A Secret Legacy: Cuban Exiles, the CIA and the Congo Crisis (A Documentary Film in Progress)
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ABC News: Bay of Pigs vets, Families Seek Billions From Cuba

11/23/2014

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MIAMI — Nov 23, 2014, 11:12 AM ET By CURT ANDERSON AP Legal Affairs Writer

(For full article on ABC News website click here)

Since the day in 1959 that Cuban government agents blackmailed his father into committing suicide, Gustavo Villoldo has been on an anti-Castro mission that included co-piloting a B-26 bomber during the ill-fated 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, infiltrating Cuba for the CIA numerous times and tracking down Fidel Castro lieutenant Ernesto "Che" Guevara in Bolivia in 1967.

Now, at age 78, Villoldo is fresh off another clash with the Cuban government, this time with a tentative success: He and family members of other two men ? American Bobby Fuller and Cuban Aldo Vera ? each won separate lawsuits in Florida seeking billions of dollars in damages combined from the Cuban government, which defaulted after never responding to the lawsuits.

"Money to me in this case, it doesn't mean anything. My family tragedy is sacred ground," Villoldo said in a recent interview. "I am continuing to fight Castro in a different arena."

The fight now, though, is less with Cuba than it is with the banks where the U.S. Treasury froze Cuban government assets that the families now want to seize. The banks are resisting turning the money over, insisting the U.S. families have yet to prove they should be allowed to seize it.

Earlier this year, Manhattan U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein ruled that the Florida decisions must be honored as attorneys for Villoldo and the others try to get at accounts with ties to Cuba held by the 19 banks, including Bank of America, Barclays Bank, Citibank, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase.

"The judgments granted by the Florida circuit court in favor of the plaintiffs and against Cuba are entitled to full faith and credit," Hellerstein wrote in an Aug. 22 order.

At stake is as much as $3.5 billion; the families have agreed to share any proceeds they get out of the New York accounts.

Villoldo attorney Andrew Hall, who previously represented Watergate figure John Erlichman and families of sailors killed in the USS Cole terror attack, said the Hellerstein ruling was a watershed moment in the case. The exact contents of the accounts and the account holders are sealed by court order, and the legal question now involves whether the money truly belongs to Cuba.

"That's the battle: Is this Cuba's money or is this someone else's money?" Hall said. "This is the green light that opens the door for us."

In a nutshell, the money was halted by the Treasury Department as it passed back and forth electronically through the New York banks between entities in Cuba and banks in other countries overseas.

Based on the rulings so far, Hall estimated more than $20 million could be paid out by the banks within the next six months. Another $20 million to $40 million, he said, could be obtained depending on upcoming legal decisions on precisely when an electronic funds transfer, or EFT, should be considered Cuban property that could be seized.

In October, the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that EFTs were subject to seizure only if Cuba itself, or a state-owned entity, transmitted the funds directly to the bank. Lawyers on all sides are still sorting out that decision's impact. An attorney for several big banks, James Kerr, suggested that no money be turned over to Villoldo and the other families right away.



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RESCUE REUNION: Cuban-American CIA team meets Congo hostages in Kendall (The Miami Herald)

11/17/2014

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By Glenn Garvin, ggarvin@MiamiHerald.com
11/16/2014 6:49 PM

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To read full article on Miami Herald.com, click here

As how-do-you-dos go, it was strange, but cheery and certainly effective: “Hi, I’m one of the hostages, you saved my life,” said Marilyn Wendler, extending an outstretched hand. “Which one were you?”

“I was the one driving the pickup truck and shooting out the window,” replied Angel Benitez, not even slightly nonplussed. “Nice to meet you!”

So it went Sunday as Cuban-Americans who fought in Africa 50 years ago under CIA command held a reunion with hostages they rescued from Congolese guerrillas.

The hostage rescue was just one chapter, albeit the most dramatic, of a little-known five-year CIA effort to shore up the pro-Western government of the country now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which was under attack by guerrilla movements backed by China and the Soviet Union.

About 250 CIA veterans, former hostages and their families flew in from all over the world for the event, which was organized at a Kendall banquet hall after an impromptu and much smaller reunion three years ago.

A surreal blend of chatter running the gamut from “Here’s a picture of my grandchild” to “the .30-caliber machine guns tended to overheat,” punctuated by the occasional burst of tears, provided the soundtrack.

Those mostly came from encounters between missionaries and the men who rescued them, most of whom had never met before. The missionaries were being held by guerrillas known as Simbas (from the Swahili word for lions) who had already killed one of them and wounded several others.

Conducted in a continuous hail of gunfire at a rural compound on the edge of the jungle, it left little time for social amenities.

“We didn’t have time to get acquainted,” said Wendler, a Los Angeles nurse who was just 11 when the rescue took place on Nov. 24, 1964. “We just took orders and stayed quiet. And when it was over, they disappeared.”

