of the NSA’s activities in Europe.
He said that under the agreements, which were drawn up after the second world war, the “NSA gets the lion’s share” of the sigint “take”. In return, the third parties to the NSA agreements received “highly sanitised intelligence”.
Madsen said he was alarmed at the “sanctimonious outcry” of political leaders who were “feigning shock” about the spying operations while staying silent about their own arrangements with the US, and was particularly concerned that senior German politicians had accused the UK of spying when their country had a similar third-party deal with the NSA…
Madsen’s disclosures have prompted calls for European governments to come clean on their arrangements with the NSA. “There needs to be transparency as to whether or not it is legal for the US or any other security service to interrogate private material,” said John Cooper QC, a leading international human rights lawyer. “The problem here is that none of these arrangements has been debated in any democratic arena. I agree with William Hague that sometimes things have to be done in secret, but you don’t break the law in secret.” [From Revealed: secret European deals to hand over private data to America]
I strongly encourage all anolen readers to review the full article here. Note how Madsen was particularly sensitive to German political hypocrisy. By associating these WWII-vintage information sharing agreements with Snowden’s leaks, Madsen besmirched networks that the NSA would like to remain intact– even to build on, according to Colby. Madsen’s sort of criticism is *not* what US IC pros intended when they engineered Snowden; they did not want their German allies taking fire in that way, at that time. The US ‘IC’ had to take dramatic action to recapture the narrative.
As readers will no doubt remember, Madsen’s article was met by a ferocious, 24-hour attack through Twitter from a cadre of Naval War College professors; Madsen’s Observer/Guardian interview was pulled shortly after its publication with no explanation as to why it was pulled. At IntrepidReport.com, Madsen described the Twitter diatribe as “offensive information warfare”, he goes on:
The favorite tool for this NSA media “war room” operation on the banks of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay is Twitter. Whether the target is journalist Glenn Greenwald, this editor, Representative Justin Amash (R-MI), former Vice President Al Gore, and the handful of NSA whistleblowers who have come forward, including Snowden, the War College’s “NSA” troika of professors—former National Security Agency officer John Schindler and his two sycophantic assistants, Tom Nichols and Stephen Knott—enlist the aid of a committed group of Twitter “followers” to launch vicious attacks against any and all comers. Their followers range from Charles Johnson of the peculiar website “Little Green Footballs,” who is a washed up former band member for the group “Chicago,” to former Tory member of the British Parliament Louise Mensch, whose only claim to fame is resigning amid the Rupert Murdoch phone tapping scandal.
The NSA2 troika in Newport, Rhode Island can also rely on a few polemicists who masquerade as journalists. Chief among them is Michael C. Moynihan, a writer for The Daily Beast and the Jewish Tablet website, who once worked for a neo-conservative group in Stockholm called Timbro and served on the editorial board of a Swedish magazine called “Neo,” as in “neo-con.” Timbro has been associated with the activities of Karl Rove and Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt. Moynihan’s libelous screeds, some of which have been directed against this editor, are complemented by those of Joshua Foust, who claims to be a national security reporter, but who has collected pay checks from a Defense Intelligence Agency contractor. The Newport troika and their media allies can always be assured of the constant support of the website Business Insider.com. The site was started by DoubleClick founder Kevin Ryan, who also happens to serve on the board of the Nazi collaborator George Soros-financed Human Rights Watch, is close to outgoing New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and is a member of the always-suspect Council on Foreign Relations.
As acerbic and vicious as these pro-NSA “wannabe” journalists can be, they do not hold a torch to the caustic and defamatory Twitter feed that ushers forth from Schindler, whose media appearances on CNN, CNBC, and MS-NBC skyrocketed in the wake of the Snowden revelations and media commentary on them, claims to have been an NSA intelligence and counter-intelligence officer and a consultant for the FBI.
The Twitter-warriors who Madsen names did not limit themselves to attacks on Madsen, but anybody high-profile enough to make a splash who questioned the official Snowden narrative. The tenor of these attacks was important: frantic, ad hominem screeds and strident assertions of NSA propaganda were the norm.
I’m not in a position to know how far the NWC crowd was aware of their place in a larger game; it’s hard to pretend to be a bore consistently, everyday, for a period of more than six months. It could very well be that they honestly thought their behavior projected an aura of strength. We do know that there are people in the ‘IC’ who still understand how to approach the public, because Ed Snowden’s crafted appearances are usually polite and eloquent. Therefore, even though the NWC tweeters were “caustic”, somebody inside the ‘IC’ let them keep going for over half a year, so the troika served someone’s purpose.
What purpose might that have been? Together, these tweeters provided a high-profile theatrical act as NSA ‘insiders’ who were ‘on the defensive’ after the Snowden leaks. I believe the goal of this act was to undermine any resistance to further integration with US intelligence amongst second- and third-tier NSA partners by stirring up a ‘siege mentality‘. The bad PR Dr. Schindler et alia presented to the general public aggravated criticism of the ‘IC’ and reinforced the desired apprehension amongst spooks. What if they vote to limit all of our powers!? To borrow a 9/11 analogy, Snowden and intemperate Twitter-warriors ensured that the NSA’s international partners were “all Israelis now”.
These NWC professors, and their echo chamber, would often tag their tweets with ‘#SnowdenOp’, as in ‘Snowden is a Russian Operative’. They repeated this meme tirelessly– and still do– but I’ll talk about that more later.
