[Infowarrior] - Collateral Damage: Surveillance Aimed at Terrorists Can Easily Go Awry

[Richard Forno]

 CQ HOMELAND SECURITY
Jan. 25, 2008 ­ 6:46 p.m.
Collateral Damage: Surveillance Aimed at Terrorists Can Easily Go Awry
By Jeff Stein, National Security Editor, CQ Staff

http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=5&docID=hsnews-000002661145

U.S. intelligence tapped the telephone calls of Lawrence Wright, the
Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower, starting in 2002.

This may well be news to many people, even though Wright revealed the taps
himself in a sprawling, 15,000-word article on electronic surveillance in
the Jan. 21 edition of The New Yorker magazine.

Perhaps because the article was not available online it lacked the
link-juice to propel it into a frenzy over the ³domestic spying² on the Web,
the cable news shows and leading American newspapers.

As far as I can tell, only Pam Hess of the Associated Press picked up on
Wright¹s confrontation with spy chief Michael McConnell over the phone taps,
and no major paper ran it. The version of her story that The Washington Post
printed recounted McConnell¹s telling Wright that water boarding would be
³torture² if it were done to him, but dropped the five paragraphs Hess wrote
on the eavesdropping. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal skipped
Wright¹s wiretap account altogether.

But The New Yorker¹s Web site did feature an audio interview with Wright in
which he described the visit of FBI agents to his Texas home in 2002 to quiz
him about the telephone calls intercepted by U.S. intelligence.

The encounter came, mind you, amid the constant assurances from the Bush
administration that the U.S. has not, and is not, ³spying on Americans² or
running a ³warrantless domestic spying program.²

³Totally untrue!² McConnell told Wright, insisting that the conversations of
American citizens with no connections to terrorists would be immediately
discarded. U.S. intelligence is after al Qaeda, McConnell and others have
repeatedly pledged, not innocent Americans.

³I¹m telling you,² the former Air Force general said, ³if you¹re in the
United States you have to have a warrant. Authorized by the court. Period!²

But Wright then told McConnell he had a more-than-professional interest in
electronic surveillance.

³Let me make a disclosure,² he told the spy boss. ³I have been monitored.²

One of his intelligence sources had revealed to him that he had ³read a
summary of a telephone conversation that I had from my home with a source in
Egypt.²

McConnell said the eavesdropping must have been triggered by getting a call
³from some telephone number that¹s associated with some known outfit.²

The journalist, however, had originated the call.

What happened next bears repeating, not just because it has gone largely
unreported, but because it¹s the kind of encounter many more Americans can
expect if they end up as a target of our distressingly sloppy ‹ some would
say incompetent ‹ counterterrorism agencies, if Congress extends a law (PL
110-55) enacted last August, that expanded the government¹s electronic
surveillance authority.

The law, which expires on Feb. 4, in effect turned U.S.-based Internet
servers into a mail drop for U.S. intelligence.

In 2002 Wright was visited by two FBI agents after placing calls in the
course of researching The Looming Tower, his Pulitzer Prize-winning account
of the rise of al Qaeda and U.S. responses to it, as well as an article on
al Qaeda¹s number two leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

³They were members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force,² he recounted. ³They
wanted to know about phone calls made to a solicitor in England² who was
upset that I was talking to some of her clients, who were jihadis, former
members of Zawahiri¹s terror organization in Egypt, and they wanted to know
what we were talking about.²

What startled him, however, was that the visiting gumshoes thought that his
daughter, Caroline, had made the calls.

³Our understanding is that these calls were placed by Caroline Wright,² they
said.

But Wright¹s daughter was off at college at the time. He now worries that
³she¹s now on the link chart as an al Qaeda connection.²

Now that we have a seamless web of databases, it wouldn¹t be surprising if
Caroline Wright finds herself blocked from getting on an airplane, entering
the country or renewing her passport.

Wright confronted McConnell with the FBI visit.

³Her name is not on any of our phones,¹ he said, ³so how did her name
arise?²

³I don¹t know,² the spy boss said.

³That troubles me,² Wright responded.

³It may be troublesome,² McConnell said. ³It may not be. You don¹t know.²

Neither the FBI nor the Office of the Directorate of National Intelligence
would comment on the incidents Wright described.

³We don¹t talk about who we are investigating and not investigating,² FBI
spokesman Richard Kolko told me Friday.

But U.S. intelligence officials insist they are not idly ³spying² on
innocent Americans. And I tend to agree.