Some of them, however, knew one another on sight. Ruth Reynard burst into tears instantly when she saw Juan Tamayo, the burly CIA machine-gunner who cradled her 4-year-old self in one arm and blasted away with his weapon in the other the entire length of the five-mile ride from the missionary compound to the safety of government lines.

“As soon as I looked into his eyes, I was 4 years old again,” said the Nashville college administrator. Tamayo, now a 77-year-old Miami concrete merchant, brooding for five decades that the roar of his machine gun had deafened her, smiled broadly at the news that her ears are good.

“Now I can die in peace,” he said.

Others at the reunion were less tearful than flat-out awed.

“When I hear all these stories, it’s like my uncle and my grandfather were bad-asses,” said 18-year-old Miami Dade College student Juan Jarquin, whose uncle and grandfather were both part of the CIA force that rescued the missionary.

“They’re part of history, and that means that — indirectly and in a small way — so am I.”

About 125 Cubans working for the CIA took part in the Congo wars from 1962 to 1967. They were originally recruited for the agency’s covert war against Fidel Castro, but as it wound down, the CIA put them to work on the other side of the world.

“Besides being well-trained and capable, they were also completely deniable,” said Frank R. Villafaña, author of Cold War in the Congo, virtually the only history of the conflict. “None of them had American citizenship or passports. If they got captured, Washington could just say, ‘Sorry, don’t know anything about this fellow, he’s not one of ours.’”

Coincidentally, the Soviets and Chinese were also importing Cubans into the Congo — troops from Fidel Castro’s armed forces. James Hawes, who commanded the CIA’s tiny two-boat navy that patrolled Lake Tanganyika, disrupting guerrilla supply lines, said his proudest moment was when the 16 Cuban exiles under his command drove a unit commanded by Castro lieutenant Che Guevara back across the lake into Tanganyika.

“Was the war in the Congo worth it?” Hawes said. “Ask Che.”

Or ask Dick Holm, a legendary CIA officer who fought in the Laotian jungles and tracked notorious terrorism Carlos the Jackal, in addition to his service in the Congo. “Apart from one bad day, I wouldn’t change anything in my career,” he said.

His definition of “bad day” is probably a little stronger than yours. Holm was aboard a CIA reconnaissance flight that crashed in the remote Congo jungle, leaving him blind with burns over 35 percent of his body. It took his Cuban-American pilot, Miamian Juan Peron, 10 days to hike through Simba-controlled territory and return with a helicopter — which promptly crashed. It was two years before Holm could go back to work.

With memories of the Congo like those, why would he travel across the country for a reunion?

“Juan Peron phoned me last week and called me a [wimp],” Holm replied. “So I had no choice.”


Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article3970866.html#storylink=cpy
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CIA Study of Covert Aid Fueled Skepticism About Helping Syrian Rebels  

10/29/2014

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NEW YORK TIMES
By MARK MAZZETTI    
OCT. 14, 2014

(To read the story on NYT website, click here)

WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency has run guns to insurgencies across the world during its 67-year history — from Angola to Nicaragua to Cuba. The continuing C.I.A. effort to train Syrian rebels is just the latest example of an American president becoming enticed by the prospect of using the spy agency to covertly arm and train rebel groups.

An internal C.I.A. study has found that it rarely works.

The still-classified review, one of several C.I.A. studies commissioned in 2012 and 2013 in the midst of the Obama administration’s protracted debate about whether to wade into the Syrian civil war, concluded that many past attempts by the agency to arm foreign forces covertly had a minimal impact on the long-term outcome of a conflict. They were even less effective, the report found, when the militias fought without any direct American support on the ground.

The findings of the study, described in recent weeks by current and former American government officials, were presented in the White House Situation Room and led to deep skepticism among some senior Obama administration officials about the wisdom of arming and training members of a fractured Syrian opposition.

But in April 2013, President Obama authorized the C.I.A. to begin a program to arm the rebels at a base in Jordan, and more recently the administration decided to expand the training mission with a larger parallel Pentagon program in Saudi Arabia to train “vetted” rebels to battle fighters of the Islamic State, with the aim of training approximately 5,000 rebel troops per year.

So far the efforts have been limited, and American officials said that the fact that the C.I.A. took a dim view of its own past efforts to arm rebel forces fed Mr. Obama’s reluctance to begin the covert operation.

“One of the things that Obama wanted to know was: Did this ever work?” said one former senior administration official who participated in the debate and spoke anonymously because he was discussing a classified report. The C.I.A. report, he said, “was pretty dour in its conclusions.”

The debate over whether Mr. Obama acted too slowly to support the Syrian rebellion has been renewed after both former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and former Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta wrote in recent books that they had supported a plan presented in the summer of 2012 by David H. Petraeus, then the C.I.A. director, to arm and train small groups of rebels in Jordan.

