SHARED LINKS - AUDIO POSTS: The German-Russian involvement & management of 9/11 is so evident and so much in plain sight, that EVERYONE REFUSES TO SEE IT ... | The 9/11 Inquest: Now Americans Say Germans Bungled | Interviews - Tyler Drumheller | The Dark Side | FRONTLINE | The son of Helmut Kohl’s chief of staff, Andreas Strassmeir, may well have been the mastermind of the Oklahoma City bombing.
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SHARED LINKS - AUDIO POSTS: The German-Russian involvement & management of 9/11 is so evident and so much in plain sight, that EVERYONE REFUSES TO SEE IT ... | The 9/11 Inquest: Now Americans Say Germans Bungled | Interviews - Tyler Drumheller | The Dark Side | FRONTLINE | The son of Helmut Kohl’s chief of staff, Andreas Strassmeir, may well have been the mastermind of the Oklahoma City bombing.
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В скором времени в России появится единая база номеров телефонов мошенников. Авторами инициативы выступили сразу три ведомства - МВД, Банк России и Роскомнадзор, их представители и займутся ее реализацией
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Tyler Drumheller served as the CIA's top spy -- the division chief for the Directorate of Operations (DO) -- in Europe until he retired in 2005. Here, he discusses changes at the CIA during his career and after 9/11; his impressions of Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet and his leadership; and Drumheller's attempts to warn about the dubious intelligence provided by an Iraqi defector, code-named Curveball. This is an edited transcript of an interview conducted on Feb. 15, 2006.
Give me a sense of who you are, what you did, what your career with the CIA was all about.
I served in the CIA for a little over 25 years. I applied in the late '70s, really started in 1980. I served all but the last few months of that undercover, and all but the last three years of that I was an undeclared officer. I spent a very short time in Washington.
My first part of my career, I served at a number of posts around Africa. I had grown up in Germany, so I spoke German, and then I got switched to Europe and spent the last part of my time in Europe. I can actually say what I did in some of those places. I was deputy chief of the Europe Division in the mid-90s, went and served as chief of the largest field office then -- Baghdad is now, obviously -- and then came back in 2001, and they made me the chief of the division. I served there until I left, which was Feb. 3 of last year [2005], so out one year. ...
In that arc of that career, what did you see happen to the Central Intelligence Agency?
The problem is the agency became larger, and the structure became more convoluted. In the beginning, when I started, they used to always say there was never more than two or three people between any case officer in the field and the director -- very short lines of command, fairly clear.
Obviously there were mistakes made, lots of excesses in the '50s and '60s, but very focused, short, direct lines of command. There was very little confusion about what we were doing and what we were to do and what our role was in the government. The policy-makers set the priorities, the things they're interested in, and we were to collect on those and then to report back, and then they make policy.
Over the time I was there, I saw it become increasingly -- "politicized" is a terrible word, but increasingly, where the policy-makers became more involved in saying, "Well, this doesn't fit with what I am interested in. I want some specific information," which is a very gradual process. ... Inside the agency itself, [this] is reflected in the fact that directors began to have padded -- not "padded"; that's the wrong word -- but more and more staff, more and more special assistants, more and more executive officers, more and more executive assistants, until in the end there were definite changes that needed to be made.
[Former Director] George Tenet started them in the mid-90s, but there were still some changes [that] needed to be made in the post-Cold War period as we adjusted. [This administration] really had an opportunity to do it, and instead, they became very much focused on politics. A lot of it centered initially around Iraq when they first came in, because they were very interested in Iraq, and then after 9/11, obviously the war on terror, rightly so.
There were a lot of preconceptions. A number of people in the administration have contacts in émigré communities in Iraq, Iran. They get a lot of information, so they come in with an idea of what they think it is, and when we report something that goes against that, it's no longer looked at as, "Well, why is this?," or "What's the problem?" In fact, it's looked at as, "You're being disloyal."
This is [former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz with the Iraqis, for example?
I don't know Wolfowitz, but that group, the people in the Pentagon, it's well known they had contact with Iraqi émigré community. I think a lot of the preconceptions about the weapons of mass destruction and all that were driven by the Iraqi émigré reporting, whether it was from the Iraqi National Congress [INC] or others.
...Émigré reporting is notoriously unreliable, ... because they always have an agenda. They're trying to get back to their home. Sometimes it's reliable and you have to use it, but you really have to double-check. You can't base your whole view of what's going on on émigré reporting.
I think that drove a lot of it. There's some complications in the Curveball case. [That] is a good example of how, had that been an agency case handled by us, we would have vetted it much, much more before the reporting was put out and given the credence that [it] was given. [Curveball] came out as a defector, was handled by Defense Intelligence [Agency (DIA)] officers. But that's nothing against Defense Intelligence officers; [there are] great Defense Intelligence officers. But we have a certain way of doing things that's built up over 50 years. Some people look at that as being cautious. In fact, it's a professional standard that you really have to have. ...
Help me understand or place George Tenet in the firmament. When he arrives, what reputation does he come with? What is he?
George actually came to the job from the National Security Council [NSC], where he was the intelligence coordinator. Before that he had been the staff director on the Senate Select Committee [on Intelligence (SSCI)] and had served on the Senate Select Committee for a long time [and] was well known.
In those days, though -- and this is another thing that's changed -- it was very unusual for the staffers or even senators for that matter to have contact with individual case officers or reports officers or even analysts. That contact was usually done through the DDO's -- the deputy director of operations' -- office. You tried to protect the junior, the working officers from the politics or the issues.
I had only met George one time. I'm sure he didn't even remember me. I had to brief him on Angola one time back in the late '80s. But I always found him, when he was at the NSC, to be very helpful. He's a very smart guy. He understands the intel community. [Before] he came in, Dr. [John M.] Deutsch was -- strictly my opinion -- a disaster as DCI [director of central intelligence], sort of petulant and disorganized. George really straightened it out after that. Morale was just disastrous in 1994 and '95 because everybody just -- it was so confused. Everybody wasn't sure where we were going. He really did give purpose to it. I have a tremendous amount of respect for him. Good friend for a long time.
I think he was truly dedicated to the idea of making an intelligence service. He's also, I think, dedicated to the institution of the CIA, and he wanted to make it better. ... I don't think he was ever completely comfortable with the Directorate of Operations [DO], because we cause problems for people. I think his staff tended to be analysts and people who came from the Hill.
But we had regular contact with him ourselves, and we could talk with him directly. You didn't have to go through one of these staffers. He was very dynamic. A lot of the things that we did in Europe in the war on terror -- we did some very good things with Europeans, and it was largely because I was able to call on him to sit down and talk to the leaders of these countries.
One of the things that I understand he does is he looks at the CTC [Counterterrorist Center] and other places, and he says, "Terrorism is a huge problem."
He did. Some people have been saying this for some time: Dewey Claridge, Milt Bearden, people like that. Tenet really said, "We have to change." And he was saying [this] back in '96: "This is a war on terror. We have to readjust our resources and the way we're structured and how we work." ... He was very -- I don't know this for a fact, but it seemed to me, as he was there longer, the Clinton administration became more and more -- until at the end they were extremely interested in terrorism and counterproliferation. They were driven by that, especially by [Osama] bin Laden. They were very interested in bin Laden.
And that was Tenet?
That was during Tenet's time. I never saw Tenet speak to the president, so I don't know. But you put the two together, it seemed like that was his focus with it. I think it was good for the agency. He really wanted to focus on these transnational issues, which is what we should do. But he was worried that if we kept the old structure in place, that that would draw away from it, because we'd always go back to doing what we knew we had to do from our early days.
The fact is, you can -- I think I convinced him of this at the end -- is you can do both. You have to have the structure to do the transnational issues. Transnational issues don't exist in a vacuum. You have to have some structure. What he was just getting started on when 9/11 hit was looking at new ways of structuring things. ... After 9/11, it was like from a fire hose. That distorted everything.
That summer before 9/11, all the alarm bells are going off everywhere -- at the FBI, CIA, everywhere. What was happening?
I came back that summer from overseas, and we had heard the year before [about] the millennium threat. There were concerns at that time about planes flying into steeples in Europe. When I came home that summer, I ran into a very close friend of mine who was working at the CTC at the time. He said, "Something terrible is going to happen," and he just can't get anybody to focus on it. He said, "Tenet's been talking to the White House."
Then, by the end of July, he said, "It seems to have gone away." Then in early August, they did the PDB [President's Daily Brief] piece for the president on that. But there was a sense. I saw it in [Deputy Director of Operations James] Pavitt; I saw it in Tenet; I saw it in my friend -- [then-CTC Director] Cofer Black's a very close friend of mine. I saw it in all these guys, that they were desperately trying to get the people to focus on this. This was a real threat.
It wasn't that people were blasé about it. It's just that the new administration had a million different things, and this wasn't what they were -- it just didn't seem to be resonating.
But if you had to say there was a number one thing George Tenet was worried about?
Terrorism and counterproliferation as joint issues. Terrorism and the counterproliferation as an adjunct of that, as sort of the force multiplier.
He really desperately wanted somebody to pay attention.
Yes. And he really tried. I think he was supported by Pavitt and Cofer.
9/11 happens. How do things change?
It changed that afternoon. They sent everybody home, and they called us, all the division chiefs, back in [to talk about] how we were going to restructure, how we were going to address what happened. Now, what happened -- why it happened and what was amiss -- we didn't really get into. We were trying to look ahead.
My part of it was to try and go to our European allies. One of Tenet's real goals was to break down the barriers between the services, because you have very long-standing rules of engagement between foreign intelligence services. You work together, but you don't really trust each other. It's an interesting sort of dance in that every service wants to protect its sources, obviously, and information. We had been looking for ways to engage on this; they, [the] Europeans, were looking for ways to engage on it. But even among themselves, they had a hard time doing that.
Then after 9/11, there was increased interest in it obviously, and I think we actually had some success. Like I said, George was a great help on that. ...
He's a great salesman, I hear. So he's going around to the foreign services. He's going around to the president of Yemen. He's going around getting everybody kind of --
He had terrific energy. He recognized his role as the most valuable asset that I, as division chief, had: that I could deliver him to meet with the president of the country or the head of [a foreign intelligence service]. That means a lot to people. ...
I've seen him many times work all day, go to the 5:00 p.m. [CIA] meeting, come out, have another meeting at the White House, and then meet me in Georgetown for dinner with some head of some service and stay up until midnight, 1:00 a.m., and drive home. I said, "You must be really tired." He said, "I have a chauffer." Then he'd be back with the president at 6:00 a.m. It was exhausting --
Is he good at it, in the interpersonal, across the dinner table?
He's fantastic at it.
In what way?
He's just a regular guy, no pretension. He listened to other people, although he holds forth. But he was very good at listening to people and making people think that he was interested in what they were saying. Most of the time he was interested in what they were saying, because he was a curious guy. I think one of the things he probably enjoyed most about being director was learning all the things he learned over the years. He was genuinely, I think, liked by every senior official ... I ever worked with.
After 9/11, what did he want?
After 9/11, the main thing was this seamless sharing of intelligence and immediate sharing of intelligence, because I think everybody saw that there may be pieces out there that are being held, and someone says, "Well, this comes from such a secret source that only one person can see it ...," and that person may have said, "Oh, well, this is terrible," put it in their desk and forgot about it. This is the other thing I think he wanted to do -- this is what eventually became the NCTC, the National Counterterrorism Center -- ... get all the analytical people in one place.
[Former CIA Deputy Director John] McLaughlin used to say -- I say this all the time; I actually stole it from him -- this should be like the Manhattan Project: Get the very, very best analysts from the intelligence community, from the academic world, from business, whatever, bring them together in one place -- not 5,000 analysts, [but] a small, efficient group. Then they should have access to all the intelligence from all our services, all the American services, all the allied services, seamlessly, and really good computer systems.
If he could have done something, that was the direction he was certainly headed in, and that got bumped off by Iraq, in my opinion.
The vice president, [Dick Cheney], on Sept. 16, [2001], says: "We're going to have to go to the dark side. The American people are going to need to understand we're going to go to the dark side." What did he mean by that?
... I think they wanted to show the American people that we're going to fight back. ... If you look at the European services and you talk to them about the reason they didn't get all spun up over this in the beginning, [it] was because they went through the Red [Brigades terror attacks in Italy]. It was never a 9/11 type of thing, but in fact was much more devastating. It changed the whole way society worked in Europe. In Italy, people stopped going out at night. The IRA [Irish Republican Army] changed the whole way British society worked.
The way they finally got this under control ... was by turning some of their tactics on them: surveilling them, being very aggressive in going after them. Some of that involves things that people may not want to know about or care about if it's a war situation, and that's what I think they were talking about at that time.
You mean like assassinations and kidnappings?
Assassinations, that's still off the -- they shouldn't do that. And kidnappings -- you look at it as a kidnapping, or, as they call them, renditions. In many cases it's more of an extradition; it's more of a super-extradition, in a sense.
The other idea was, I think, they were definitely sure in September and October that we were going to hit [them]. People who knew how organizations like Al Qaeda worked realized at that point Al Qaeda had pretty much shot its bolt for that period in America, and it would take them a while to rebuild anything. To pull off an operation like that, where you have all 19 men show up -- nobody overslept, and nobody was in a car accident, and nobody chickened out and ran away -- it's unbelievable. You couldn't do it if you tried.
Then they were all killed, and I think the leadership of Al Qaeda realized that once those planes hit the tower, they were pretty much finished; that we were going to come after them. That's when they started dispersing around the world. But I think that's what the vice president was talking about. Now, I don't know what other tactics they had in their minds because they didn't confide in me, and a lot of this stuff was really highly compartmented.
Did you know about the "black site" prisons and all that stuff?
No. I knew there were discussions of what to do with the prisoners, and I knew about Guantanamo, obviously. They had prisoners captured in Afghanistan, and there was a debate about how [to handle them]. What was finally decided in the end, that was highly, highly classified. I would only have known about it if someone were taken from Europe to a place like that.
Even as head of Europe, you wouldn't have known if they were taking people?
If they're doing it in Europe, I would have known. But if they were taking people out of Europe, I wouldn't have known. ... No, the thing that we tried to do was to get the European services to focus on the terrorist groups in their country -- not only that, but the things that bred the terrorist groups, this dislocation of Palestinian communities and all that, to get better coverage of that.
We had a very hard time covering [that], because they just -- Europeans can't go in. If you go to the Muslim areas of Brussels or Paris, it's quite [like] the Middle East. They're more isolated. I think it's one of the things that's prevented a second attack here, that the Muslim community here is much more integrated into American society. In Europe, they really are a separate entity, ... so all their anger ... about what's going on in the Middle East is exacerbated by what's happening to them in Europe.
But in the black sites, you hear rumors about it, but they were very, very tightly compartmented, and that's as they should be.
I was talking to somebody yesterday, a general, who said that the CIA has it all wrong, that what actually happened in Afghanistan was CENTCOM's [U.S. Central Command's] plan, and the CIA helped here.
You should talk to Tenet about that, because I hope he would speak up on that. That's one of the frustrations I had with George: While these guys are saying, "It's all an intelligence failure," as a matter of fact he knows, "No, it was our plan; this plan was drawn up years before and was in place because of the relationship with the Northern Alliance." Tenet was able to put it on the desk at the White House [four days after 9/11]. I think the military never got over that.
It was a unique situation that we had a longtime relationship with ... the Northern Alliance and people that served in Afghanistan and Pakistan over the years. That plan was there because they were anticipating not attacking Al Qaeda, because Al Qaeda is relatively new, but dealing with the rise of the Taliban and eventual chaos in Afghanistan.
But no, I mean, the military didn't arrive for, like, six weeks or five weeks. The problem was that they had battle groups in the Persian Gulf and all the support -- that's the way they operate. They have to look at it for huge numbers of troops.
