A Secret Legacy: Cuban Exiles, the CIA and the Congo Crisis (A Documentary Film in Progress)
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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for all I care,” said a food services supervisor at the Central Intelligence Agency, asking that his identity remain unpublished for security reasons.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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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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    Sandra Alvarez-Smith is the director and Executive Producer of the film

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