Mr. Obama rejected that plan, but in the months that followed, Obama administration officials continued to debate the question of whether the C.I.A. should arm the rebels. Mr. Petraeus’s original plan was reworked until Mr. Obama signed a secret order authorizing the covert training mission after intelligence agencies concluded that President Bashar al-Assad of Syria had used chemical weapons against opposition forces and civilians.

Although Mr. Obama originally intended the C.I.A. to arm and train the rebels to fight the Syrian military, the focus of the American programs has shifted to training the rebel forces to fight the Islamic State, an enemy of Mr. Assad.

The C.I.A. review, according to several former American officials familiar with its conclusions, found that the agency’s aid to insurgencies had generally failed in instances when no Americans worked on the ground with the foreign forces in the conflict zones, as is the administration’s plan for training Syrian rebels.

One exception, the report found, was when the C.I.A. helped arm and train mujahedeen rebels fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan during the 1980s, an operation that slowly bled the Soviet war effort and led to a full military withdrawal in 1989. That covert war was successful without C.I.A. officers in Afghanistan, the report found, largely because there were Pakistani intelligence officers working with the rebels in Afghanistan.

But the Afghan-Soviet war was also seen as a cautionary tale. Some of the battle-hardened mujahedeen fighters later formed the core of Al Qaeda and used Afghanistan as a base to plan the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. This only fed concerns that no matter how much care was taken to give arms only to so-called moderate rebels in Syria, the weapons could ultimately end up with groups linked to Al Qaeda, like the Nusra Front.

“What came afterwards was impossible to eliminate from anyone’s imagination,” said the former senior official, recalling the administration debate about whether to arm the Syrian rebels.

Mr. Obama made a veiled reference to the C.I.A. study in an interview with The New Yorker published this year. Speaking about the dispute over whether he should have armed the rebels earlier, Mr. Obama told the magazine: “Very early in this process, I actually asked the C.I.A. to analyze examples of America financing and supplying arms to an insurgency in a country that actually worked out well. And they couldn’t come up with much.”

Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said that “without characterizing any specific intelligence products, the president was referring to the fact that providing money or arms alone to an opposition movement is far from a guarantee of success.”

“We have been very clear about that from the outset as we have articulated our strategy in Syria,” Ms Meehan said. “That is why our support to the moderate Syrian opposition has been deliberate, targeted and, most importantly, one element of a multifaceted strategy to create the conditions for a political solution to the conflict.”

Arming foreign forces has been central to the C.I.A.'s mission from its founding, and was a staple of American efforts to wage proxy battles against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The first such operation was in 1947, the year of the agency’s creation, when President Harry S. Truman ordered millions of dollars’ worth of guns and ammunition sent to Greece to help put down a Communist insurgency there. In a speech before Congress in March of that year, Mr. Truman said the fall of Greece could destabilize neighboring Turkey, and “disorder might well spread throughout the entire Middle East.”

That mission helped shore up the fragile Greek government. More frequently, however, the C.I.A. backed insurgent groups fighting leftist governments, often with calamitous results. The 1961 Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba, in which C.I.A.-trained Cuban guerrillas launched an invasion to fight Fidel Castro’s troops, ended in disaster. During the 1980s, the Reagan administration authorized the C.I.A. to try to bring down Nicaragua’s Sandinista government with a secret war supporting the contra rebels, who were ultimately defeated.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, C.I.A. paramilitary officers and Army Special Forces teams fought alongside Afghan militias to drive Taliban forces out of the cities and set up a new government in Kabul. In 2006, the C.I.A. set up a gunrunning operation to arm a group of Somali warlords who united under the Washington-friendly name the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counterterrorism. That effort backfired, strengthening the Islamist fighters that the C.I.A. had intervened to defeat.

“It’s a very mixed history,” said Loch K. Johnson, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Georgia and an intelligence expert. “You need some really good, loyal people on the ground ready to fight.”

The progress of the Syrian conflict has only deepened skepticism about the loyalties — and the capabilities — of the Syrian opposition. Years of a bloody civil war have splintered the forces fighting the Assad government’s troops, with an increasing number of fighters pledging loyalty to radical groups like the Islamic State and the Nusra Front.

Last month, Mr. Obama said he would redouble American efforts by having the Pentagon participate in arming and training rebel forces. That program has yet to begin.

Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said last week that it would be months of “spade work” before the military had determined how to structure the program and how to recruit and vet the rebels.

“This is going to be a long-term effort,” he said.




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Interesting story about the daughter of Larry Devlin (CIA Chief of Station of Congo)

10/11/2014

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The True Story Of The 14-Year-Old Girl Who Earned One Of The CIA's Highest Valor Awards

For full article on the Business Insider website, click here

by
Paul Szoldra

A 14-year-old girl became the youngest recipient of the CIA’s second-highest award in the late 1960s, and she went on to become a successful intelligence officer in adulthood.