The people that we have to do this are very special guys that are willing to take huge, monstrous risks without a tremendous support structure. Many of them are former special forces guys who felt constrained in special forces, so they are very resourceful and smart and brave. We shouldn't take away from them because they did all the work, guys like Gary Berntsen and [Gary] Schroen, plus the guys under them that they had in the field.
How important was it to the CIA that that plan was taken on right at that time, that Tenet himself could somehow get it before the president in a way [former CIA Director James] Woolsey or somebody else wouldn't have been able to?
My opinion is that Tenet, Cofer and some of these others were, as we all were, upset by 9/11. They were personally shaken, like they had failed in their charge to protect America. They really wanted to do something, and because they felt that we had the ability to do this, on a political level, it catapulted Tenet from being just a holdover from the Clinton administration who basically kept the job because they couldn't find anybody else to take it ... into the inner circle of the president. In that sense, it was very important.
But it worked. It worked because some guys took some horrendous risks, and it worked because we had B-52s that could come in and bomb the Taliban into spaghetti. So the military played a role in it, but it was the Air Force. Then when they came in, special forces joined up with the paramilitary, and they worked together. They all know each other; it's that special forces world. So it's also wrong for them to say, "The military's here." It's all mixed up together.
You could see both the operational side -- ... [and] the politics, because of your experience in Washington. Help me understand the big politics: Cheney, [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld, Tenet, [then-National Security Adviser] Condi Rice, [then-Secretary of State Colin] Powell, that inner circle of the war cabinet. Where was Tenet in that mix, and what was going on?
After 9/11, and after the success of the initial battle plan, ... because of that, Tenet was right at the heart of the matter. He was in every meeting, and they depended on him because he could speak. He is articulate, and he doesn't equivocate a lot. I think the president liked that. He was able to say, "Yes, we can do this; yes, we can do this; we can do that." It got to the point, actually, that that became a problem, because it started to stretch us really, really thin. The Directorate of Operations, they always said, "Well, we never say no to someone." It did start to fray some of the fabric.
And his primary competitor, was it Rumsfeld?
That was always our perception, although I'll say that he always said, "Oh, I have a wonderful relationship with Rumsfeld." But that's Washington, I guess. But yeah, it's the Pentagon, and I think they want to beef up their intelligence work, which is fine. In fact, in Iraq, the tactical intelligence -- the people that are going and looking for a rocket in somebody's basement or something -- that should be done by military, by joint special forces command troops trained as intelligence officers. You don't want to bring the case officers down to do that, which is what was happening, because then they have to be guarded by the soldiers while they do that.
You have certain specific things that you need CIA-trained people to do: classic human collection against terrorist targets and to recruit agents and to run agents. The Pentagon, they want to get more into that area, and it's an area of natural conflict. The DHS [Defense HUMINT (Human Intelligence) Service], that had a lot of problems. They've tried to reorganize it, and they have a variety of the structures.
The problem is that intelligence seems very simple to people; ... it seems pretty straight. And it is. It's not physics, but it is a profession like anything else. ... It's a knowledge base and a set of professional traditions and standards that's developed over 50 years and that we inherited from the British 100 years before that. ... So there is a long-standing way that you have to work on it, and that's going to be the natural bone of contention for the military. ...
The military does what it does very well; I think we do what we do very well. When you start trying to mix the two, where you start crossing the lines with each other, that's where we have problems.
OK, Tora Bora -- what happened?
I think Berntsen is probably the best person -- I believe what he said, and I heard it from other people that were there, that they used the Northern Alliance troops. They could have used Americans. ... Whether they could have actually done anything anyway, even if they had sent the 10th Mountain Division in and combed the mountains, because it's pretty remote and desolate country, but they did make the conscious decision to use the Northern Alliance troops. Why they did that, ... it's not clear, but what I think Berntsen said is exactly true, in his book, [Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA's Key Field Commander], and he was there, so he's the best judge for that.
And its meaning inside the CIA? We have this tremendous success; the plan is executed; the president is paying attention; the press is saying, "Gosh, the CIA, things are shining." In that moment, here's Tora Bora -- maybe [bin Laden is] up in the mountains; maybe we've got him surrounded. But the military won't play. Inside the CIA, how does that feel? ...
There was always an idea that the military moved in a different pace on these things, and they had a different way of doing things, so it was part of the ongoing frustration, but it wasn't a terrible, tremendous blow, outside of those paramilitary units and the Counterterrorist Center people that were driving it. I think they felt terrific anger and frustration, and Gary reflects that. But everybody else was so busy, literally working around the clock, trying to work in your own areas ... and coordinate with the Counterterrorist Center, that was very aggressive and getting out all over the place and keeping all that in front of you.
I was actually more focused on the battle for the city in the western part of Afghanistan; that was the big turning point.
Mazar-e-Sharif?
Mazar-e-Sharif, because if Mazar-e-Sharif hadn't fallen when it did, we were already making plans for a winter siege, and we had meetings on the budget, like how we would budget for this and the military and our people and the Northern Alliance people [who] would be there through the winter. And it was actually the bombing the broke the Taliban, ... that broke the siege. And so I was much more focused on that, because it was going to affect me directly, than I was with Tora Bora.
When Tora Bora happens, another thing is beginning to become obvious that it's happening, and that is there's a turn toward Iraq that's been going on mildly in the fall, but we're swinging into January, February, March of 2002. When do you feel the turn?
In the late Clinton administration, in the middle '90s, there was a large push on Iraq. Then in the late '90s, as they became more concerned about the nuclear proliferation in Iran, there was a movement of resources from Iraq to Iran. I was in the field then, so I saw that. It was seen as [compared to] Iraq, with the inspectors and with the sanctions and all, that Iran presented a much more dangerous threat than Iraq. Right after the Bush administration came in in February of 2001, we got the word to start gearing up on Iraq, start gearing up [intelligence] collection on Iraq, resources back to Iraq, that these guys were focused on Iraq.
It didn't come as any surprise. I heard right after Sept. 11 this whole thing about the Prague meetings [between Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer]; that never happened. I had a friend of mine ... telling me that there were people at the Pentagon who were pushing in the spring for what they called an "Afghan solution" in Iraq, which was to send in British and American special forces to work with the peshmerga [Kurdish freedom fighters], and the peshmerga would play the role of the Northern Alliance. Finally, senior heads, I think both ... at the State Department and our people and [the] British, [explained] that Iraq's not Afghanistan, the peshmerga aren't the Northern Alliance, it's a whole different ballgame, and so they backed off. ...
And you have Mike Maloof [of the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group (PCTEG)] and the Office of Special Plans [OSP], and the DoD [Department of Defense] taking raw intelligence and retyping it and sending it up? ...
I don't know for sure, but I believe there was serious consideration, at least briefly, given to the "Afghanistan solution" for Iraq. Then by the summer, it was clear we were going to war with Iraq. There was no doubt about that. I mean, you could feel it. You're in Washington long enough, you could feel it.
Summer of 2002?
2002, and I think a lot of it was driven by émigré reporting. Also during that spring, Dr. Rice made a speech when she said, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," and the vice president said, "There's no doubt that they have [reconstituted their nuclear program]." That had to come from these émigré sources, because we weren't reporting that. Even the Pentagon wasn't reporting that, that I saw.
They always say, "Well, all these other European services and all these other countries around the world felt the same way." Well, no, it wasn't exactly the same way. They were all concerned; there was a general fear that Saddam was building [weapons] because Saddam was Saddam. ... It's the way he kept his enemies inside and outside the country off balance.
This general view developed that the inspectors were a bunch of clowns, which wasn't true. The inspectors are very serious guys, and they actually did an effective job -- not perfect, but they were pretty effective. But the intelligence that was coming in was saying that there aren't any weapons, the actual hard intelligence.
And you were seeing that? You would have been seeing it?
Yeah, and most of it's coming from the inspectors -- I mean, not intelligence reporting from the inspectors through the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency], but we had other very sensitive stuff.
During that summer, the Silberman-Robb [commission] report and the SSCI report would say there was no direct political pressure [on the intelligence community], and that's true. Nobody ever came up and said, "Write this NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] in that way." But if you've been around Washington long enough, you know when there's pressure. These are bureaucracies: The CIA is a bureaucracy; the Pentagon is a bureaucracy. People want to get ahead, and the way to get ahead was to move ahead on Iraq. And there were a lot of people that were concerned.
It's six of one, half dozen of the other whether or not to destroy Saddam Hussein. You can't argue that's a bad thing to do. But ... if you're going to do it -- and this was always my concern as they built up through the summer and into the fall, and it became clear that we really were going -- was that you do it in the right way. [Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric] Shinseki was right, what he said about [needing] 450,000 troops. [Gulf War commander Gen. Norman] Schwarzkopf had 750,000 troops, and they didn't feel comfortable attacking Baghdad. I think this idea that we could overwhelm them with our technology really caught on.
...They could have built a Gulf War-like coalition, because what they did was almost without meaning. By sending all these troops out to the desert, they scared the heck out of all the people at the U.N., all the Europeans and everybody else, who said, "Well, the Americans are there; we'd better --" I'm convinced that if they had allowed the inspectors to finish the last three months of inspections, they could have gotten French -- never the Germans, but maybe the French and some other Europeans. If they came in, they would have brought in some of their Arab allies, but it would have meant waiting another year, probably, because of the weather. They just couldn't do that either, physically or politically.
So what was the NIE? What were those, basically just sales documents?
An NIE is a summary of supposedly all the intelligence. I didn't even know they had drafted the NIE. See, Curveball wasn't our source; he was a DHS source -- Defense HUMINT Service source. So we were not involved with Curveball at all until they came up. They wanted us to vet him.
Who asks you to vet him?
Tenet asked me. He started.
And what does he say?
This is all in the Silberman-Robb report. Late September, he asked me to see the guys who were handling [Curveball]. ... In fact, he said to Jim [Pavitt] -- Jim said it to me. He said, "Ask him about that defector, the biological weapons defector." I didn't know who he was, but I didn't want to say, "Well, I don't know who that is." So I went back, and I asked my executive officers, "Who's that guy who defected in '99, and Curveball?"
How did the name Curveball come up?
Curveball is a German term. It had nothing to do with him being --
It's not a baseball terminology?
No. They use "-ball" a lot for code names.
We did some research on it and found that as early as, I think it was September of 2000, the chief of the German service was warning that they couldn't confirm what this guy was saying. In the meantime, DIA had put out over 100 intel reports from this reporting. Now, these went to the concerned analysts and people in the community and became part of the war of Iraq, but were forgotten specifically in detail.
But what was he saying in the early [reports]?
That they had these mobile [biological weapons] labs, and that they were building these, and they had this accident, and he saw guys dying. It was very detailed stuff on the place where he was supposed to work. ...
What's very important -- and this is what I've told everyone I've talked to about this -- is that the way it's being portrayed now is that they have this reporting from the agency through the NIE. When they got that, they said, "Oh my God, we're about to be attacked by the Iraqis." Well, that's not true. ... If you look at what they said, the administration's statements about the danger of this all predated the NIE. The NIE came back because people said, "Let's pull everything together in one place and see what we have."
The other part of it is, there's all sorts of caveats in the NIE. INR [the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research] put a very strong caveat in. People said, "Well, policy-makers only have time to read the headlines." Well, if you're going to go to war, you'd better read more than the headlines in something like that. ... If you really are going to go to war and commit people's lives to that, you want to have a definite view of what you're doing, and you'd better think about how you're doing it. To me, that's the story of the NIE.
And why didn't they?
For whatever reason -- and I can't read their minds -- I think many of them really, honestly believed that defeating Iraq will bring democracy and stop terrorism. I think they really believed that. But for whatever reason, I think they wanted to go. The plan was to knock out Iraq.
But they didn't write the NIE --
No, it was written by WINPAC [Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center] and by the analysts at the agency. But again --
So why would the analysts, why would WINPAC --
Because it's a bureaucracy. We had one officer that was working on the Iraqi ops tell one of my chiefs of station, and this was in the fall, "Look, we've got information that contradicts this." This isn't about intel; it's not about WMD; we're into regime change now. ... They were gambling, too, that when they got on the ground, they would find these things. ... And the amazing thing was -- this makes me look like an idiot, but the fact was I really believed Curveball couldn't possibly be the only source they had on that, but it was.
Let's go back. You hear about this guy named Curveball. You're told to go, or you figure you'd better check him out, find out who he is?
No, to see if we can get access to him, because the Germans had never given us access to him.
So what do you do? ...
You talk to the guys that deal with him that said, "This guy's got a lot of problems; he's unstable." They never said he was a fabricator. The one fellow said to me personally -- he never said officially he's a fabricator; he said, "I think he's a fabricator." But he said: "We can't verify his reporting because we have no other sources, and nobody else has any other sources. We didn't know other sources that can verify what he's saying, so we can't vet what he's saying. All we can do is tell you this is what he said, and he says it consistently."
And how are they telling you this? Through a telephone conversation, or you're in person?
This is in person, but also later they sent a letter to Tenet, who came in and OK'd it. ... This is in January, or maybe late December [2002]. They said: "Go to them [German intelligence]; ask them if we can use this information. If we can use the information, can they assure that he won't contradict them; he won't come out after the president or Powell and say that's not true?" And the Germans were very consistent. They were very professional, and they said, "Only know what he's reported. We've told you what he's reported; we've told you there are personal problems; and we've told you we can't verify what he's telling you. But if you want to use it, go ahead."
"And we can't let you talk to him"?
"And we won't let you talk to him."
Why?
I think that case is just professional pride.
"He's ours"?
He's theirs. What he said is he hated Americans; that turned out not to be true. But I think we would do the same thing. We wouldn't let some other service have -- they said, "This is what we're telling you; why are you any smarter than we are?"
And what's your answer to that?
Well, that's our system. We really need to see, and we pushed and pushed. It took almost a year, and Tenet really weighed in strongly at the end to get them to let us do this, but even then they didn't want to do it. The actual officers who would handle him were furious, as I would be if I were them, because what you're implying is, "All right, Big Brother's here; [let's] sort this out." And in fact, they were right on the money the whole time. They did it just right. They said: "Here's what we have. We can't verify it. It sounds really important. You guys, you big, huge, powerful country, look at this and tell us if you can verify this." And nobody could. But then it took on a life of its own.
So here's this guy who's saying there's chemical and biological weapons. They're in mobile labs or something?
He said this plant was processing these weapons, and they were also building these mobile labs. No one had ever seen these, and it upset the inspectors, [Iraq Survey Group head David] Kay and the guys before [him], because they said: "How can we ever find it? They'll just drive around the country in these mobile labs."
Looking back on it, under a calmer moment, a guy at the agency told me: "I never did think they had anything, because after the first Gulf War, we destroyed tons and tons and tons. Yes, they did have it at the time of the first Gulf War, and they were far ahead on the nuclear program, but all that stuff was destroyed. The inspectors, whatever you think of them, they were around; they were harassment for them." So to think that the Iraqis ... could build Nazi Germany-style underground factories that would process nuclear and biological [weapons], he said, "It's just a huge stretch." But nobody stopped to make that connection at the time.
We were in a kind of craze. I mean, we were angry, and we were --
Oh, yeah. They wanted to strike, destroy an enemy. And legitimately, Saddam was a destabilizing factor. He violated all the treaties; there were plenty of reasons to go to war with Saddam. That's the tragedy of it, having done it this way now. Until they can come to grips with the real reason they went to war, they're never going to be able to get out of it. They have to come to grips with that before they can adjust to do the things they're going to have to do to get out of it without the country collapsing into chaos.
Let's go back to Curveball for a second. ... You probably believe -- tell me whether you do or not -- that there was more evidence to this stock of rolling things than just this Curveball stuff.
Absolutely. I said, this can't just be the only case, because this is kind of a silly -- it's not silly, but it was kind of a goofy case. Given the fact that there's already tens of thousands of troops in the Middle East, it can't be based on this one thing.