I don’t think that one has to be ‘intelligence savvy’ to see what went on with the ‘pulling’ of Madsen’s interview, nor the fabulous American media support which the NWC troika received. I believe a far more interesting question is why this undertaking ended so badly for Dr. Schindler. Whatever the answer, the drama around Wayne Madsen’s interview gets even better…
Less than two weeks after Madsen’s interview was withdrawn, Jacob Appelbaum, who was exempted from similar attacks by the Twitter-troika mentioned above, wrote a very similar article to Madsen’s which was published in Germany’s Der Spiegel. The Der Spiegel article also focused on NSA collaboration with foreign intelligence services, but in a vague and wishy-washy way. Appelbaum qualifies German cooperation with the NSA by implying 1) the Germans only conduct US-assisted surveillance on high-priority targets and 2) that German politicians don’t know about the collaboration.
Appelbaum only focuses in depth on Israeli-US and UK-US espionage cooperation, probably because as far as their reputation as American-collaborators goes, Israel and the U.K. don’t have anything to lose. Appelbaum’s article reads like a balm on German-intelligence-nerves.
The first page of Jacob Appelbaum’s Der Spiegel interview with Snowden, which addressed issues that Masden brought up.
The context of Appelbaum’s article is as suspicious as its contents. Appelbaum claims Laura Poitras asked him to be the technology ‘sounding board’ for an anonymous contact who she was cultivating:
“In mid-May, documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras contacted me,” Appelbaum said. “She told me she was in contact with a possible anonymous National Security Agency (NSA) source who had agreed to be interviewed by her.”
“She was in the process of putting questions together and thought that asking some specific technical questions was an important part of the source verification process. One of the goals was to determine whether we were really dealing with an NSA whistleblower. I had deep concerns of COINTELPRO-style entrapment.”
The story goes that Poitras used Appelbaum because she figured he would be able to divine whether her contact– Snowden– really was NSA. She figured that Appelbaum would be able to identify knowledgeable answers to questions about secret NSA programs… now how could Appelbaum know such things?
Appelbaum also claims that he conducted the Der Spiegel interview with Snowden well before Snowden came out with his revelations, and that Snowden was happy for Appelbaum to sit on the interview until whatever time behooved the Tor advocate to publish it… that time just happened to be several days after Madsen’s interview on the same topic was pulled from British press. Appelbaum tells us:
“At a later point, I also had direct contact with Edward Snowden in which I revealed my own identity. At that time, he expressed his willingness to have his feelings and observations on these topics published when I thought the time was right.”
And finally, in case anybody might find all these coincidences too hard to swallow, Appelbaum dictates this to Der Spiegel readers:
“It is critical to understand that these questions were not asked in a context that is reactive to this week’s or even this month’s events. They were asked in a relatively quiet period, when Snowden was likely enjoying his last moments in a Hawaiian paradise — a paradise he abandoned so that every person on the planet might come to understand the current situation as he does.”
I’m going to move on from Madsen/Appelbaum now and address another canard swirling around the Snowden debate: that Snowden was somehow working for the Russians when he leaked NSA documents in Hong Kong, and that the show-down between Russia and the USA over Snowden is something other than theater. It is not in Russian nor US interests to fight over NSA surveillance; both governments stand too much to gain by cooperating. Colby recognized this way back in ’78:
Ignorance, suspicion and misunderstanding have been the sources of too many wars, either because they generated hostility and hatred or a false belief that the other side could be easily defeated…
Recent years have brought a major change in the role of intelligence in this regard, from the old effort for strategic or tactical advantages to a new contribution to reassurance and understanding. The most dramatic example occurred in the SALT negotiations between the United States and the USSR…
One of the aspects of that agreement [SALT I] shows what intelligence can offer a future world. Both the USSR and the United States were considering the next strategic step of deploying nationwide antiballistic-missile systems to destroy incoming hostile missiles. But agreement was reached that neither would do so, leaving both sides vulnerable to retaliation and thus deterring a first use…
International statesmen are gradually becoming accustomed to conducting their negotiation on the basis of common understandings of the facts and factors involved rather than believing they can profit from private and secret knowledge withheld from the other side (although Soviet military officers still try to persuade their American counterparts to keep from civilian negotiators on both sides “secret” military information about Soviet weapons being negotiated over, since the Soviet weapons are too “secret” to discuss with Soviet civilians, despite the fact that they are known in detail to American intelligence.)
Anything Colby says about the Soviet military can, of course, also be applied to the American military. The US and Russian big-wigs aren’t fighting each other; they’re far more afraid of their own people than they are of their counterparts in Moscow/Washington D.C.. This was as true in Colby’s day as it is now, when talking-heads spew endless noise about Snowden’s ‘KGB ties’.
I think, anolen readers, that the American ‘IC’ didn’t want anybody ‘outside the fold’ opining on what Snowden did in light of its impact on international espionage cooperation. ‘IC’ pundits were able to spin the ‘revelations’ in a way which encouraged a ‘siege mentality’ amongst the NSA’s international partners– hence the NWC Twitter work and Glenn Greenwald’s harping on relatively benign spying between governments and on government-funded entities. This siege mentality was manipulated to overcome overseas resistance to increased cooperation– increased dependence— on Amerika.
“I’m excited to be in Germany and I look forward to all the Handys.”
The reason that American intelligence professionals were willing to take the extraordinary risks which they took by engineering Snowden was that the ‘siege mentality’ Snowden induced amongst foreign spooks helped prepare the way for long-cherished US intelligence goals, according to Bill Colby. This siege mentality aggravated group-think amongst spooks, a delirium which I compared to cult-members’ intolerance of independent thinking in The Cult of Intelligence.
Of course, I have no ties to the intelligence community and my opinions in this post are just opinions. However, William Colby’s opinions carry a little more weight. There’s a strange poetry about the US IC’s ‘grand strategy’ being revealed in the final pages of the autobiography of their manipulator-in-chief.