It’s one of the many fascinating insights gleaned from newly declassified documents as a result of a FOIA lawsuit.

In May 1966, Maureen Devlin was living in the Congo with her parents — her father, Lawrence, was the CIA’s station chief — amid civil war and general lawlessness in the capital of Kinshasa. One night, the family had a firsthand encounter with the turmoil.

Maureen was awakened by armed burglars in her bedroom as she pretended to sleep. As she kept up the ruse, the robbers stole a ring and bracelet from her hand, but it wasn’t long before she woke.

From “The Youngest Intelligence Star” in the agency’s “Studies in Intelligence” journal:

The girl heard the burglars discussing the possibility of harming her. She understood their local language, Lingala, but she did not understand the word rape, only that it was a physical threat. They turned on the lights, and one used a butcher knife to cut her nightgown. She managed to roll over and cover herself with the sheet, still feigning sleep. Her greatest fear at the time was that perhaps the men had already killed her mother and father.

She couldn’t pretend to be sleeping any longer after the burglars pricked her neck with the knife. But she acted quickly, speaking their language to tell them they shouldn’t harm anyone in the house — and in a genius move to capitalise on local superstition — told them the US embassy had “secret and magic” ways of identifying people who harmed Americans.

Later, after her parents were woken up and put into a corner of the bedroom, the girl’s mother talked back to the robbers in French and told them to leave. Maureen, for her part, told the bandits the family had “a dawa,” a black-magic spell that would result in the deaths of their wives, children, parents, and others if any harm came to them.

The journal noted the bandits had killed other families under similar circumstances.

“My God, this is the end of us,” Lawrence Devlin thought at the time, according to an account in The Washington Times. He knew of the other families found murdered in their bathrooms, but he was able to slam and lock the door.

The robbers eventually gave up and left. They were later captured by police, tried, and executed.

Maureen Devlin received the CIA’s second-highest award — the Intelligence Star — for “her quick appraisal of the situation, calm deportment, knowledge and use of the local language, exploitation of local lore, and resolute action,” the article says, adding that it “served her well as a teenager, and they continue to do so now in her career as a case officer in the Directorate of Operations.”

A 2008 New York Times article also recognised Maureen as having followed her father into the CIA. Her calm during this episode was similar to her father’s reaction to a trigger-happy Congolese soldier, who “defused a potentially lethal confrontation by calmly offering the soldier a cigarette.”




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On the lighter side...a story about the Starbucks at Langley!

10/9/2014

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AT CIA STARBUCKS, EVEN THE BARISTAS ARE COVERT
(to read the article on Washington Post website, click here)

By Emily Wax-Thibodeaux September 27

The new supervisor thought his idea was innocent enough. He wanted the baristas to write the names of customers on their cups to speed up lines and ease confusion, just like other Starbucks do around the world.

But these aren’t just any customers. They are regulars at the CIA Starbucks.

“They could use the alias ‘Polly-O string cheese’ for all I care,” said a food services supervisor at the Central Intelligence Agency, asking that his identity remain unpublished for security reasons. “But giving any name at all was making people — you know, the undercover agents — feel very uncomfortable. It just didn’t work for this location.”

This purveyor of skinny lattes and double cappuccinos is deep inside the agency’s forested Langley, Va., compound.

Welcome to the “Stealthy Starbucks,” as a few officers affectionately call it.

Or “Store Number 1,” as the receipts cryptically say.

The baristas go through rigorous interviews and background checks and need to be escorted by agency “minders” to leave their work area. There are no frequent-customer award cards, because officials fear the data stored on the cards could be mined by marketers and fall into the wrong hands, outing secret agents.

It is one of the busiest Starbucks in the country, with a captive caffeine-craving audience of thousands of analysts and agents, economists and engineers, geographers and cartographers working on gathering intelligence and launching covert operations inside some of the most vexing and violent places around the world.

“Obviously,” one officer said, “we are caffeine-addicted personality types. ”

Because the campus is a highly secured island, few people leave for coffee, and the lines, both in the morning and mid-afternoon, can stretch down the hallway. According to agency lore, one senior official, annoyed by the amount of time employees were wasting, was known to approach someone at the back of the line and whisper, “What have you done for your country today?”

This coffee shop looks pretty much like any other Starbucks, with blond wooden chairs and tables, blueberry and raspberry scones lining the bakery cases, and progressive folk rock floating from the speakers. (There are plans to redecorate, possibly including spy paraphernalia from over the decades.)

But the manager said this shop “has a special mission,” to help humanize the environment for employees, who work under high pressure often in windowless offices and can’t fiddle with their smartphones during downtime. For security, they have to leave them in their cars.

Amid pretty posters for Kenyan beans and pumpkin spice latte, nestled in the corner where leather armchairs form a cozy nook, the supervisor said he often hears customers practicing foreign languages, such as German or Arabic.