What's so goofy about it?
Just the whole thing about him, about how they handled it. They couldn't verify it; he himself was sort of an oddball. You know, for a [foreign intelligence] service to say, "We have this source, and here's where he reports, but we can't vouch for it one way or another," that should be a flag right there. They were saying, "We're being responsible because we don't want to sit on this, but here's the truth of the matter."
When I came back from that meeting, I told the chief of the group that dealt with Germany: "You'd better get right on top of this. Find out what's going on. There's more here." ... They dug into it and found all these details on it, and then they began this long debate through the fall of 2002 about Curveball. We were saying: "We don't know anything about the science of this. I don't know whether they can do this or not; I don't know if it makes any sense." ...
Wait a minute. You said there's a debate in the fall. [But the Curveball intel] shows up in the NIE as one of the central pillars of the NIE?
Yeah. Actually, when they asked me to check on it, the NIE had already been drafted, or it was pretty much done. This was people saying, "We'd better find out about this source." I didn't know all that at the time. ... So the people that drafted the NIE of course had a very emotional stake in defending their analysis of it. I stayed out of most of it -- the operations chief and the group chief deal with it because it was at that level -- but it was as pugnacious and angry meetings as I've seen. WINPAC were very, very set on this; they saw us as throwing in unwanted complication. ... In our professional view, the operational part of this was extremely weak, and there's no validation of this source. No one's ever seen anything; no one's ever really talked to him at any length.
When you say angry or pugnacious, you mean literally people yelling at each other?
Yes, a very strident meeting. ... There was strong language. There was all --
Like what kind of language?
Cursing, and really angry and lots of implication: "Well, you guys don't know what you're talking about. It makes sense scientifically." And then, "How do you know it makes sense scientifically?" "Well, we've checked it on the Internet." "Well, don't you think he could have done that?" A lot of back-and-forth like that.
This is like true believers versus --
Yeah. And then we got our backs up, and we were angry, too. Then, in all of this -- I don't know the exact sequence -- ... all of the e-mails, the summaries, the work we'd done was sent up to the special assistant for McLaughlin so that they had it, because I wanted to make sure they really had it at this point. It dawned on me, even on me, that this was something; that this was a key element.
Did you by now know that he was the primary, the only source?
Yes, at that point.
How did you? When did you learn?
I learned it from McLaughlin's chief of staff. I was talking to him, ... and he said, "Man, I hope not, because this is really the only substantive part of the NIE." I said, "You've got to be kidding." And he said, "No, this is the only substance in the NIE." I said, "Oh my God."
You said "My God" because? What does that mean?
That means that if the NIE is the judgment that they're going to go to war on, and at that point ... there were just too many questions about the validity of the source, and to go to war on something like this -- and I said, "Man, we're going to be responsible for starting a war if they don't do something."
And you hang up the phone from this conversation with this guy, and you say to yourself, what?
Well, I called in the group chief who was working on it, and she said, "I've been trying to tell you that for two months." And I said, "Well, I assume[d] they had something else." [And she said,] "No, this is all there is, and this is why they're fighting so ferociously to validate this source."
That's like pit-in-the-stomach time, right?
Yeah. There was a meeting on the 19th or 20th of December [2002] where it was really fought out, and after that ... it sort of died out. Early January, we didn't really hear anything more about it.
You thought it was over?
We got caught up in other things. There was a lot going on in Europe on the terrorism front at that time. ... I knew it wasn't over. It hadn't been resolved; it was just hanging there. Then we started getting inklings that it might be used in the State of the Union; it might be used in a speech to the U.N. That's when they wanted this cable sent to the Germans saying, "Ask the Germans if they can guarantee these things," and they came back and said, "You can use it, but we can't guarantee anything." Then the president mentioned it in the State of the Union address, and the Germans called me and said: "What's going on? You promised us you wouldn't use it without telling us." I said, "He didn't tell us either."
You didn't know it was going to be in the State of the Union address?
Not the State of the Union address. That came as a surprise.
Wait a minute, the director of central intelligence?
He may have known. I didn't know. I'm sure WINPAC people knew, because they probably wrote that part of the speech. But then the next week, getting ready for the Powell [U.N.] speech in February, ... the fellow from the counterintelligence center who was responsible for verifying what's in speeches, he brought it down. He said, "These portions are for you guys." We went through and read it, and I said, "Well, this is all the Curveball stuff."
Who were you talking to at this point?
My executive officer and the chief of operations. I called this fellow that's McLaughlin's chief of staff, and I said: "I really am uncomfortable with you using this stuff. If you want to say you're overruling me and you want to use it, that's fine, but I have serious problems with it." And he said, "Hold on a second; I'll call you back." And he called me back, and he said, "Come on up; John wants to talk to you." So I go up, and we met in McLaughlin's little conference room. ...
At that point, I said, "I think this guy might be a fabricator." We rehashed everything, which they obviously knew, because they'd been in all the e-mails and everything that we'd been discussing, and John said, "Oh my, I hope not." I said, "Well, I think so." So he said to his chief of staff, he said, "Look into this; see if you can get to the bottom of it," which is kind of strange, because we'd been talking about it all fall. ... I thought, this is the first time you've heard this? It can't be the first time you heard this, because these guys are briefed constantly by the chief of staff, and their executive assistants are smart guys. ...
Why would he act like he didn't really know?
He may not have. Now again, he's a DDCI [deputy director of central intelligence]; he's got a million things on his mind. I think they may have convinced themselves at that point, "Well, we've made a decision; we're going to go with the WINPAC position." And they were surprised, maybe, that we hadn't given up yet. That really focused [him], because he knew me; we'd known each other for 20 years. So he said, "Get to the bottom of this."
So I went back to the office. I said: "Here's what we'll do. We'll line out the section of the speech that we don't think should be used and send it back up to him." And I said to the executive officer, "Stay in touch with the staff up there and make sure that they get the right copy." And so she said, "Yeah, they're going to take it out."
Then, the night before the speech, that's this famous phone call from Tenet. In fact, it's funny. After many years of friendship with Tenet, [it's] one thing I really think stressed our relationship, but the fact is that phone call was meaningless, because at that point the speech was written. They were already in New York; they were going to give it the next day. But I called to give the phone number of the European service chief, and while I had him on the phone, I said: "Boss, ... there's a lot of problems with that German reporting. You know that?" And he said, "Yeah, don't worry about it; we've got it." So I said, "OK, done," and I went to bed confident that they had taken it out.
The next day, my wife actually called me and said, "Powell's on; you may want to watch." I turned on CNN or whatever he was on, and he got to the part about that, and I said, "That's the Curveball stuff." I called the executive officer, and I said, "Did we send them the wrong speech?" That's the first thing I thought is, we screwed up; that it's a bureaucratic mix-up. She said, "No, they just went on." I don't know why, how they decided to use it, what they decided. I have no idea.
[Editor's Note: In his 2007 memoir, At the Center of the Storm, Tenet disputes Drumheller's characterization of this phone call. "Drumheller and I did speak very briefly earlier in the event, but our conversation had nothing to do with Curveball; rather it involved getting clearance from the British to use some of their intelligence in the speech," he writes. Tenet denied FRONTLINE's request for an interview.]
So you say, "Let's line it out; let's send it up to him." She says, "It's done, boss." Up it goes. You go home; you think it's over?
I thought at least for this speech they're not going to use [it], because they had other things. ... The Germans themselves had questions; we had questions. It didn't fit in with anything. ... Later on, after the war, they found this thing for a day or two. They thought they had, and it turned out to be a thing for inflating garage balloons. ...
But they knew right away. The chief of counterproliferation was a close friend of mine. [He] called me, and he said, "This isn't a bio lab, but the inspectors say it looks like something used to make hydrogen blow up, helium to blow up garage balloons."
Why would it have been so heralded?
Because they were desperate to validate it at that point. When they got to Baghdad, they didn't find any of this stuff. ... They honestly believed they had all this stuff. A lot of people did. Europeans did, but they didn't have the evidence. Even Clinton believed it. ... I think they believed for sure they'd find these big warehouses full of this stuff, and when they didn't, then they really wanted to at least try and pin down what was going on with Curveball.
What's going on with Director Tenet? Is he on the side of the guys who want to go to war no matter what the information is? Where is he that fall, and what's going on? ...
It seemed to me ... he was trying to do the right thing. ... At that point, they had already decided to attack and everything, by the end of January, so there was tremendous pressure, and almost a fear, that something was going to happen to derail the attack. I think he just got sucked right along with it. He, in the end, was the guy that pushed the hardest trying to figure out if Curveball was fabricating. ...
What do you mean he pushed the hardest?
He's the one that said, "We have to get to the bottom of this," after the fact, after the speech. "We have to find out the truth about this." He very easily could have covered it up.
But before the speech?
Before the speech, they let it play out among the divisions. All they had to do was say, "We made a mistake." ... But I guess that's hard to say when the war started. ...
You know him. What was going on with him at that time?
I think he was just caught up in it. I think they were tired; they were all working around the clock. It's intoxicating to be around the president, to be in power. ... But I do think there was just incredible momentum, just a huge force, an irresistible force, for the war coming in. ... It's Washington; it's the way it happens in government. When things start building towards war, when there's all this emotion, you do things that you wouldn't have done if you sat down and thought about it. After the fact, like I say, he's the one that pushed very, very hard. He said, "We have to determine if this was real or not."
Why?
Because I think he really had to know; he wanted to know if it was real. ... In fact, it was only through his interest that we were able to finally force [the Germans'] hand.
And?
We sent the guy I considered probably the best field case officer in the agency to talk to him, a fluent German speaker. He sat down with him for a period of days, went over everything in detail, came back and said, "The guy's lying." He said, "He can't account for why things are different in some photos and why they're in others, where he was." In the meantime, they captured his personnel file in Baghdad ... at the ministry. He hadn't worked there since '95; at one point, he was driving a cab. The Germans had told us from the beginning that one of their views was that he just wanted to get the equivalent of a German green card, and that was really probably what it was. ...
So he was singing for his supper, basically?
Yeah. So that was late March [2004]. There was a long study done. He did a long write-up; he went over in great detail, involving all sorts of other technical things. By early May, they withdrew all the reporting on it. It was called back. British held on [a] couple more months trying to double-check it, and then they finally called it all back to their side.
... Is it fairly common that something like this happens, or is it rare?
He was a very clever fabricator. There's even a whole science of denial and deception that the Soviets perfected. There are times when you're tricked, but at least you've gone through all the steps. This is one of the few times I can think of where basically the source was saying what people wanted to hear. If what he said fit what the hypothesis was, they went with it. ...
But no, I can't think of any other time. Usually it's the other way around. Usually they want to know, is the source a good source? You almost have to go and prove: ... "Well, who is this guy? How does he know this? Is this just stuff he's hearing in the cafeteria, or is this real?"
[Tenet has said that there should have been a burn notice put out that this guy might have been a fabricator.] ...
When that story came out and they said it was fabricated, I couldn't say it was fabricated because we'd never met him. What I was saying is there were doubts, and at least one of the guys who dealt with him felt he was a fabricator, and there was a lot of doubt about the way he was handled. ...
That he fell back on the sort of bureaucratic response, "Well, there should have been a burn notice, and why wasn't there a burn notice put out?," and [CIA Director from 2005-2006 Porter] Goss even instituted an investigation about why we hadn't put out a burn, and they quickly found out they didn't know what they were talking about. It's like, after 30 years, I didn't know what I was doing with this?
What I was saying is we need to establish this, and before we use it with anybody, we'd better establish the validity of the case. That's all there was to it. Once we determined he was a fabricator, yes, they did put out a fabrication notice just like it was supposed to be. But you would think if it was up in the air like that, then people would think twice about using it.
We interviewed McLaughlin, and I asked him about it, and he said: "I'm not going to talk about it. I've made a statement. I have no answer."
He doesn't want to do it. He is in many ways a great guy, and he was always very good to me. He may not remember it, maybe not. I mean, they had a million things; I just had Europe. And that's the only difference I had with either [Tenet or McLaughlin].
But it's not like you're some guy from downstairs who they've never met before.
Oh, no. They're friends of mine; they know me. ... I'd say it's the only time I've ever differed with them, but I cannot believe they don't remember. I can believe Tenet might not remember the substance of the phone call maybe, because they had really been up about three days without sleeping at that point, and it was in the midst of about five other things that they were talking about.
But the meeting with John is the one that bothers me most, because I respect John so much. I just can't believe he didn't focus on it; he didn't remember that. It's just speculating, but I would say that they wanted to check on it, and then they just got overwhelmed by the timing, the drive to get it out. The troops are in the desert; Powell's getting ready to speak to the U.N.; and these guys in Europe are saying, "Wait a second -- we have a question about this." ...
But let's go back just for one more second, because somebody's lying, right?
For want of a better word, yeah. Or they're going to say they don't remember, and I can't do anything about that. As I say, I like both of these guys; I respect both of them; they were very good to me, professionally and personally. My mother was really sick; Tenet wrote her a letter, a really nice letter. It meant a lot to her. People make mistakes.
This is some mistake.
It's a big mistake, but at the point that this happened, ... it wouldn't have stopped anything. What it would have done is, at least you don't give them the out of just saying, "Well, intelligence told us to do it; we were just doing what intelligence told us to do," which is not true. That's not true, for sure.
Everybody I've talked to said the role of the DCI is to speak truth to power. The great thing that George Tenet did was he got face time with the president of the United States. The implications of that are he might be able to speak truth to power at a critical moment. ... If there was ever a fulcrum moment for George Tenet, that's the moment, isn't it?
Unfortunately, that's the case. Now, the person that you're talking to has to be receptive to what you're saying, but you have to try. It's the hardest thing I've ever had in my career to do, frankly, personally, ... because I really do like the guy. I admire the guy; I really do. But again, as you said, there's no way to get around it.
Around what?
Around [the fact that] if they had these doubts, they should have told the president. You know, I wish he'd come out and say it, because knowing him, I can't believe he didn't [say anything], because that would be his nature. But I wasn't there, so I don't know. That's the other part of the equation: Only George was there. To have a debate within the service, that's not unusual; that's part of what intelligence work is. ... It should have been figured in, and George is the one who should have done it. Or if it was done and it was ignored, then that's a different issue. But that I don't know. Again, that's the murky part of it.
But when he's standing there getting [the Medal of Freedom] from the president, what did you think? ...
I think at that time people felt what he had done for the agency, and who he was sort of validated saying it was our fault, that it was just an intelligence failure, and the war never would have happened.
Why?
I would have hoped that he would have come out of it and said, "Now wait a second; back off these guys." There were definitely failures in that we didn't have enough agents, and there are reasons for that. There were definitely failures, but the cause for the war wasn't that. There was plenty of debate inside the agency, enough to raise the issue of, "Is the intelligence strong enough to go to war?" That's what needed to be said. Nobody said it.
So he fell on his sword when he resigned around election time? And he took the agency with him?
Well, the agency certainly went with him. I think he resigned because he felt he was going to be hammered by the 9/11 report. Goss was really hammering him. The narrative for the budget markup was just a vicious attack on Tenet. I think he felt he couldn't defend himself. ... He'd been basically running the agency for 11, 12 years. That's a tremendous strain on him, and I think he just wore out. ... Give him his due that he was just burned out.
But yeah, the agency was certainly left holding the bag; that's for sure. ... In intelligence, intelligence collectors have a part of the job; the analysts have a part of the job; and the policy-makers have a part of the job. ... The policy-makers have the biggest part, because they're taking it and saying, "OK, here's what I do with what I have." In this case, there were some glitches down below, but there certainly should have been enough doubt in the minds of the policy-makers. Then to turn around and say, "We only did what we were told to do," -- if you really listened to all this, you would think that the NIE appeared, everybody said, "Oh my God, we're about to be attacked by Iraq," and then we went to war. It just didn't work that way.
Some people we've talked to [talk] about his resignation, and maybe in the year before, when the David Kay phone calls start and letters started coming from, when Tenet has to call Powell and say, "Those things I assured you, that one isn't true; that one isn't true."
He did do that. It's not easy. Powell is a wonderful guy. And I'm convinced Powell didn't know, by the way. I'm absolutely convinced, because there's no way he would have done that if he had known. I just can't imagine.
Well, he'd been assured by his friend George Tenet, his political ally George Tenet, that it was all kosher.
And they were the two sort of moderate voices.
People talked to us, and they say, "What's actually been going on is maybe the most successful covert action by the Central Intelligence Agency in years, and that is against this president of the United States."
There are certainly people who feel that, but if you knew what the people -- the sort of security practices and the polygraphs and all the other stuff -- that you put up [with] just to work there, and then you add to that the sacrifices these people make in the field -- diseases; they get killed; their families are uprooted -- the stresses on the people and the families for a CIA case officer are just unimaginable for normal people.
The people the agency hire, myself excepted, are really talented, smart. There are lawyers and doctors. I had a case officer that was an M.D., a great case officer. They do this certainly not for the money, ... and certainly not to get to live in suburban Washington when they retire. These people sacrifice for the country, and sometimes it is grating when you hear people say, "Well, we're going to support the troops." They forget these people are out there a little bit ahead of the troops.
Yeah, but I could see how you could sit there as one of these very people you're describing and say, "I've been badly used by this administration, and I'm now being blamed for a war even though there was a rush to judgment; there was manipulation of the evidence and information." ... There's lots of stuff that suddenly starts rolling out -- all you guys writing books now. ...
If it's a war, it's a defensive war. It's people defending themselves after the fact, about what the truth was of what happened. But as far as saying it was a political agenda to attack the administration, I don't believe it. If they were going to do it, they could do a lot better than this. You've got guys that are trained to do much more nefarious things, and if they were going to do something, it wouldn't be like this.
I know these guys. I think [Michael] Scheuer is a guy, if you ever talk to him, he really believes what he believes, and he really believes that [it's] important for people to know that. [Paul] Pillar is [the] same way now. I started out to do this just to do something, write the story of my past career up to this point, just to have something to do, and got caught up in this at the end.
I was very upset at the time of the election. As I said, I just couldn't stay on. But nobody did anything; nobody came out and gave a press conference -- ... Pillar going and making a speech to a group of guys in an outreach program, Scheuer writing his third book, whatever. There's nothing new in it; there's new information, but there's nothing new in the way Scheuer feels about things.
What about the whole yellowcake story? What did it mean to have been a covert operator, that Valerie Plame's name was released?
This is just my personal opinion. First off, for a bunch of guys who spent their whole careers sitting in offices in Washington and dining out on the public on the Washington circuit, to do that, if they did what they were alleged to have done, that's the worst thing of all, because they didn't earn the right to do that. And then to say, "Oh, she wasn't a case officer; she was an analyst," that's the worst, because she was a good officer. She did do good work; she did real sensitive things. They hadn't earned the right to do that. [If] people suspect this is covert action, if they did that, then that's the real covert action that was done.
You mean outing an agent?
Yeah. People say, "Well, she's in Washington." Yeah, but she travels to Europe, you don't know? There have been a number of agency people killed or attacked over the years. ... They ended her career, and she was a valuable asset.
Now, why did they do it?
I don't know. You'd have to ask them. [It] certainly looked like they were trying to send a message. I don't know the whole circumstances of [Ambassador Joseph] Wilson going [to Niger], ... but they were looking to try and verify it, because the yellowcake story in and of its own is ridiculous. I'm glad you didn't ask me about that. That to me is sort of the silly end of this. It is the idea you have either some sort of fraud going on in Italy, and if the guy's trying to make money --
You mean writing fake documents?
Yeah. ... The French were monitoring all those countries to see what was being shipped and what wasn't, and we knew they weren't shipping [yellowcake]. It just got caught up in the circle. It was a good story; it sounded cool. Rome fell into my jurisdiction. We never took it seriously. I mean, we looked at it, but there was never any real substance to it.
But then to feel threatened by it like that and have this come out of it, this is wrong. Of all the things that really made me angry, that really made me angry. The beginning of the war is sad and tragic, and you can let yourself get angry, but there's a sort of drama and tragedy to it. But this is just petulance from a bunch of inside-Washington guys.
Hardball from the vice president?
Yeah, tough guys. But they've got to live with themselves. But it's not right. And it is interesting; it does sort of push a button.
Going all the way to where we stand now: Iraq is a mess and pulling all kinds of resources; the Army may be broken; CIA is no longer the CIA you knew as a young man. Is it your sense that the war on terror, as we all thought it was probably going to be fought, has been lost, that we're not really doing it?
I think the problem is calling it war on terror. That gives people the sense that you can actually win it. Once you kill or capture every Al Qaeda guy in the world, there will be another one. Terror has been with us since the dawn of time. It is the tool of the underprivileged and the weak. If it's not Al Qaeda, it will be Sikhs; it will be Armenians.
But are we fighting that war now, or have we just been completely diverted?
So many resources are socked into Iraq. You can say Iraq is the centerpiece of the war on terror, but I don't think that's true. What it does, it does breed other terrorists. I think that it has taken away from the ability to do these other things. But the other problem is the idea that you can have a military solution for a terrorist organization. ...
The difference nowadays is terrorists travel, and the weapons they get are much more powerful. There are not more terrorists now than there ever were; there's always [been] terrorists. We're not even looking at all the right stuff. It's a matter of immigration control and travel of people. Europeans have the same problem we do: Once people get inside, they can go anywhere in Europe that they want. ...
You need to penetrate the terrorist groups; you need to penetrate the communities in which they live. I think the British did a good job after the attack in London. They went and called in all the leaders of the community and said, "You have responsibility in this, too."
In the eyes of some American officials, the German police and intelligence agencies missed signals about the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, failed to push hard enough beforehand to unravel the plot and, more recently, refused to arrest men suspected of being accomplices of the conspirators.
The Germans, in response, say the Americans withheld information from them and sometimes still do -- most recently in the case of a German citizen born in Syria who was expelled from Morocco and then arrested in Syria last October.
The Americans instigated that arrest, Moroccan and American officials said, but never informed the Germans, who were meanwhile looking for the man because his family filed a missing-person report.
''We have always suspected that the Americans were withholding intelligence information and now we have proof,'' said Rolf Tophoven, a German counterterrorism expert with close ties to German officials.
As American investigators try to deflect criticism that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency missed clues, they are increasingly pointing to what some American officials see as even bigger failures in Germany, where Mohamed Atta and other hijackers were members of a group in Hamburg that was under some surveillance from 1999.
''The Germans were basically pretty much AWOL,'' said an American official who has seen intelligence data from both countries. ''They generally knew about these guys, but they were not doing anything to find out what they were up to.''
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Mohamed Heidar Zammar, the German citizen now held in Syria, for instance, first came to the attention of American and German authorities in late 1998 during the investigation of Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, who is considered a founder of Al Qaeda and suspected of being the financial chief for Osama bin Laden.
Mr. Salim was arrested in Munich in September 1998 on suspicion of helping plan the bombings of the American embassies in East Africa that August. He awaits trial in New York on terrorism charges.
Reconstructing Mr. Salim's activities, investigators found that Mahmoud Darkazanli, another Syrian living in Germany, had power of attorney over Mr. Salim's Hamburg bank account and that Mr. Darkazanli's telephone number was programmed into Mr. Salim's cellphone. In an interview last month, Mr. Darkazanli, 44, a businessman who remains in Germany, denied all ties to terrorism.
The F.B.I. pressed for Mr. Darkazanli's arrest, but the Germans said there was not enough evidence. They did, however, put him under surveillance.
The monitoring led to the Al Quds mosque, a gathering place for militants in Hamburg. Along with Mr. Darkazanli, the police discovered that his friend Mr. Zammar was a frequent visitor at the modest mosque, German officials said.
American investigators say they view Mr. Zammar, 41, as a central figure in the Sept. 11 plot, and they were frustrated by Germany's contention that there was not enough evidence to arrest either him or Mr. Darkazanli.
''Darkazanli and Zammar were the recruiters working out of that mosque and bringing people into the Islamic extremist cell,'' said an American official involved in the inquiry.
German intelligence officials said today that they first noticed Mr. Zammar as early as 1997, when they received reports that he had once fought in Afghanistan and that he had ties to Mr. bin Laden. ''He became of more interest to us then, but there was no clear evidence of wrongdoing and we only kept watch on him,'' said a senior intelligence official in Hamburg.
In 1999 and early 2000, the police also kept watch on a nondescript apartment in Hamburg where Mr. Atta and his roommates are believed to have carried out much of the planning for the suicide hijackings.
Last week, the police detained another of Mr. Atta's former roommates and five other men in Hamburg on suspicion that they were planning unspecified new attacks. All of the men were associated with the Al Quds mosque.
Terrorism poses a unique challenge to law enforcement because the guilty parties often do not commit a crime until the actual act.
Germans say that post-Nazi laws intended to protect civil liberties are responsible in part for their failure to act more aggressively.
Before Sept. 11, moreover, Germany's limited antiterrorism resources were focused on neo-Nazis and other domestic threats, not Islamic extremists. Under German law, it was not even a crime to plan attacks to be carried out on foreign soil on behalf of organizations outside the country.
As in the United States, the post-Sept. 11 atmosphere prompted Germany to strengthen antiterrorism laws and to try to improve cooperation between their domestic police and intelligence agencies and with the Americans.
Despite the earlier misunderstandings, the C.I.A. and F.B.I. are still active in Hamburg and elsewhere, German police officials said. ''We have a good system for cooperation and good personal contacts with the C.I.A. and F.B.I.,'' Andreas Croll, a senior official with the Hamburg police, said in an interview.
In recent days, however, there has been a backlash against American criticism of earlier lapses, and German officials are accusing the Americans of turning cooperation into a one-way street.
The dispute was heightened by the discovery last month that the missing Mr. Zammar has been held secretly in Syria for months.
Mr. Zammar disappeared last October after flying to Morocco. Officials were unable to locate him until press reports last month said he was being held in Syria, perhaps with the collusion of the Americans.
Even after those reports, a senior German official said, the American government maintained that it had no information about Mr. Zammar.
New information from Moroccan and American officials shows that the United States orchestrated the steps that got him to Syria, a country with a poor human rights record that is on the American list of state sponsors of terrorism.
After learning that Mr. Zammar was headed for Casablanca, C.I.A. agents tipped their Moroccan counterparts to his imminent arrival and asked that he be detained and deported immediately to Syria, a senior Moroccan official said.
''We declared him persona non grata and put him on the next flight to Damascus,'' said the official, whose account was corroborated by an American official with access to intelligence reports on the episode.
In addition to having Mr. Zammar in detention, the Americans also could benefit by having him in Syria because Germany's Constitution prohibits extradition of its citizens.
Shortly before Mr. Zammar arrived in Syria, a top C.I.A. official traveled there to persuade Syrian intelligence officials to help investigate Al Qaeda. Since then, American officials said, the Syrians have provided intelligence information and shared the results of Mr. Zammar's interrogation.
Mr. Zammar, who weighs 300 pounds, often entered the Hamburg mosque with bodyguards and was described by associates as a charismatic figure. He claimed to have fought in Afghanistan and Bosnia and urged followers to take action on behalf of their faith.
After Mr. Salim's 1998 arrest, the German police tapped the telephones of both Mr. Darkazanli and Mr. Zammar. One of those taps led to three young Arab students.
On Feb. 17, 1999, Mr. Zammar visited the apartment on Marienstrasse in Hamburg where the students lived. There, he met with the residents -- Mr. Atta and two other men implicated in planning the attacks, Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Said Bahaji, according to the weekly magazine Der Spiegel.
While there, Mr. Zammar received a telephone call in which the police overheard him referring to the three men by their first names. The police put the apartment on their watch list, but did not follow up and identify the three men mentioned by Mr. Zammar.
About this time, American investigators took matters into their own hands. An investigator familiar with the episode said the German police discovered that American agents had been questioning people in Hamburg about Mr. Darkazanli and Mr. Zammar without informing the German authorities.
The discovery drew sharp complaints from the Germans, the investigator said.
American investigators contend this was a critical period in the formation of the Hamburg cell, which provided three of the four suspected hijackers on Sept. 11. Mr. Shibh and Mr. Bahaji disappeared just before the attacks and have been charged with conspiracy by the Germans.
A senior German intelligence official said that the light surveillance of the Marienstrasse apartment suggested that Mr. Atta and the others were inconspicuous students. Early in 2000 a judge refused permission to extend the monitoring, ruling that the police did not have evidence of a crime.
But some Americans say the Germans may have had the opportunity to crack the plot.
''If you were on top of these guys you would have gotten quite a bit,'' an American official said.
Dave Emory’s entire lifetime of work is available on a flash drive that can be obtained here. (The flash drive includes the anti-fascist books available on this site.)
COMMENT: With the rhetorical firestorm of faux outrage coming from the EU and Angela Merkel’s office over NSA spying, it is important to recall some very important information.
Much of what is presented below will be review for veteran listeners/readers.
We call attention to Ernst Uhrlau, chief of police in Hamburg during the time period in which German intelligence had taken the Hamburg cell of 9/11 hijackers under surveillance. In 1998, he was appointed special adviser to Chancellor Helmut Kohl on intelligence matters. (
The son of Helmut Kohl’s chief of staff, Andreas Strassmeir, may well have been the mastermind of the Oklahoma City bombing.
See the photo at right and discussion below. With Uhrlau as special adviser to Chancellor Kohl on intelligence matters, and with Andreas Strassmeir apparently having overseen the OKC bombing plot, there is ample reason to bug the Chancellor’s phone!)
In 2005, Uhrlau became head of the BND!
It should come as no surprise that the NSA would target Germany as a “hot spot” for electronic surveillance. An overview of the most important terrorist incidents affecting the United States over the last quarter of a century reveals important evidentiary tributaries leading to Germany:
- The bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 was executed in Germany. The bomb was placed aboard the plane in Germany and the bombers were heavily infiltrated by German intelligence. One or more of the cell of bombers was a German intelligence operative.
- The financing for the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 came from operatives in Germany.
- The actual mastermind of the Oklahoma City bombing, according to ATF informant Carol Howe, was Andreas Strassmeier. Strassmeir was a “former” Bundeswehr officer and the son of Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s chief of staff. Andreas’ grandfather was one of the charter members of the NSDAP under Hitler. The resemblance between Strassmeir and “John Doe #2” is striking.
- Not only did the 9/11 hijack conspirators coalesce in Hamburg, but there is strong evidence that German intelligence was involved with the attack. Many of hijacker Mohamed Atta’s associates in South Florida were Germans. Atta was moved around under the cover of the Carl Duisberg Society (Gesellschaft). (See text excerpts below.) In Florida, he was associating with the sons and daughters of prominent German industrialists. (See text excerpts below.) Of interest, also, is the fact that CIA pilots apparently made a “run” to the Bormann ranch. (See text excerpts below.) This sounds like a regular route. In our conversations with Daniel Hopsicker, we have noted that the South Florida aviation milieu had been a focal point of covert operations for decades, dating back to the Second World War. The Bormann ranch was in the three-borders area highlighted in FTR #457. Did the German associates of Mohamed Atta come up the other end of that pipeline?
- There are numerous evidentiary tributaries between the first World Trade Center attack, the Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 attacks, as set forth in FTR #330.
- The “vacuum cleaner” activities of NSA/GCHQ have been known for a long time–we have done programs about it dating back many years. The formal, public attack on the ECHELON network began in 1998. That attack came from Germany and Underground Reich-associated elements such as the Free Congress Foundation.