The shop is also the site of many job interviews for agents looking to move within the CIA, such as from a counter­terrorism post to a nuclear non-proliferation gig. “Coffee goes well with those conversations,” one officer said.

The chief of the team that helped find Osama Bin Laden, for instance, recruited a key deputy for the effort at the Starbucks, said another officer who could not be named.

One female agent said she occasionally runs into old high school and college friends in line at Starbucks. Until then, they didn’t know they worked together. Such surprise reunions are not uncommon. Working at the agency is not something you e-mail or write Facebook posts about, she said.

Normally, during the day, the bestsellers are the vanilla latte and the lemon pound­cake. But for officers working into the night, whether because of a crisis or they are dealing with someone in a different time zone, double espressos and sugary Frappuccinos are especially popular.

“Coffee culture is just huge in the military, and many in the CIA come from that culture ,” said Vince Houghton, an intelligence expert and curator at the International Spy Museum. “Urban myth says the CIA Starbucks is the busiest in the world, and to me that makes perfect sense. This is a population who have to be alert and spend hours poring through documents. If they miss a word, people can die.”

The nine baristas who work here are frequently briefed about security risks.

“We say if someone is really interested in where they work and asks too many questions, then they need to tell us,” the supervisor said.

A female barista who commutes from the District before sunrise said she initially applied to work for a catering company that services federal buildings in the region, not knowing where she might be assigned. She said she underwent extensive vetting “that was more than just a credit check.”

The 27-year-old woman was offered a job and told that she would be working in food services in Langley. On her first morning of work, she recalled, she put a location in her GPS and nothing came up. So she called the person who had hired her and got an explanation of the address. “Before I knew it, I realized I was now working for the Starbucks at the CIA,” she said.

Unfortunately, she can’t boast about where she works at parties. “The most I can say to friends is that I work in a federal building,” she said.

She said she has come to recognize people’s faces and their drinks. “There’s caramel-macchiato guy” and “the iced white mocha woman,” she said.

“But I have no idea what they do,” she added, fastening her green Starbucks apron and adjusting her matching cap. “I just know they need coffee, a lot of it.”






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Washington Times: CIA GOES TO WAR AGAINST ISLAMIC STATE

9/25/2014

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CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE ON THE WASHINGTON TIMES WEBSITE

By Bill Gertz - The Washington Times - Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Behind the scenes of the U.S. military preparations for airstrikes in Iraq and Syria against the al Qaeda offshoot terrorist group Islamic State, the CIA is gearing up for new drone strikes and a surge in intelligence-gathering operations to support it, according to U.S. officials.

The agency is beefing up its presence in countries near Syria, including Jordan, as part of increased U.S. military operations in the region, said officials close to the agency. Liaison with regional spy services also is being increased.

The agency is slated to provide traditional clandestine support to the U.S. military through intelligence-gathering on Islamic State leaders, training bases, communications networks and other targets. The agency also is expected to set up new Predator and Reaper drone bases.

The agency already is supplying intelligence gathered from Islamic State social-media accounts, both official and unofficial, on outlets such as Twitter and Facebook. The social media networks are a moving target but have provided some valuable intelligence and targeting data.

The National Security Agency also is involved in electronic efforts to locate and target Islamic State leaders.

But CIA-operated missile-firing drones have proved to be some of the U.S.’ most effective counterterrorism tools.

The aircraft have had a devastating impact — both in killing terrorist leaders inside their residences or vehicles, and as psychological influence, namely, instilling fear among terrorists.

U.S. drone attacks have forced terrorists to remain under cover and limit their public exposure and movement. The aircraft have forced terrorists to remain on constant alert for the signature hum of propeller-driven Predators and Reapers, never knowing whether the drones are unarmed surveillance aircraft, or whether the next sound they hear will be the blast of a Maverick missile hitting their position.

Analysts say drone strikes over the longer term have demoralized the Islamist terrorist groups that have been targeted.

The CIA has scored major successes using drones against al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan for more than a decade, and many analysts credit the aerial strikes with severely weakening al Qaeda central.

The CIA’s major shift to drone operations has prompted some agency critics to comment that the CIA is becoming too much of a counterterrorism agency at the expense of its traditional spying missions. Agency defenders say the CIA is doing both jobs well.

In recent month, CIA drone operations in Southwest Asia were scaled back by the Obama administration, under pressure from Pakistan after Islamabad complained that too many civilians were being killed by the strikes.

Under current rules, drone strikes require a relatively high level of confidence in the identification of a target before missile strikes are carried out, a standard that requires good intelligence from all sources — aircraft, satellites and people.

The agency’s role in Syria and Iraq will be similar to the CIA’s significant covert missions in counterterrorism operations in Yemen and Somalia, in support of U.S. commandos and other military forces.

A CIA spokesman declined to comment.

HOUSE INTEL ON BENGHAZI

The CIA is reviewing a highly classified report by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that, according to sources close to the panel, will largely support the Obama administration’s version of events surrounding the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attacks on the U.S. diplomatic mission and CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya.

The report is expected to be released “in the coming days,” and will contain “additional views” by Democrats and Republicans who challenge some of its findings, said committee spokeswoman Susan Phalen.

According to congressional sources familiar with the report, the final unclassified version is expected to largely exonerate the Obama administration of covering up and lying about the attack that killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.

Some Republicans on the committee are said to be upset that the panel’s chairman, Rep. Mike Rogers, Michigan Republican, did not allow dissenting views to be adequately represented in the main report.

One senior congressional insider said Mr. Rogers, who will step down as chairman at the end of the year, has been overly accommodating to Democrats.

Ms. Phalen, the committee spokeswoman, defended Mr. Rogers’ handling of the report. The committee held a business meeting to consider adopting the report and no one suggested, request or otherwise sought changes, she said, adding that members were given two days to file additional, minority or supplemental views.

Minority panel members submitted additional comments to the report, “but no other majority members took advantage of the opportunity to submit views,” Ms. Phalen said.

Mr. Rogers also has been highly critical of some fellow Republicans in the House, notably Rep. Darrell Issa of California, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that has been hammering the Obama administration on several issues such as the IRS targeting conservative groups.

Although the House intelligence report is still classified, key elements have been leaked.

For example, Rep. Mike Thompson, California Democrat and intelligence committee member, last month told the San Francisco Chronicle that the report exonerates U.S. intelligence agencies by stating that they were warned about an increased threat of attack but lacked specific details to stop the Sept. 11 assaults.

Mr. Thompson said the report will identify the attackers as a mixed group that included al Qaeda-affiliated militias and former supporters of Moammar Gadhafi. He also revealed that the report will state that no U.S. official ordered a military “stand-down” that prevented a rescue or counterattack, and that no illegal activity or arms transfers were taking place with the help of U.S. personnel.

One of the unanswered questions about the Benghazi attack is what role was played by more than a dozen CIA officers and contractors operating out of the Benghazi annex.

In January 2013 testimony before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed ignorance about the CIA operations at the annex.

Asked during a hearing by Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican, whether the CIA in Libya was running guns to Turkey, presumably for later transfer to Syrian rebels, Ms. Clinton said: “Well, senator, you’ll have to direct that question to the agency that ran the annex.”

SNOWDEN FALLOUT

The director of the National Counterterrorism Center told Congress on Wednesday that gathering intelligence on terrorism threats has become more difficult as a result of disclosures of National Security Agency documents by renegade NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

“The final point I’ll make on this is that identifying and disrupting threats is increasingly challenging,” Matthew Olsen, the center’s director, said during a hearing of the House Committee on Homeland Security.

“The groups are adapting their tactics to overcome our defenses, to avoid our intelligence collection,” he said. “They’re looking for simpler, less-sophisticated attacks that are on a smaller scale and that are easier to pull off, such as the al-Shabab attack at the Westgate Mall last year in Nairobi.”

Mr. Olsen said that “terrorists are changing how they communicate” in the aftermath of Snowden’s release of electronic intelligence-gathering methods through pilfered NSA documents released to the press.

“They are moving to more secure communication platforms,” Mr. Olsen said. “They are adopting encryption. And they are avoiding electronic communications altogether. We see this in our reporting. And this is a problem for us in many areas where we have limited human collection and depend on intercepting communications to identify terrorists and disrupt plots.”

Among the encryption software used by terrorists to communicate in coded emails, according to non-government analysts, include three programs known as “Mujahideen Secrets” and more recent programs called “Tashfeer al Jawwal” and “Asrar al Ghurabaa.”

The software is not unbreakable but complicates efforts to spy on terrorists’ communications.

The Syria and Iraq-based terrorist group Islamic State has been using social media to communicate and spread propaganda. Initially the group utilized Twitter but was shut down for violating the social media outlet’s terms of service.

The group then switched to the small Diaspora social media outlet and finally to the Russian social networking outlet Vkontakte. The Russians then took steps to shut down official Islamic State accounts on that medium Sept. 12.

• Contact Bill Gertz on Twitter at @BillGertz.




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INQUIRY BY C.I.A. AFFIRMS IT SPIED ON SENATE PANEL

8/8/2014

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By MARK MAZZETTI and CARL HULSE JULY 31, 2014

(FOR THE FULL ARTICLE ON THE NY TIMES WEBSITE CLICK HERE)


WASHINGTON — An internal investigation by the C.I.A. has found that its officers penetrated a computer network used by the Senate Intelligence Committee in preparing its damning report on the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program.

The report by the agency’s inspector general also found that C.I.A. officers read the emails of the Senate investigators and sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department based on false information, according to a summary of findings made public on Thursday. One official with knowledge of the report’s conclusions said the investigation also discovered that the officers created a false online identity to gain access on more than one occasion to computers used by the committee staff.