- In August of 1998, several things happened almost simultaneously–as the German/EU/Free Congress Foundation/Underground Reich attack on ECHELON/Menwith Hill was gaining momentum, Osama bin Laden stopped using his cell phone and began using couriers for important communication. At this time, German intelligence had the Hamburg cell (of 9/11 hijackers) under electronic surveillance. German intelligence did NOT alert the United States.
- The chief of the Hamburg police in this precise time period was Ernst Uhrlau. In 1998, Uhlrlau was appointed special adviser to the Chancellor on intelligence matters. (The Chancellor at the time was Helmut Kohl. Kohl’s chief of staff was Gunther Strassmeier, father of the aforementioned Andreas Strassmeier!)
- In 2005, Uhrlau was appointed head of the BND!
- In an update, we learn that Germany is threatening to suspend the SWIFT agreement allowing the U.S. to track bank transfer data to monitor the flow of terrorist money. The German justice minister said she fears the program is used to gather economic intelligence. Noting the relatinship between the Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft and German corporations, it isn’t much of a reach to extrapolate that the Bormann capital network is a focal point of that intelligence gathering.
- Mohamed Atta studied German at the Goethe Institute, widely used as a front for the BND.
- A fascinating and important detail concerning the hijackers is the fact that Yeslam bin Laden’s SICO subsidiary trained its pilots at Rudi Dekkers’ Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida! Huffman is the school at which Atta and company were “trained.” Although he denies it, there are profound indications that Yeslam and SICO are involved with the activities of Al Qaeda. This subject will be dealt with at greater length below. Note that there are numerous connections between the milieu of Huffman Aviation and the Iran-Contra-connected drug smuggling routes. Recall that SICO personnel were involved with some of these Iran-Contra drug routes.
- The co-chairman of the board of directors of SICO is Baudoin Dunand a friend and professional associate of Francois Genoud. He also was Genoud’s counsel.
- Reprising an item of discussion from FTR#357, the program cites the opinion of Ernest Backes (one of Europe’s foremost experts on money laundering) concerning the role of Francois Genoud in the development of the events of 9/11. Genoud (who committed suicide in 1996) was very close to Al Taqwa personages, especially Achmed Huber. Bank Al Taqwa appears to have played a significant role in the financing of Al Qaeda’s activities, as well as those of Hamas. According to Backes, Genoud was also a financial adviser to the Bin Laden family.
- It is important, in this context, to review the Clearstream financial network. The connecting links between Clearstream, Al Taqwa, the Banco del Gottardo (formerly the Swiss branch of the Banco Ambrosiano) and Bin Laden were further described by one of Clearstream’s founders, Ernest Backes. Note the opening of 16 unregistered accounts by SICO in the spring of 2001. Is there a relationship between the liquidation of the financial entities in early 2001 by Rochat, Dunand and Zucker and the opening of the Clearstream accounts at approximately the same time?
“Embassy Espionage: The NSA’s Secret Spy Hub in Berlin” by SPIEGEL staff; Der Spiegel; 10/27/2013.
EXCERPT: . . . . Former NSA employee Thomas Drake does not see this as a contradiction. “After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Germany became intelligence target number one in Europe,” he says. The US government did not trust Germany, because some of the Sept. 11 suicide pilots had lived in Hamburg. . . .
EXCERPT: . . . . From 1996–98, Ernst Uhrlau was the Chief of Hamburg Police. In 1998, Uhrlau was appointed a Coordinator of the Intelligence Community in the office of the Chancellor.
On 1 December 2005, he was appointed to the post of the head of the BND. . . .
EXCERPT: . . . . Three years before the Sept. 11 attacks, Germany’s domestic intelligence service was tracking prominent members of the Hamburg terrorist cell that planned and executed the aircraft hijackings, according to newly obtained documents. The documents, including intelligence reports, surveillance logs and transcripts of intercepted telephone calls, appear to contradict public claims by the German authorities that they knew little about the members of the Hamburg cell before the attacks.
As early as 1998, the records show, the Germans monitored a meeting between men suspected of plotting the attacks. The surveillance would lead a year later to the Hamburg apartment where Mohamed Atta and other main plotters were living while attending universities. While the records do not indicate that authorities heard any mention of a specific plan, they depict a surveillance mission extensive enough to raise anew the politically sensitive question of whether the Germans missed a chance to disrupt the cell during the initial stages of planning the attacks. Some American investigators and officials have argued that the Germans in the past missed evidence that could have stopped the plot. The Germans have maintained steadfastly that the information they had was too scanty to warrant serious alarm, and that their police and intelligence agencies were not focused on Al Qaeda at the time.
The documents come from the files of various German police and intelligence agencies. They detail how close an investigation of Qaeda contacts in Hamburg begun in 1997 by the Constitutional Protection Agency, Germany’s domestic intelligence service, came to the main cell members. They were provided to The New York Times by someone with official access to the files of the continuing investigation into the events leading to the Sept. 11 attacks. When the documents were described to officials at the German Interior Ministry and the constitutional protection police, they declined to answer any questions about them but did not dispute their authenticity . . .
. . . . Mr. Motassadeq admitted that he knew Mr. Atta and other plotters and had attended Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. He has maintained in trial testimony that he did not know that his friends were planning to attack the United States. No evidence has been presented at his three-month trial that would reveal when the police first opened an inquiry into Mr. Motassadeq. But the intelligence agency documents show that by August 1998 he was under surveillance and that the trail soon led to most of the main participants in the later attacks. [It was in August of 1998 that President Clinton ordered the cruise missile strike against Bin Laden and the same month that Bin Laden went to a courier system instead of using his cell phone. Note, also, that the head of the Hamburg police at the time the surveillance of the Hamburg cell was in place became head of the BND in 2005!–D.E.]
According to the documents, the surveillance was in place on Aug. 29, 1998, when Mr. Motassadeq and Mohamed Haydar Zammar, who had already been identified by police as a suspected extremist, met at the Hamburg home of Said Bahaji. [Italics are Mr. Emory’s] The police monitored several other meetings between the men in the months that followed, the documents said. The record of the meeting shows that police had identified Mr. Bahaji, another person suspected of being a cell member and believed to have been intimately involved in the planning and logistics of the plot, who fled to Pakistan days before the attacks. Mr. Bahaji later moved in with Mr. Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shibh in the now-infamous apartment at 54 Marienstrasse in the Harburg section of Hamburg. [There are profound indications of a link between Mohamed Atta and the BND–D.E.]. . .
EXCERPT: . . . . As possible leverage, German authorities cited last wek’s non-binding resolution by the European Parliament to suspend a post‑9/11 agreement allowing the Americans access to bank transfer data to track the flow of terrorist money.
German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schmarrenberger said Mnday she believed the Americans were using the information to gather economic intelligence apart from terorism and that the deal, popularly known as the SWIFT agreement, should be suspended.
That would represent a sharp rebuke to the United States from some of its closest partners. . . .
EXCERPT: . . . . In 1990, Atta graduated with a degree in architecture,[15] and joined the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Engineers Syndicate organization.[8] For several months after graduating, Atta worked at the Urban Development Center in Cairo, where he worked on architectural, planning, and building design.[16] In 1990, Atta’s family moved into an 11th floor apartment in Giza.[15][17]
Upon graduating from Cairo University, Atta’s marks were average and insufficient to be accepted into the University’s graduate program. His father insisted he go abroad for graduate studies, and had Atta enroll in a German language program at the Goethe Institute in Cairo.[18] [Italics added.] In 1992, Atta’s father invited a German couple over for dinner while they were visiting Cairo. The German couple ran an exchange program between Germany and Egypt, and suggested that Atta continue his studies in Germany. They offered him a temporary place to live at their house in the city. Mohamed Atta ended up in Germany two weeks later, in July 1992. . . .
EXCERPT: . . . . Using the WikiScanner, one can trace what changes have been made to Wikipdia entries from any given IP address. Employees of the BND had made changes to the entries on military aircraft, nuclear weapons and the BND itself.
Even more amusing were the “corrections” made to the entries made to the entries on the Goethe Institute, the German government’s premier institution for promoting German language and culture around the world. Originally, the entry had stated that many Goethe Institute offices had served as unofficial points of contact by the BND. BND employees had altered it to say the exact opposite: “Foreign branches of the Goethe Institute are not used as unofficial homes for the BND.” . . .
“History of the Carl Duisberg Society”
EXCERPT: In the 1920’s, Carl Duisberg, General Director of Bayer AG in Germany, envisioned sending German students to the United States on work-study programs. Duisberg was convinced that international practical training was critical to the growth of German industry. Many of the returning trainees later rose to prominent positions at AEG, Bayer, Bosch, Daimler Benz, and Siemens, bringing with them new methods for mass production, new ideas, and new business practices. Following World War II, alumni from the first exchanges founded the Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft (CDG) in 1949 to help engineers, businessmen and farmers gain international work experience necessary for the rebuilding of Germany . . . .
Excerpt from the Description for FTR #484
. . . . Daniel also notes that some of Atta’s German associates in Florida were sons and daughters of prominent German industrialists. . . .
Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile by Paul Manning; p. 292.
EXCERPT: . . . A former CIA contract pilot, who once flew the run into Paraguay and Argentina to the Bormann ranch described the estate as remote, ‘worth your life unless you entered their air space with the right identification codes. . . .
EXCERPT . . . Swiss police questioned Yeslam [bin Laden] because one of his companies, Avcon Air Charter, had offered flight training to clients at the Venice flight school attended by some of the hijackers. As a result of what Le Monde called ‘a still unexplained coincidence,’ the pilots of Yeslam bin Laden’s company trained at Huffman Aviation in Florida, the paper stated. ‘I didn’t chose that flight school,’ Yeslam protested. ‘I don’t have contact with my half-brother since over 20 years ago.’ . . .
EXCERPT:. . . .This company, established by the bin Ladens in 1980, is the flagship for the group’s activities in Europe. It is headed by Yeslam bin Laden, and the board of directors is made up almost exclusively of members of the family clan, except for a Swiss citizen, Baudoin Dunand. This well-known lawyer from French-speaking Switzerland, who is on the boards of several dozen companies, came to public notice in 1983 when he agreed to represent the Swiss banker Francois Genoud, a controversial figure who had been a disciple of Hitler and sole heir of Goebbels’s copyrights before becoming one of the financiers of the FLN during the Algerian War. The friendships of the bin Ladens sometimes seem surprising, but they are logical: Francois Genoud has always been pro-Arab. . . .
EXCERPT: . . . . Financial expert Ernest Backes of Luxembourg has [studied] white-collar crime in the field of banking for many years. According to him, there are indications of unusual transactions with which the groups [associated with] bin Laden could have earned money. ‘You can, for example, examine whether, within a certain time period there’s been an attack against the securities of a given airline company. Since these securities are safe in a ‘clearing system,’ you can’t get an overall view, who the owner was at a given time.’ . . . According to Backes’ information, the trail leads to Switzerland, to the accounts of an organization that was founded by the late lawyer Francois Genoud and evidently still survives. Says Backes, ‘One of the grounds for accusation is that this Swiss attorney had the closest connections with the Bin Laden family, that he was an advisor to the family, one of its investment bankers. It’s known for certain, that he supported terrorism and was the estate executor for Hitler and part of the terror milieu.’ [Emphasis added.]”
“Banking with Bin Laden” by Lucy Komisar [sidebar to “Explosive Revelation$”]; In These Times; 3/15/2002.
EXCERPT: . . . .In November, U.S. authorities named some banks that had bin Laden accounts, and it put them on a blacklist. One was Al Taqwa, ‘Fear of God,’ registered in the Bahamas with offices in Lugano, Switzerland. Al Taqwa had access to the Clearstream system through its correspondent account with the Banca del Gottardo in Lugano, which has a published Clearstream account (No. 74381). But Bin Laden may have other access to the unpublished system. In what he calls a ‘spectacular discovery,’ Ernest Backes reports that in the weeks before CEO Andre Lussi was forced to leave Clearstream last May, a series of 16 unpublished accounts were opened under the name of the Saudi Investment Company, or SICO, the Geneva holding company of the Saudi Binladen Group, which is run by Osama’s brother Yeslam Binladen (some family members spell the name differently.) Yeslam Binladen insists that he has nothing to do with his brother, but evidence suggests SICO is tied into Osama’s financial network. [Emphasis added.] SICO is associated with Dar Al-Maal-Al-Islami (DMI), an Islamic financial institution also based in Geneva and presided over by Prince Muhammed Al Faisal Al Saoud, a cousin of Saudi King Fahd, that directs millions a year to fundamentalist movements. DMI holds a share of the Al Shamal Islamic Bank of Sudan, which was set up in 1991 and partly financed by $50 million from Osama bin Laden. Furthermore, one of SICO’s administrators, Geneva attorney Baudoin Dunand, is a partner in a law firm, Magnin Dunand & Partners, that set up the Swiss financial services company SBA, a subsidiary of the SBA Bank in Paris, which is controlled by the bin Mahfouz family.”
EXCERPT: [Notice when this was published–9/6/2001.–D.E.] . . . The United States-led spying system known as Echelon can monitor virtually every communication in the world — by e‑mail, phone or fax — that bounces off a satellite, the European Parliament was told. But in reporting on a yearlong study of the system that was prompted by concern that American companies were using data from the system to gain a competitive edge, Gerhard Schmid, a German member of the Parliament, said that many European countries had similar abilities . . .
In early February, the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office in California came across a Snapchat post from a man saying he planned to be “shooting up” the Westfield Valley Fair mall, approximately a 45-minute drive away, in Santa Clara.
“I swear I’m literally seconds from snapping and going on a mass homicide,” wrote 21-year-old Hunter Tital.
The sheriff’s office quickly tracked down Tital’s cellphone provider and his phone's location. When they confirmed that Tital was at the mall, they called in the Santa Clara Police Department and the nearby San Jose Police Department. Officers quickly confronted Tital at gunpoint and eventually arrested him outside a Nordstrom store before most mall workers knew what had happened. Tital had a pistol and an assault rifle on him, according to the San Jose police, and later pleaded guilty, court records show.
One law enforcement group saying it worked behind the scenes to stop this potential tragedy was the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, or NCRIC (“Nick-Rick”), one of 80 “fusion centers” — nearly all created after the Sept. 11 attacks in response to the threat of terrorism. Now nearly 3,000 people work at these fusion centers nationwide tracking down and monitoring these types of cases. In the February case, Mike Sena, the president of the National Fusion Center Association and the director of NCRIC, said the center made sure local law enforcement agencies worked together.
“We called each of those agencies and made sure that they had what they needed,” Sena said. “At the time, I knew that there was a lot of confusion between the folks at Seaside and Santa Cruz and Monterey over who had the jurisdiction on the threats and the filings on the case, and the search warrants.”
But Officer Steven Aponte, a San Jose Police Department spokesperson, the agency that arrested Tital, said that NCRIC actually did little to help with this case.
“We don't have any information showing that NCRIC was involved,” he said, noting that his department relied on information that came from the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office to find the suspect, like the fact that Tital had shoulder-length, purple hair.
That confusion has raised concerns among government watchdog and civil liberties groups for years. They point to cases going back over a decade that they say show fusion centers, which cost federal and state taxpayers over $330 million a year, at best waste money and at worst often violate civil liberties. Either way, fusion centers, in the two decades since 9/11, have become a quiet part of the modern American criminal justice landscape, for better or worse.
“The practice of DHS fusion centers are, in large part, humming in the background,” said Brendan McQuade, a professor of criminology at the University of Southern Maine, and the author of a 2019 book about fusion centers, "Pacifying the Homeland." McQuade has publicly advocated to shut down the fusion center in Maine. He wrote in a June 2020 op-ed in The Bangor Daily News that “fusion centers have also been implicated in the surveillance of constitutionally protected political activity across the spectrum.”