The inspector general’s account of how the C.I.A. secretly monitored a congressional committee charged with supervising its activities touched off angry criticism from members of the Senate and amounted to vindication for Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the committee’s Democratic chairwoman, who excoriated the C.I.A. in March when the agency’s monitoring of committee investigators became public.

A statement issued Thursday morning by a C.I.A. spokesman said that John O. Brennan, the agency’s director, had apologized to Ms. Feinstein and the committee’s ranking Republican, Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, and would set up an internal accountability board to review the issue. The statement said that the board, which will be led by a former Democratic senator, Evan Bayh of Indiana, could recommend “potential disciplinary measures” and “steps to address systemic issues.”

But anger among lawmakers grew throughout the day. Leaving a nearly three-hour briefing about the report in a Senate conference room, members of both parties called for the C.I.A. officers to be held accountable, and some said they had lost confidence in Mr. Brennan’s leadership. “This is a serious situation and there are serious violations,” said Mr. Chambliss, generally a staunch ally of the intelligence community. He called for the C.I.A. employees to be “dealt with very harshly.”

Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado and another member of the Intelligence Committee, demanded Mr. Brennan’s resignation. “The C.I.A. unconstitutionally spied on Congress by hacking into the Senate Intelligence Committee computers,” he said in a written statement. “This grave misconduct not only is illegal but it violates the U.S. Constitution’s requirement of separation of powers.

“These offenses, along with other errors in judgment by some at the C.I.A., demonstrate a tremendous failure of leadership, and there must be consequences,” he added.

Committee Democrats have spent more than five years working on a report about the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program during the Bush administration, which employed brutal interrogation methods like waterboarding. Parts of that report, which concluded that the techniques yielded little valuable information and that C.I.A. officials consistently misled the White House and Congress about the efficacy of the techniques, are expected to be made public some time this month. Committee Republicans withdrew from the investigation, saying that it was a partisan smear and without credibility because it was based solely on documents and that there were no plans to interview C.I.A. officers who ran the program.

According to David B. Buckley, the C.I.A. inspector general, three of the agency’s information technology officers and two of its lawyers “improperly accessed or caused access” to a computer network designated for members of the committee’s staff working on the report to sift through millions of documents at a C.I.A. site in Northern Virginia. The names of those involved are unavailable because the full report has not yet been made public.

The C.I.A. officials penetrated the computer network when they came to suspect that the committee’s staff had gained unauthorized access to an internal C.I.A. review of the detention program that the spy agency never intended to give to Congress. A C.I.A. lawyer then referred the agency’s suspicions to the Justice Department to determine whether the committee staff broke the law when it obtained that document. The inspector general report said that there was no “factual basis” for this referral, which the Justice Department has declined to investigate, because the lawyer had been provided inaccurate information. The report said that the three information technology officers “demonstrated a lack of candor about their activities” during interviews with the inspector general.

The dispute brought relations between the spy agency and lawmakers to a new low, as the two sides traded a host of accusations — from computer hacking to violating constitutional principles of separation of powers.

At a tense meeting earlier this week in which Ms. Feinstein and Mr. Chambliss were briefed by Mr. Brennan on the report, Ms. Feinstein confronted Mr. Brennan over his past public statements on the issue, in which he defended the agency’s actions, and his implicit criticism of her.

When the C.I.A.’s monitoring of the committee became public in March, after months of private meetings and growing bitterness, Ms. Feinstein took to the Senate floor to deliver a blistering speech accusing the agency of infringing on the committee’s role as overseer.

Calling it a “defining moment” in the committee’s history, Ms. Feinstein said that how the matter was resolved “will show whether the Intelligence Committee can be effective in monitoring and investigating our nation’s intelligence activities, or whether our work can be thwarted by those we oversee.”


Hours later, Mr. Brennan was publicly questioned about the dispute and said that “when the facts come out on this, I think a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong.”

Mr. Brennan said at the time that he had referred the matter to the agency’s inspector general “to make sure that he was able to look honestly and objectively at what the C.I.A. did.”

The White House publicly defended Mr. Brennan on Thursday, saying he had taken “responsible steps” to address the behavior of C.I.A. employees, which he said included suggesting an investigation, accepting its results and appointing an accountability board.

Asked whether the results of the investigation presented a credibility issue for Mr. Brennan, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said, “Not at all.”

Crediting Mr. Brennan with playing an “instrumental role” in helping the United States government destroy Al Qaeda’s leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Mr. Earnest said, “He is somebody who has a very difficult job, who does that job extraordinarily well.”

Ms. Feinstein called Mr. Brennan’s apology and decision to set up an accountability board “positive first steps,” and said the inspector general report “corrects the record.” A separate investigation, led by the Senate’s sergeant-at-arms, has yet to be completed.