Raising concerns
Twenty years after the Sept. 11 attacks prompted the creation of these centers, these criticisms do not seem to be waning. According to a July report by two immigrants’ rights groups and the Boston University School of Law, the fusion center in the Texas capitol, known as ARIC (Austin Regional Intelligence Center), “collects and disseminates vast quantities of data about Austin residents with minimal limitations or oversight.” But its purpose is unclear.
“Surveillance and policing and patrol does not actually prevent crime,” said Bethany Carson, an Austin-based immigration policy organizer, and one of the co-authors of the new report on ARIC. “It’s not something that can prevent crime.”
ARIC did not respond to NBC News’ requests for comment.
Political officials have raised similar criticisms for nearly a decade. In October 2012, a Senate subcommittee found that after a two-year investigation there had been “little, if any, benefit to Federal counterterrorism intelligence efforts.” Then in July 2013, a House Homeland Security Committee found that there were no “tracking mechanisms in place to provide a complete picture, even quantitatively, of how fusion center-gathered information affects Federal terrorism or criminal cases or other homeland security mission areas.”
Jake Weiner, who is a law fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a public interest research group, and an expert in fusion centers and domestic surveillance, pointed out that it’s practically impossible for outsiders to figure out what fusion centers do.
“There’s no public oversight, functionally and there’s no information coming out other than the BlueLeaks,” he said. “I think one of the questions we should be asking is: Is it worth the price tag?”
In recent years, particularly as defund the police efforts have gotten some traction in some liberal American cities, fusion centers have received even more scrutiny.
When Milwaukee County Supervisor Ryan Clancy was asked if he fully understands what the Milwaukee-based Southeastern Threat Analysis Center does, his answer was blunt.
“The short answer is no, and it’s not for a lack of effort,” he said. “To have any organization operating with the opacity that the fusion centers do — it’s kind of the Wild West. They’re operating in almost a complete lack of oversight.”
Long history
Fusion centers sprung out of the fact that, even before 9/11, few state and local law enforcement entities were able to share information and intelligence across regional and state lines, much less national ones. One common criticism by the 9/11 Commission itself was that the federal government was hampered by its own rules and regulations, concluding that the FBI specifically “was limited in several areas critical to an effective preventive counterterrorism strategy.” Pre-9/11, such federal law enforcement integration largely only existed through Joint Terrorism Task Forces.
In some ways, fusion centers were the state and local version of these task forces, but with one key distinction. While the initial wave of early 2000s-era fusion centers focused on counterterrorism, nearly all have expanded their mission to include “all-crimes and/or all-hazards.” In 2007, the Congressional Research Service found that several fusion center leaders were “more concerned with issues such as gangs, narcotics and street crime.”
Today, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s website, fusion centers serve as “focal points” to “lawfully gather and share threat-related information” among all levels of law enforcement, from local police to the FBI. Every state has at least one, along with 27 major urban area centers and three spread across U.S. territories — California alone has six centers.
According to Sena, the Valley Fair mall incident is a clear example of how fusion centers help different agencies advance everyday criminal investigations.
“Rather than trying to find the usual suspects, we are trying to identify the people that are the small number of folks in the communities that are causing the disproportionate amount of harm to the community,” he said.
Structural challenges
But critics of fusion centers say they have even more problems than the fact that nearly all of them have moved beyond aiding terrorism-related investigations.
Each fusion center is run independently and exists within what the American Civil Liberties Union called a “no man’s land between the federal government and the states.” Also while fusion centers gather vast quantities of purported suspicious activity, this data gathering rarely results in criminal prosecutions, much less convictions.
A spreadsheet published as part of the BlueLeaks trove, the 2020 publication of internal fusion center documents from around the country, for instance, showed that the fusion center found some troubling and potentially criminal incidents.
For example, in March 2020, a female employee at a Victoria’s Secret store in Barton Creek Mall in Austin, who posted on Facebook that she was upset about her hours being cut and wrote: "so my job just going to cancel employees shift so they don't have to pay us...this is why ima blow up the f---ing store." But the log states: “No device was located and the subject's employment was terminated.”
Another November 2019 incident describes a student who apparently told a teacher: "Do you know what the 2nd Amendment is? It's what gives me the right to bear arms, and bring them to school. I'm going to kill as many people as I can. I'm going to be more famous than nikolas cruz."
This student was arrested for having made a “Terroristic Threat,” the log added.
But there are also plenty of reports not tied to a specific crime. As part of the BlueLeaks document dump, in a file pertaining to ARIC, the Austin fusion center, one person recorded that a Metro Rail passenger in Austin had “changed his dress from traditional westernized clothing to ‘tunics with an Arabic style hat,’” adding that this new outfit made the person appear to be “‘tense and sweaty, and that his fists are always clenched’ while ‘mumbling’ what the caller describes sounds like Arabic.”
Another was a report from a person on a Swift Airlines flight from Nevada to Austin. That person said he saw a “Middle Eastern male in his thirties” who was looking at photos on his phone. This passenger then watched this fellow passenger as he “viewed photo of a female and kissed the screen,” and then saw a “photo showing the male having a very long beard then in the next picture he was clean shaven,” and finally a “photo showing the male wearing a black mask covering most his face then wearing a silver mask.” Based on these reports, it is not clear what, if any action was taken in Austin.
“Part of the problem post-9/11 was that information sharing was seen as the solution and there wasn’t a discussion about what information was appropriate to collect and share,” said Michael German, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, and a former FBI special agent who wrote the 2007 ACLU study.
“All they started doing was collecting and sharing more dots.”
Sena, the president of the National Fusion Center Association, said that gathering these reports doesn’t suggest that a potential suspect is nefarious.
“Anyone can report something through the (suspicious activity reporting) process,” he said. “But that doesn't mean that it gets inducted into our environment unless it meets the threshold,”
At the same time, even Sena says there’s not an obvious way to know how successful his fusion center, NCRIC, or any other fusion center actually is, in practice.
“It’s really hard to connect a specific report to an arrest or a specific conviction,” he said.
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At the time of the 9/11 attacks, I was a senior counterterrorism analyst at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., focused on terrorism in and from the Middle East. Al Qaeda-affiliated threats had been picking up their pace since the turn of the millennium. By the spring and summer of 2001, the system was blinking red as intelligence agencies gathered chatter of an impending plot — but failed to develop actionable information to counter the threat.
My colleagues and I worked 15-hour days and six-day weeks in our attempt to not only determine who carried out the attacks, but to uncover and prevent the follow-on attacks we feared were coming.
Ironically, I was out of the office on that fateful morning, having cleared my schedule months in advance to take a day off to work on my dissertation. I helped my wife and kids get out the door and settled in at my computer just in time to see a news ticker cross my screen reporting that a small propeller plane had crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. I turned on the television and watched United Airlines Flight 175 crash into the south tower. Within hours, I would be sitting in the FBI Strategic Information and Operations Center, assigned to lead the analytical team focused on UA175.
I remember well feeling that primeval “fight or flight” response to danger. People were glued to the televisions watching the planes crash into the towers over and over on cable news, and I felt grateful to be part of the FBI’s response. Unlike most, there was something I could actually do. My colleagues and I worked 15-hour days and six-day weeks in our attempt to not only determine who carried out the attacks, but to uncover and prevent the follow-on attacks we feared were coming. Intelligence, information from the public and investigative leads were coming in like a tidal wave, and making sense of it all in a timely manner was a gargantuan task.
But as days and weeks morphed into months and years, what we did to counter terrorism did not significantly evolve. It was understandable that immediately following 9/11, the entire U.S. national security bureaucracy — and, indeed, country — was focused solely on bringing the perpetrators to justice and preventing the next attack. But after that, we needed to adapt — and we didn’t.
U.S. officials from President George W. Bush on down immediately framed our counterterrorism efforts as a war to be won. Fittingly so, as Americans needed to hear that everything would be OK, that the terrorists would be found and punished, while the government bureaucracy needed to be galvanized to secure the country at warp speed.
Over the following two decades, the United States built a counterterrorism enterprise through its intelligence, law enforcement and military bodies that has been remarkably successful from a tactical perspective —foiling attacks and disrupting terrorist networks. But it has been less successful from a strategic vantage point, given that more people today are radicalized to violent extremism than in 2001 as part of a more diversified and globally dispersed terrorist threat. Two decades after 9/11, the U.S. government’s database of known or suspected terrorists has grown by a factor of nearly 20.
The fact is, the struggle against terrorism is not a war to be won or lost. The United States has never actually fought a “war on terrorism” any more than it has fought a war on crime or drugs. Counterterrorism efforts, therefore, cannot be measured in terms of victory or defeat. Rather, they should be seen as part of an ongoing effort — short of both war and peace — to disrupt acts of terrorism, compete with adversaries and address the underlying issues that make a dangerous minority of people believe the only way to achieve their social or political goals is through violence targeting civilians.
By focusing so many resources on the counterterrorism mission for two decades, all those dollars, intelligence assets and more primarily went to support military actions. It’s long overdue for the mission to recalibrate by widening the national security aperture to address other key threats, from cybersecurity to climate change, and trimming the counterterrorism program to make it more affordable over the long term.
This will require less investment in expensive hard power (military) and much more investment in inexpensive soft power (intelligence, diplomacy, civilian capacity-building). It’s a shift that will entail a period of rebalancing, along with burden shifting to partners and allies.
The United States should draw on its civilian departments and agencies to help foreign countries address radicalization themselves, arresting and trying terrorism suspects within the rule of law and with respect for human rights, and working with private and nongovernmental partners to build resilient communities. We must invest in our partners’ own civilian departments and agencies, such as ministries of justice, interior and corrections.
At the same time, these policy changes must seek to preserve the many counterterrorism advances already made. For instance, the U.S. should consider maintaining small numbers of troops in key locations to defuse global challenges, albeit not with the intention of resolving them. Small counterterrorism missions in Iraq, Syria, Africa and, yes, Afghanistan may be necessary to prevent terrorist groups from holding territory or plotting foreign attacks from safe havens. Such deployments could be run by international partners rather than the U.S., such as the French-led Operation Barkhane in Africa’s Sahel region or the mission in Iraq where NATO’s deployment is increasing.
Like efforts to counter crime, drugs, corruption or other illicit activities, countering terrorism is an ongoing effort. While none of these malign activities can be defeated, persistent efforts to counter them can be very effective. Twenty years ago, in the heat of the moment, the U.S. counterterrorism response was entirely tactical, aimed at preventing the next attack. Politics, ongoing threats and bureaucratic inertia then prevented any serious re-evaluation of that strategy. Today, we need to focus on not only stopping today’s plots, but also on shrinking the pool of people drawn to violent extremist ideologies.
Unlike traditional wars, there is no end game or exit strategy for the struggle against terrorism. Leaders should communicate to the public that terrorism is a tactic, and its complete defeat is neither achievable nor necessary. They should avoid language suggesting terrorism will end or be defeated and speak about terrorism instead as a danger to be taken seriously but one that does not present an existential threat to the country. The goal should be to reduce terrorism to a low-level threat that law enforcement can address, just as it ably does other threats.
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Dr. Matthew Levitt is the Fromer-Wexler fellow and director of the Reinhard program on counterterrorism and intelligence at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
The head of a computer firm wants the independent commission named to investigate September 11 intelligence failures to review accusations that his software-tracking program, which he says the Justice Department stole, was diverted to Osama bin Laden.
William H. Hamilton, president of Inslaw Inc., said the commission — headed by former New Jersey Gov. David H. Kean — should focus on the validity of published reports saying bin Laden penetrated classified computer files before the attacks to evade detection and monitor the activities of US law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
The 10-member Commission on Terrorist Attacks will have the authority to subpoena witnesses and documents in an effort to determine whether intelligence lapses by the FBI, CIA and other agencies contributed to the deadly success of the September 11 attacks.
“Bin Laden reportedly bought the US intelligence community’s version of the Promis database software on the Russian black market, after former FBI Agent Robert P. Hanssen had stolen it for the Russians, and used Promis in computer-based espionage against the United States,” Mr Hamilton said in a two-page fact sheet.
“The national commission may wish to examine whether the Justice Department’s misappropriation of Promis was, at a minimum, linked indirectly to pre-September 11 performance problems of US intelligence,” he said.
Law enforcement authorities said Hanssen gave secret US software to his Russian handlers that later went to bin Laden, allowing him to monitor US investigations of his al Qaeda terrorist network.
The Washington Times reported last year that an upgraded version of the Promis software was routed to bin Laden after Hanssen, who is now serving life in prison for his espionage activities, had sold it to Russia for $2 million.
The software not only would have given bin Laden the ability to monitor US efforts to track him down, the authorities said, but also could have given him access to databases on specific targets of his choosing and the ability to monitor electronic-banking transactions, easing money-laundering operations for himself or others.
The government has denied using the Promis software or that Hanssen delivered it to the Russians, but charged in a criminal complaint against the former FBI agent that he made extensive use of the bureau’s computerized case management systems — Field Office Information Management Systems (FOIMS) and Community On-Line Intelligence Systems (COINS) — as part of his activities.
The government also said Hanssen gave his handlers a technical manual on the US intelligence community’s secure network for online access to intelligence databases. Law enforcement authorities said FOIMS and COINS are believed to be upgraded versions of the Promis software.
Mr Hamilton said FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III acknowledged to Inslaw attorney C. Boyden Gray in late 2001 that the FBI system was based on “the Inslaw software,” a fact the bureau had vigorously denied for more than a decade. He said Mr Mueller referred further inquiries to the Justice Department, although a requested meeting never was scheduled.
“The national commission will need to overcome resistance from the Justice Department, remarkable for both its ferocity and tenacity, to any inquiry that might even imply the existence of the department’s improprieties regarding Promis,” Mr Hamilton said.
He said federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, including the FBI, later denied under oath that they had used the program, but the government did “an abrupt about face” a month after the September 11 attacks following news reports that bin Laden might have used the Promis program.
Mr Hamilton said the FBI confirmed on Oct. 16, 2001, that the government had used Promis to track classified information in federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
Inslaw battled the Justice Department for more than a decade over a $10 million, three-year contract to install the Promis program. A federal court initially ruled the department had used “trickery, fraud and deceit” to steal the Promis program, but that ruling later was overturned in the government’s favor. The House Judiciary Committee, after a three-year investigation, also found in 1992 that there was “strong evidence” the Justice Department had conspired to steal the Promis program.
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Twenty years after the attacks of 9/11, there is still so much we do not know about that intensely studied day. The greatest void remains the hijackers—not the how of their diabolical plot, but the who: who they were as people.
That human element has been a taboo subject for two decades, as if trying to understand what they believed and what drove them would somehow justify or excuse their acts.
And yet their lives open up a door to perhaps one of the most intriguing mysteries of that terrible day: the South Tower of the World Trade Center was never a target that al Qaeda planned to hit. The implications are enormous: because of the decision of two of the hijacker pilots to hit both towers and die together, both buildings ultimately came down and the White House was spared.
In the course of my research into the terrorists' point of view, a source gave me access to thousands of pages of CIA interrogation transcripts and reports of captives who were involved in 9/11 plotting—most centrally Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the mastermind of the plot who is now a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay.
Only a very small group has ever had access to KSM's actual words, the records shielded by secrecy and buried in controversies over torture and black sites. And though what KSM had to say fed scores of breathless terror alerts and provided leads to uncover plotters and plots, the voluminous documentation largely went unexamined as a source to understand the lives and motivations of those who perpetrated 9/11.
In many interrogations and debriefings, KSM says that al Qaeda was looking for three classes of targets—military, political, and financial. Thus, in the mountains of Afghanistan, they chose the Pentagon, the White House, and the World Trade Center (as a financial center). Osama bin Laden, KSM says, added the U.S. Capitol building, believing that Congress was the source of America's unwavering support for Israel.