But others took a much harder line. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, called the C.I.A.’s actions “appalling.” Senator Angus King of Maine, an independent, said that the spy agency’s actions violated both the spirit and the letter of the constitutional separation of powers.

As he put it: “How do we do our oversight if we can’t believe what is being represented to us in our committee?”






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Summer 2014

8/5/2014

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Hello A Secret Legacy Supporters:

This summer has been pretty busy!  I have had to take a break from A Secret Legacy to work on a paying gig, producing a television documentary series for Lifetime Movie Network.  Dava, our editor has been able to work on A Secret Legacy bit by bit, and I'm really happy with the progress.  We actually have an assembly of the footage, which is very exciting.  Many of our supporters are anxious to see the film, and I've had many questions about when the film is going to be done.  The answer to that, of course, is all about financing!  We have been able to raise a good amount of money to get us to this point, but this fall I will be applying for more documentary grants (highly competitive!), and developing an online crowdfunding campaign which will hopefully cover the rest of the editing (good editors aren't cheap for a good reason!). 

Thank you so much to all of the people who have helped us, cheered us on, and gotten us to the point where we are.  Enjoy the rest of your summer and stay tuned for more updates from A Secret Legacy!

Sandra Alvarez
Director- A Secret Legacy

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CIA HAD ROLE IN GERMANY SPY AFFAIR

7/10/2014

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(TO VIEW THE ARTICLE, CLICK HERE)

World
| Reuters | Updated: July 08, 2014 00:22 IST

Credit: (Reuters on NDTV.com)

Washington: 
The Central Intelligence Agency was involved in a spying operation against Germany that led to the alleged recruitment of a German intelligence official and has prompted renewed outrage in Berlin, two U.S. officials familiar with the matter said on Monday.

CIA Director John Brennan has asked to brief key members of the U.S. Congress on the matter, which threatens a new rupture between Washington and a close European ally, one of the officials said.

It was unclear if and when Brennan's briefing to U.S. lawmakers would take place. The CIA declined any comment on the matter.

The office of Germany's Federal Prosecutor, based in the western city of Karlsruhe, late last week issued a statement saying that a 31-year old man had been arrested on suspicion of being a foreign spy, and that investigations were continuing. The statement offered no further details.

German politicians have said that the suspect, an employee of the country's foreign intelligence service, admitted passing to an American contact details concerning a German parliamentary committee's investigation of alleged U.S. eavesdropping disclosed by Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the U.S. National Security Agency.

The U.S. officials who confirmed the CIA's role spoke on condition of anonymity, and offered no further details.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest declined comment on the dispute.

"The relationship that the United States has with Germany is incredibly important. This is a very close partnership that we have on a range of security issues, including some intelligence issues," Earnest said. "All of those things are high priorities not just to this administration, but to this country. So we're going to work with the Germans to resolve this situation appropriately."  

Snowden's revelations last year, which included evidence that the NSA was targeting German Chancellor Angela Merkel's personal cell phone, frosted U.S.-German relations. The White House agreed to stop targeting Merkel, but rejected Berlin's pleas for a wider "no spy" pact.

The latest case risks further straining ties.

"If the reports are correct it would be a serious case," Merkel told a news conference in Beijing, standing next to Chinese Premier Li Keqiang.

German media reported that the suspected spy, who has not been named, had first been detained on suspicion of contacting Russian intelligence agents, but then admitted he had worked with the Americans. The suspect worked for Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, known by the German initials BND.

While historically close, U.S. intelligence ties to Germany became strained over the last year in the wake of the Snowden revelations.

Snowden took refuge in Moscow last year after leaking tens of thousands of highly classified U.S. intelligence documents to media organizations.  © Thomson Reuters 2014


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RECENTLY DE-CLASSIFIED CIA DOCUMENTS!

3/6/2014

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Over 900 pages de-classified: Recently I was informed that The State Department has released a new volume of declassified documents on the Congo, during 1960-1968, which includes new materials pertaining to the CIA.  They released over 900 pages, including telegrams between CIA station chief Lawrence Devlin and CIA Director in Washington Allen Dulles.  It was pretty fascinating to read through the documents, and to see the actual conversations and decision-making during the Congo Crisis.

No mention of Cuban-Exiles: In over 900 pages, there is not ONE mention of the Cuban-exiles and their participation in the CIA's Congo Operation.  If you do a word search, there is some mention of the word Cuba, such as "T
here may be little time left in which take action to avoid another Cuba."  But in every spot in the document where there should be a mention of the Cuban-exiles and their efforts, the text simply reads: [less than 1 line not declassified]. 

Over 50 years later, the US government still refuses to acknowledge the efforts by the Cuban-exiles to help the CIA in what they regard as one of their most successful missions to date. If you are interested in reading the De-Classified Congo Volumes released by the State Department, Click Here


Now more then ever, I am determined to continue my quest to bring this story to light through the medium of film.  I would love to hear your thoughts on this, so please join the conversation on our Facebook Page

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