In thousands of pages, the CIA never reports KSM making mention of any plan to hit both towers. In fact, he says outright that he was surprised when both buildings were hit.
In that, KSM speculates that Mohammed Atta, the American-based leader of the plot and the pilot of American Airlines Flight 11 that hit the North Tower, and Marwan al-Shehhi, the hijacker who piloted United Airlines Flight 175 into the South Tower, did so because they wanted to die together. He repeatedly calls them unusually close and "different," using this to explain why they defied al Qaeda instructions. On more than one occasion, he calls them "homos," speculating that they might have been lovers.
In over a decade of reporting, I've asked many FBI and intelligence sources about the hypothesis that the South Tower was never what al Qaeda intended to attack, and all were surprised by the question, initially. But after reviewing the evidence, they don't dismiss the possibility—particularly not the FBI agents who were involved in reconstructing the lives of the 19 hijackers before 9/11.
After the attacks, over 100 agents and analysts pored over every move the pilots and "muscle men" made in the United States: everywhere they went, every meal they ate, every credit or debit card transaction, every phone call and email.
I've scoured that database as well. Over 15 months that they resided in the United States, Atta and al-Shehhi uniquely did everything together. They trained together, ate together, shopped together, and lived under the same roof. They spent nights together in hotels, including meeting in Boston just days before 9/11. They constantly checked in with each other by phone when they were separated, and al- Shehhi called Atta twice on the morning of September 11, the two separated by different terminals. They acted as a couple. None of the other pilots or muscle men fit any similar profile.
Ramzi bin al-Shibh (also a Guantanamo captive) and the Berlin-based operative who was Atta's link back to Afghanistan also reinforces this interpretation. He told U.S. interrogators that Atta and al-Shehhi had been best friends, roommates, and maybe even lovers for years, going back to their days in Hamburg where bin al-Shibh roomed with them in the same apartment. And he said that Atta was inconsolable when he was separated from al-Shehhi, constantly worrying about his young friend's wellbeing and health (al-Shehhi was ten years younger than Atta and may have also been gravely ill).
I've also contacted parents and friends of the 9/11 hijackers, many of whom were reluctant to talk and thus did so only on deep background, not wanting to have their lives further ruined by association with the events of that terrible day. Some of these people have even changed their names to disappear. Among them, there is almost universal agreement regarding some kind of special relationship between Atta and al-Shehhi. Members of Atta's family spoke to me of his psychological torment, embracing the hypothesis with their own homophobic slurs as a way of explaining the unexplainable: that somehow their lives—and their faith—had been perverted.
Perversion—that is, of the terrorists being "bad" Muslims—has always been a big part of the American narrative explaining the hijackers: that they spent their days watching porn and their nights slamming down drinks and visiting prostitutes; that they were evil hypocrites.
But in the entire FBI classified reconstruction of their actions in the U.S.—hundreds of pages and many thousands of entries—there is only one instance actually recorded of anything confirming this. On September 7, two of the musclemen who would fly on American Airlines Flight 11—Abdulaziz al-Omari and Satam al-Suqami—called the "Sweet Temptations" escort service from their Newton, Mass. motel and ordered two prostitutes. The women told the FBI that they had sex with the two, positively identifying them from ATM and visa photographs.
But there is no record of Atta and al-Shehhi doing anything similar, nor of any others of the 19 hijackers.
The story of Ziad Jarrah, the hijacker pilot of United Airlines Flight 193, adds further evidence.
Jarrah was headed for the U.S. Capitol but went down instead in Pennsylvania due to the heroic actions of the passengers. Married to a German woman of Turkish descent, during his time in America, living in Florida near Atta and al-Shehhi and spending most of his free time with the two men, he respectfully observed them. All during that time, Jarrah exchanged hundreds of emails and had countless phone calls with his wife in Germany, and he traveled to Germany five times to visit her.
Jarrah told her—and she told others—that much about America shook the views of the three, forcing them to ponder the difference between their societies and the richness and hope of the West. In America, no one pried into who they were. They were free to travel and practice their faith—and even train to be terrorists—without the mosque or secret police or even neighbors watching or judging. Atta and al-Shehhi, he said, were free to be themselves.
There is a final piece of the puzzle. A month before 9/11, we now know that there was a crucial phone call between Atta and bin al-Shibh, who was in Berlin. In that call, intercepted by German intelligence, the two explicitly discussed the targets. Donald Rumsfeld confirms this in his autobiography, that the two posed as students on the phone talking about different subjects of study. They talked about four targets, in code: "architecture" referred to the World Trade Center. "Arts" was the Pentagon. "Law" was the Capitol Building. "Politics" was the White House. No South Tower.
Why does Atta and al-Shehhi's relationship, or a possible change in targets, matter?
For one thing, it is now clear that attacks on both buildings were integral to their collapsing. The National Institute of Standards and Technology concluded that the resulting dispersal of fuel and debris, and the intense heat created, accumulated to cause both buildings to fall. Engineers who have studied the effect believe that had only one building been hit, it might have survived. Further evidence of the cumulative impact is seen in the nearby 7 World Trade Center, a building that wasn't directly attacked but also collapsed on 9/11 as a result of the cascading heat and flying debris. In other words, if things had gone according to al Qaeda's intended plan, the Trade Center complex might have survived, along with the 624 occupants of the South Tower and hundreds more who were below the 93rd floor of the North Tower, where the plane hit.
The most plausible explanation as to why both towers were struck—and the attacks synchronized so closely—was that Atta and al-Shehhi chose to die together.
Had the men followed al Qaeda's plan, the White House might also have been struck by UA Flight 175, piloted by al-Shehhi. Vice President Cheney, who was in the White House that morning, might have been killed.
Picture the White House, the ultimate American icon, destroyed. It's hard to imagine what the aftermath of such an attack would have been.
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Privacy Center.Sexual abuse allegations against Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of Brooklyn did not have “the semblance of truth,” the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has said in its judgement on the results of an investigation made under Pope Francis’ rules for alleged misconduct by bishops.
“I repeat what I have said from the beginning. There is no truth to these allegations,” Bishop DiMarzio said Sept. 1. “Throughout my more than 50-year ministry as a priest, I have never abused anyone.”
The Vatican judgement concerned separate claims from two alleged victims who have filed civil lawsuits alleging Bishop DiMarzio abused them when he was a priest of the Archdiocese of Newark four decades ago. New Jersey in 2019 suspended the statute of limitations for civil sex abuse lawsuits, allowing for a two-year window for lawsuits concerning older allegations.
Under rules implemented by Pope Francis in the May 2019 document Vos estis lux mundi, the metropolitan archbishop investigates allegations of abuse against other bishops in his region. The Holy See authorized Timothy Cardinal Dolan of New York to conduct the investigation, which he did through hiring an outside law firm.
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith reviewed the investigation results and made a determination finding the claims “not to have the semblance of truth.”
“Given this finding, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith will not authorize any further canonical process to address the accusations,” the New York archdiocese said in a Sept. 1 statement.
Bishop DiMarzio said he “fully cooperated with this inquiry, because I know I did nothing wrong.”
“I have prayed for a conclusion to this investigation, and these final results further verify, as I have consistently said, that these allegations have absolutely no merit,” he said.
Both accusers are represented by attorney Mitchell Garabedian, who criticized the investigation as “subjective and biased.”
In November 2019, Garabedian sent a letter to the Newark archdiocese reporting that Mark Matzek of New Jersey said he was abused by Bishop DiMarzio and another now-deceased priest at St. Nicholas parish in Jersey City in the 1970s. Metzak, who is now in his late fifties, said the abuse occurred when he was an altar boy. In March 2021 Garabedian filed a lawsuit on Metzak’s behalf seeking $20 million
In June 2020, Samier Tadros accused Bishop DiMarzio of committing abuse in 1979 and 1980 beginning when he was six years old. Bishop DiMarzio was then a priest at Holy Rosary parish in Jersey City. In February 2021 Tadros filed a lawsuit seeking $20 million. Bishop DiMarzio said at the time that he had retained legal counsel and was considering filing a lawsuit over the “libelous” claims.
To investigate the allegations, Cardinal Dolan had hired the law firm of Herbert Smith Freehills. The firm retained the Freeh Group to lead what the New York archdiocese described as “an independent, thorough investigation.” The Freeh Group is headed by Louis Freeh, a former FBI director.
Bishop DiMarzio’s attorney, Joseph A. Hayden, Jr. of the New Jersey law firm Pashman Stein Walder Hayden in Hackensack, N.J., welcomed the decision.
“This decision by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was rendered after an impartial and rigorous factual investigation conducted by former federal prosecutor John O’Donnell, partner at Herbert Smith Freehills, as well as the investigative firm founded by former FBI Director Louis Freeh,” Hayden said. “Both are former law enforcement officials with proven experience and impeccable integrity and the result of their investigation should leave no doubt.”
Garabedian said the investigations were “subjective and biased because the investigators were controlled by and paid for by the Catholic Church,” the Associated Press reports. He said the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is “in the business of continuing the secrecy of clergy sexual abuse by hiding the truth.”
In October 2019, just before the first abuse allegation was made public, Bishop DiMarzio had finished heading a Vatican-ordered investigation into accusations of cover-up against Bishop Richard Malone, who was then the Bishop of Buffalo.
Garabedien has said the allegation against Bishop DiMarzio taints his investigation into Bishop Malone and said law enforcement should carry out a new investigation in Buffalo. The attorney has represented several dozen clients alleging abuse against clergy of the Diocese of Buffalo.
In his own comments, Bishop DiMarzio said, “I remain focused on leading the Diocese of Brooklyn as we are emerging from the darkness of the Coronavirus pandemic. I ask for your prayers as I continue to fight against the lawsuits stemming from these two allegations, and as I now look forward to clearing my name in the New Jersey state courts.”
Bishop DiMarzio was consecrated an auxiliary bishop of Newark in 1996. He served as bishop of Camden from 1999 until 2003, when he was installed as the Bishop of Brooklyn. His time in Newark overlaps with Theodore McCarrick, who served as Archbishop of Newark from 1986 to 2000.
In June 2018 the New York archdiocese announced that an abuse allegation against McCarrick was “credible and substantiated.” The announcement led to McCarrick’s resignation from the College of Cardinals, a Vatican investigation into McCarrick’s activities and behavior, and major debates about the Church’s handling of sex abuse committed by Catholic bishops.
Several Vos estis investigations have proceeded against U.S. bishops. In March, the Albany diocese said Bishop emeritus Howard Hubbard would be investigated for alleged abuse of an 11-year-old boy in 1977, in a claim that also involves a lawsuit against the bishop and the diocese. Bishop Hubbard has said he is innocent of the allegations.
Bishop John Brungardt of Dodge City is under investigation by Church authorities and local law enforcement for alleged abuse of a minor, a charge he denies. Bishop Michael Hoeppner of Crookston resigned in April after facing two Vos estis investigations for alleged mishandling of cases of priests accused of sexual misconduct.
On 6 January, a mob including white supremacists and far-right militants stormed the US Capitol as lawmakers were certifying Joe Biden’s election victory. The attack followed mass shootings by white supremacists – like in El Paso in 2019 and a Pittsburgh synagogue the year before – and relatively unpoliced public violence by far-right militants at rallies across the country since Donald Trump’s election.
The Biden administration now seeks to turn the attention of the post-9/11 counterterrorism enterprise toward “domestic violent extremists”. But in making this shift, it is vital that we learn from our mistakes rather than simply repeating them. Already officials are headed down the same problematic path we took 20 years ago, considering proposals to expand counterterrorism authorities and using ideology as an indicator of potential violence.
These approaches are sure to backfire. Instead, our government should direct its focus toward pursuing and punishing acts of violence that it has too long ignored, using the ample tools at its disposal and without regard to ideology.
After 9/11, Congress raced to provide the government with new counterterrorism authorities. Within weeks of the attacks, Congress passed the Patriot Act, vastly expanding the government’s ability to secretly collect Americans’ personal information and communications data. Later examinations showed these authorities were easily abused to infringe on Americans’ privacy rights. The one program that was subject to extensive independent review was found to be all but useless in identifying terrorist plots – not to mention illegal.
Now the White House is seriously considering proposals to give law enforcement new statutory authority to take on domestic terrorism, even though the FBI already has significant legal authority in this area – as the multitude of federal charges against more than 500 people who attacked the Capitol attest. Indeed, an entire chapter of the US criminal code is devoted to terrorism. It contains 57 federal crimes of terrorism, 51 of which apply to domestic acts, not to mention dozens of other federal statutes that can be and are used in domestic terrorism cases.
The FBI’s inadequate response to far-right violence results from a lack of will, not a lack of legal authority. The FBI has used its domestic terrorism authorities to target environmental, animal rights and racial justice activists. Yet the FBI doesn’t even track the number of murders committed by white supremacists each year, much less consistently investigate these crimes as domestic terrorism.
Expanding counterterrorism authorities will not solve this attention deficit. To the contrary, both history and recent events suggest that new laws could become tools in the future for FBI agents to target those seeking to reform systems of structural racism and social inequity rather than those committing racist violence.
The Biden administration has also revived an Obama-era program designed to counter violent extremism (CVE), which relied on widely discredited theories of terrorist radicalization that painted Muslim religious practices and the expression of political grievances as precursors to violence. The Biden administration’s version has been rebranded as the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3), but it adopts the same basic model.
Like CVE, the CP3 program seeks to train law enforcement officials, educators, public health officials, social workers and private citizens to identify and report people who show purported warning signs that they might commit an act of “targeted” violence or terrorism sometime in the future. These supposed indicators include some combination of vague and commonplace characteristics like holding a grievance, being socially alienated and feeling hopeless.
In addition to falsely labeling people in need as dangerous, this flawed approach corrodes the trust that teachers, coaches, religious leaders, therapists and others need to serve as mentors, provide treatment or otherwise help people work through difficult times in their lives. It also opens a pipeline for channeling well-documented societal biases into an already corrupted “pre-crime” law enforcement surveillance system.
As for law enforcement agents, directing them to counter “radical” ideologies or identify ill-defined “concerning behaviors” will undoubtedly lead to the targeting of marginalized groups who challenge the status quo, rather than white supremacists who have long been deeply embedded in powerful government institutions like law enforcement and the military. History provides ample evidence of this point: ideas that have stood in opposition to established structures of power, such as civil rights, labor organizing, or women’s suffrage, are the ones law enforcement has treated as “radical”.
Instead of using dubious methods to predict the next mass shooter, law enforcement should address deadly violence that is already occurring. Police and prosecutors have turned a blind eye to violence at far-right rallies around the country where counter-protesters were shot and beaten, including by some perpetrators who later stormed the Capitol. According to media reporting, three far-right militants who tried to break into the Oregon state capitol the month before also participated in the Capitol riots, yet remain uncharged. More broadly, despite spending more than $100bn annually on policing, more than half of violent crime goes unsolved each year, with racial minorities disproportionately feeling the impact of this law enforcement inaction.
Until recently, the Department of Justice has failed to prioritize the investigation and prosecution of white supremacist violence – treating it as a lesser threat than so-called “eco-terrorism”, which has cost zero American lives. Shortly before the attack on the Capitol by a mob that included active members of law enforcement, FBI managers disavowed a 2006 bureau intelligence assessment warning of white supremacist infiltration of police agencies and refused to participate in a congressional hearing to examine the issue. An FBI intelligence report issued after the Capitol attack substantiated the findings of the 2006 assessment.
The government’s misplaced priorities are reflected in – and enabled by – its failure to systematically track white supremacist violence. This failure results from several practices. For one thing, the justice department defers investigations of hate crime and most violent crime to state and local police, so many of the violent crimes committed by white supremacists are completely absent from federal databases.
When the justice department does investigate white supremacist violence, the investigations fall within several different program categories, including domestic terrorism, civil rights violations, and gang crimes. But FBI reports assessing the threat from white supremacist violence count only those crimes it categorized as domestic terrorism. Accordingly, the FBI’s data severely underestimates the threat white supremacist violence poses, which in turn results in misallocations of domestic terrorism resources.
Repurposing failed “war on terror” tactics is not the answer. Adequately prioritizing white supremacist violence starts with maintaining accurate data about the crimes these groups commit – not casting an ideological dragnet. The justice department should then use its abundant existing authorities to address violent crime, focusing its resources where the data shows they are most needed.
Harsha Panduranga is a counsel with the Liberty & National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law
This essay is co-published with the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law as part of a series exploring new approaches to national security 20 years after 9/11
Bausman, 57, is an American man known for producing the pro-Kremlin website Russia Insider, which he has in recent years infused with overtly fascist and antisemitic content. He mystifies not only researchers of the far right, who struggle to understand his objectives or his funding, but also his own family. Bausman’s older sister, Mary Watkins, who says she loves her brother but opposes his fascist politics, told Hatewatch she watched online as his wife, Kristina Bausman, originally from the rural community of Mednogorsk, Russia, posted a video to Facebook of what looked to her like a live scene from the Trump rally that descended into violence.
“I messaged her as everything was happening and said, ‘You’re not there, are you?’ She said, ‘No, no, we’re here in Lancaster,’” Watkins recalled of Jan. 6.
Hatewatch launched this investigation in January after an anonymous tipster alleged to us that Bausman “fled the country” after traveling to Washington, D.C., for the fateful Trump event. Hatewatch then visited Bausman’s home in Lancaster twice in March and interviewed more than a dozen of his neighbors but found no trace of him. Neighbors told Hatewatch that Bausman moved into their community in 2018, shortly after relocating from Russia. He promoted hard-right causes, including the anti-lockdown protests during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. He involved himself in #StoptheSteal activism perpetuating the lie of a stolen election alongside others in the far-right, such as members of the gun-worshipping Unification Church cult. He hyped the Jan. 6 event on social media. Then he seemed to disappear from Lancaster, leaving his 2020 Christmas lights and a Betsy Ross-style American flag dangling from his porch.
“As I was just telling a friend, those are our neighbors. They’re big Trump supporters. They have ties to Russia. And they skipped town right after the insurrection,” a neighbor of Bausman’s told Hatewatch in March, pointing to the Christmas lights.
Hatewatch has elected to withhold the names of Bausman’s Lancaster neighbors to protect them from potential harassment. They decorated his street with roughly two dozen antiracist signs following the publication of a Hatewatch investigation linking Russia Insider to a small network of racist junk news websites, including a hyper-partisan blog focused on Lancaster County. The reason for what appears to have been his abrupt departure, whether a reaction to the election of Biden, or something else—some of the neighbors speculated to Hatewatch that Bausman may have been trying to avoid scrutiny from law enforcement because of his support for the insurrection—is unclear.
“Seems like he ran out of town in a big hurry,” one neighbor told Hatewatch, referring to the now-months-old Christmas lights.
Hatewatch sent a request for comment to Bausman first by email and later by certified mail, which the post office returned without a signature. We finally confirmed that Bausman left the U.S. for Russia after translating into English three Russian television appearances he made. Bausman appears in studio during the videos. (Hatewatch geolocated a Moscow television studio which hosted Bausman in June.) He does not specify whether he relocated to Russia permanently or is visiting in the appearances.
“America is awake now,” Bausman said in Russian on one program that aired in the immediate aftermath of the insurrection, referring to the willingness of Trump supporters to embrace Russia as an ally in a shared struggle. Russia “now has the chance to build big bridges with half of the United States,” Bausman also boasted. He described the U.S. as being irrevocably divided following Biden’s election.
Bausman made those three appearances spanning from January to June. Each time, he talked about the insurrection in fluent Russian, presenting himself to a Russian-speaking audience as an expert on U.S. affairs. He pushed the lie that elites stole the election from Trump in the appearances. In one show, he asked the host to avoid saying he actively participated in the insurrection because he did not want someone to “show up at his door.” (Bausman denied direct involvement in the unlawful activities that day and instead framed himself as a journalist covering the event rather than a pro-Trump demonstrator.) Hatewatch reached out to the FBI to inquire whether they were investigating Bausman for any reason. They declined to respond.
‘I’ve never heard of this man in my life’
Charles Bausman lived in Moscow as an American expatriate for the better part of three decades, working as a businessman, according a description he gave to Alex Jones’ Infowars in 2019. Hatewatch found little verifiable information about Bausman’s business history in Russia before he founded Russia Insider in 2014. He lists on his LinkedIn page business ventures related to agriculture, including one company where he claims to have served as a “Director” from 2010 to the present. The HR director of a company of the same name reviewed Bausman’s LinkedIn page and told Hatewatch in emphatic terms that he never worked for them.
“I’ve never heard of this man in my life,” they said over the phone in July.
The HR director investigated Bausman’s claims by speaking with other employees and then called back with additional details later in the same day.
“In about 2010 … he approached us about starting a conference in Russia with a former employee and there were, like, two discussions about it. It never got off the ground. We never hosted an event there, we never pursued it and we never wrote him a check of any sort, whatsoever. He has never been in any way, shape or form in our employment,” they said.
The HR representative told Hatewatch they would pursue avenues to try and stop Bausman from using their name on his publicly visible resume. A website Bausman listed as being related to his present business operations, <a href="http://RuFarm.com" rel="nofollow">RuFarm.com</a>, expired from the web years ago. Another company Bausman listed is based out of the island nation of Cyprus. In 2013, around the time Bausman claimed to work for the company, “about one half to a third” of bank deposits issued in Cyprus originated from Russia, according to the BBC. The Cyprus-based company never replied to an email requesting clarification on what, if anything, Bausman did for them.
“He was always back and forth. He was never in one place,” Watkins, Bausman’s sister, recalled. “He’s the kind of brother where I would be in touch with my parents and say, ‘I can’t reach Charlie, where is he?’ He never settled in one address or stayed in one place. He spent more time in Russia than not in Russia, but he still did a master’s degree at Columbia, and his first daughter was born in the United States.”
A person familiar with Bausman’s purchase of his home in Lancaster told Hatewatch that during the purchase, he verbally described himself as working in the agriculture business, and never mentioned Russia Insider or anything else related to the far-right activism to which he devoted so much of his time. The same person told Hatewatch they saw evidence of him having over $700,000 in his savings account. He purchased his Lancaster home for $442,000 in 2018, as Hatewatch previously reported. Watkins said she believes he also purchased property in Moscow at some point, which would suggest he may currently live in his home there. She said that Bausman’s parents left behind money for him when they died.
“He kept badgering my parents to give him money. He was always short on money. They funded his whole life. And then he inherited their money when they died, and they’re still funding his life,” Watkins said. “If he makes money now, it’s not much.”
The Interpreter, an online journal that produces translations and analysis related to Russia, published emails in 2015 showing Bausman asking for money through an associate of pro-Kremlin Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev. Like Bausman, Malofeev views himself as a promoter of the Russian Orthodox faith, and he is known for his far-right political views and ties to anti-LGBTQ hate. Political scientist Marlene Laruelle of George Washington University, an expert on Russia and its influence on far-right nationalist movements worldwide, previously told Hatewatch in the context of understanding Bausman’s motives that Russia’s influence on foreign extremists sometimes manifests in a decentralized way, which she described as “ideological entrepreneurship.” She continued:
Each ideological entrepreneur has his own portfolio and is put in competition with others; nothing is secured or guaranteed. They create new networks and platforms that may be later approved or disapproved by the Kremlin. This is a largely decentralized process: The centralization only comes later, post-factum – if successful.
Watkins told Hatewatch that Bausman privately denied to her that the Russian government funded his activism when they discussed the subject.
“I don’t know where to go on [finding a] motivation for this with him. I honestly don’t,”
Watkins said of her brother.
An eclectic mix of far-right activism
Bausman started pushing increasingly pro-fascist and antisemitic views on Russia Insider in 2018, around the time he moved back from Russia to the U.S. By 2019, after Bausman settled down in Lancaster, Russia Insider published posts with titles such as “Adolf Hitler's Spot-On 1936 Speech on the Evil of Soviet Bolshevism (Transcript).”
Hatewatch linked Bausman to the American white supremacist group The Right Stuff (TRS) in 2020 through a network of related junk news websites that all pushed a racist, authoritarian worldview. Although Bausman vocally champions Trump, TRS jettisoned pro-Trump advocacy for more overtly neo-Nazi sentiment by the time he associated with them. In fact, the group typically portrays the 45 th president in conspiratorial terms as a pawn who is beholden to the influence of powerful Jewish people. Four different antiracist activists told Hatewatch they saw Bausman along with white supremacists affiliated with TRS at a Black Lives Matter demonstration staged in Lancaster in September 2020. One of the activists claimed that Bausman offered them a walkie-talkie to communicate with other activists and they found that to be “weird.”
“That guy, I would not forget his face,” one of the activists told Hatewatch, referring to a photograph of Bausman that Hatewatch showed them from a mobile phone. “He offered to loan me a walkie-talkie.”
Hatewatch emailed Bausman about the allegation of the walkie-talkie incident in October 2020, when the activist mentioned it, but he never replied. Neighbors say Bausman also involved himself in the anti-lockdown activism that targeted stay-at-home orders at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Hatewatch spoke to Bausman at his home in September 2020 regarding his connections to TRS and noted that he promoted both Trump and a group called ReOpen PA through the prominent placement of lawn signs. Bausman told Hatewatch at that time that he did not want to speak to the media. ReOpen PA runs an active Facebook group that opposed COVID-19 protocols put in place by the state’s Democratic governor, Tom Wolf.
Bausman also promoted Stop the Steal activism, which spread the lie that Trump won the 2020 election. He appeared at a Stop the Steal-branded event in December 2020 at Speaker of the Pennsylvania House Bryan Cutler’s residence, seeking to urge him to overturn the election results. Bausman attended that event alongside members of the Unification Church, a cult known in part for their extreme pro-gun beliefs.
Bausman’s time in Lancaster straddles the period between the 2018 midterm elections and the 2020 presidential race. Hatewatch linked the website infrastructure employed by Russia Insider to a far-right junk news website called Lancaster Patriot, which started publishing propaganda during the runup to the 2020 election. Trey Garrison, a TRS-affiliate known in the white nationalist movement by his stage name “Spectre,” authored many of the posts on that site. Lancaster Police arrested Garrison, a Texas native, on DUI charges on April 2, and a local reporter photographed him in the city as recently as April 22. Hatewatch reached out to him by text about Bausman’s whereabouts, and he dodged the questions by pretending to be a 12-year-old girl. Multiple affiliates of TRS have moved to the Pennsylvania area in recent years.
Selling Russian media on a ‘fractured’ America
Bausman’s television appearances since the insurrection, spoken with an impressive grasp of the Russian language, portray the U.S. as being divided beyond repair and increasingly open to Russian influence. In January, Bausman appeared on a state-run show hosted by Arkady Mamontov, a well-known Russian journalist whose programming style often veers into reactionary and conspiratorial pro-Kremlin propaganda. On the show, Bausman claimed to be connected to a former member of the U.S. Congress, as well as current and former members of U.S. intelligence agencies.
“It would be naive to believe that the FBI didn’t have provocateurs among the protesters,” Bausman said about the Jan. 6 violence.
Bausman made the comment five months before Tucker Carlson floated a similar allegation about the role of the FBI on Jan. 6 on his Fox News show. Bausman explicitly called America “fractured” in the interview and condemned the influence of “globalists.” He told the Russian-speaking audience that Russia, China and the EU should be interested in keeping America from becoming a far-left country.
Bausman suggested that Russia get involved in American affairs on an Orthodox Christian channel owned by Malofeev called Tsargrad TV, which also aired in January.
“Liberal oligarchs nearly destroyed Russia and now they’re destroying America,” Bausman told the audience.
At one point another guest on the program suggested that building an “English-language Christian Russian American channel, targeting the [conservative, pro-Trump] audience” would present a business opportunity for Russians.
“I agree completely,” Bausman responded.
In a June appearance on a Tsargrad TV show hosted by a woman named Anna Shafran, Bausman arrived to speak to her in a studio in Moscow, which Hatewatch geolocated through Shafran’s Instagram accounts. Tsargrad TV titled the program, “The U.S. Deep state is exploiting the whole world,” and Bausman used the opportunity to denounce transgender people, Black Lives Matter and President Biden.
“Satan is in charge of the U.S. government right now,” Bausman said.
Bausman left for Russia ‘in a big hurry’
Neighbors continue to pass along tips to Hatewatch about Bausman and his home. An unidentified woman allegedly came to his address and took the Christmas lights down in recent months, but Bausman, his wife and his daughters never resurfaced. Bausman allegedly boasted to people about plans to build Russian Orthodox churches in and around Lancaster in the past. No one knows if he took any steps to achieve those ambitions.
Neighbors also question whether Bausman is still pushing far-right propaganda into Lancaster from abroad. The Lancaster Patriot, the reactionary publication Hatewatch connected to Russia Insider through its website infrastructure, claimed to stop publishing material after local reporters identified the white supremacist Garrison as the site’s primary author in September 2020.
“It has been reported this week that our future editor-in-chief has elsewhere, expressed politically incorrect and offensive views. This being the case, the Publisher and the Investors have decided that it is best to close doors before we officially open since we do not approve of or condone those views,” The Lancaster Patriot posted to their site at that time.
However, someone subsequently removed that statement and began publishing a physical version of The Lancaster Patriot in recent months. No one in Lancaster knows who launched the project, but three different Lancaster residents sent Hatewatch photographs of a “newspaper” version of it, which they said the post office began mysteriously delivering into mailboxes in April and May without solicitation. Among other topics, the paper pushed anti-COVID-19 vaccine rhetoric on the front pages, as well as stories calling for an audit of the 2020 election.
One Lancaster Patriot article that contained vaccine disinformation featured the byline Ann Marie DiCarlo.
Hatewatch found an Ann Marie DiCarlo living in Lancaster and reached out for comment through her son. The woman we contacted did not call us back. Hatewatch reached out to The Lancaster Patriot by the phone number and email address listed on their website to ask about Bausman, but they did not respond.
’Who the hell does that?’
Watkins told Hatewatch that Bausman’s ties to Russia stem from his family, but she is unable to explain them in the context of his behavior as an adult. John Bausman, their father, served as the Moscow bureau chief for the Associated Press from 1968-72, when Charles Bausman was between 4 and 8 years old. Watkins described their childhood to Hatewatch as the “Brezhnev years,” referring to the Soviet Union’s General Secretary at that time. She said she could recall nothing from her brother’s youth that might shape either his pro-Kremlin or white supremacist activism.
“Other than the fact that it was a very special time for my mother in particular, she learned Russian, she hung out with dissident artists. … Maybe in the family lore [Russia] becomes somewhat romanticized,” Watkins recalled to Hatewatch in a FaceTime conversation in July. “[But] our exposure to Russia and Russian culture at that time was festivals and friends.”
When Watkins spent time with her brother growing up, she said she viewed him as an “Alex Keaton” type, referring to the character Michael J. Fox played on the 1980s sitcom “Family Ties.” Keaton’s character became symbolic of a child who espouses reactionary beliefs in a liberal family. “[It’s] 1982, 1983 and Charles is walking around Wesleyan in a suit and tie. … Who the hell does that?”
Watkins implied that what Bausman has mutated into is something more extreme than the Keaton character, and more difficult to reform.
“If I’m going to do antiracist work … I’m not sure the most effective thing for me is to engage my brother … because engaging him is a fool’s errand,” Watkins said.
Editor’s note: Journalist Natalia Antonova contributed to this story by translating Charles Bausman’s television appearances, providing context about Russian programming and geolocating one of his appearances to Moscow.
Photo illustration by SPLC
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