What would be the point?
No Substitute for Human Intelligence

On the other hand, the incidents Wright describes, and the open-ended
electronic surveillance authority the administration wants, are cause for
worry ‹ just not for the reasons many people think.

Yes, it troubles me that U.S. intelligence could so cavalierly gather and
store names and information that they¹re not supposed to have, without a
warrant no less. There¹s no guarantee that this or any future administration
won¹t use it.

James V. Bamford, the acclaimed author of two exhaustive histories of the
National Security Agency, respects the codebreakers so much that a critic
once dissed him as ³the agency¹s hagiographer.²

But Bamford joined a class action suit last year against the NSA by the
American Civil Liberties Union, with the explanation that the NSA, like
teenagers, can get into mischief if they¹re home alone.

³What greatly concerns me as someone who has written more about NSA than any
other writer is that in the past, when NSA was allowed to operate in
absolute secrecy, without oversight, it became a rogue agency,² he said.

That¹s why the administration cannot be allowed to skirt the FISA court,
created by a 1978 law (PL 95-511) to screen secret warrant requests by the
spy agencies ‹ and keep them honest.

The fact is that, in the wake of the Patriot Act (PL 107-56, PL 109-177) and
other procedural changes in the surveillance laws, there¹s no legal red tape
holding up time-sensitive counterterror operations, despite incidents
McConnell has cited ‹ and which turned out to be completely unfounded, to
put it politely.

It¹s just not true, no matter how many times administration officials say
it, that critical operations to find the kidnappers of American soldiers in
Iraq and an al Qaeda cell in Germany were held up by FISA regulations.
McConnell himself said he was mistaken.

But what really troubles me is that so many, many years after the first
terrorist attack here (on the World Trade Center in 1993), our spying
agencies apparently still haven¹t found an effective way to pursue the real
bad guys.

The huge electronic wires they want to wrap us in are no substitute for good
human intelligence work out there ‹ where the bad guys are.

As former counterterror agent Michael Tanji put it on Wired magazine¹s
Danger Room blog: ³It¹s bad enough that the Director of National
Intelligence is trotting out a bogus threat so the government can snoop on
all Internet traffic. What¹s worse is that this kind of mass surveillance is
a pretty lame way to catch the honest-to-God bad guys.²

Tanji added, ³The fact that we are essentially attempting to gill-net bad
guys is a fairly strong indicator that the intelligence community has yet to
come up with an effective strategy against information-age threats.²
Out There

But hey, say the wiretapper wannabees, we can¹t wait until the college kids
we¹ve recruited turn into good spies. The threat is now.

I say: That¹s an excuse.

Hurry up. Every hour and dollar spent wiring up the home front is time,
money and attention wasted on building real intelligence networks, the
old-fashioned way ‹ out there.

³It is simply a case of, as the late Sam Kinison joked, going where the food
is,² Tanji blogged. ³That our intelligence agencies can intercept adversary
communications is largely a given. They just want to do it from the
convenience of the homeland, not some remote switch in the darkest
hinterlands.²

America is a special place, if only for the restrictions we put on the
snoopers¹ desire to intrude into our private conversations without warrants.

You don¹t like that? Move to France. Or Pakistan.

At a conference in Paris a few years ago, I asked a top counterterrorism
official if he needed special legislation or judicial warrants to plant
spies in mosques or wiretap citizens.

³Mais non,² he replied, looking mystified. What¹s the point of that?

Is that the way we want to live?
BACKCHANNEL CHATTER

Last week¹s column about Russian spying operations here and in Canada drew
an underwhelming response. One widely read blogger, Wired¹s Noah Shachtman,
called my report on former Russian master spy Sergei Tretyakov¹s allegations
³a great catch,² but except for another dozen pick-ups on the Web, it was
ignored.

Tretyakov¹s story is told in a new book by former Washington Post reporter
Pete Earley, ³Comrade J: The Untold Secrets of Russia¹s Master Spy in
America After the End of the Cold War.² Tretyakov relates in convincing
detail how he and his comrades recruited and managed a dozen spies,
including a Pakistani-born Canadian who, he writes, is today ³a U.N. senior
verification expert,² who specializes in the clandestine weapons programs of
Iran, Libya and his native Pakistan.

I identified the official as Tariq Rauf, chief of verification and
security-policy coordination at the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA). As I reported, Rauf had every chance to completely deny the
allegations during my conversation with him, but declined. Only later did he
e-mail a more emphatic denial that he had worked for Russian intelligence.

The IAEA, which did not respond to my previous inquiries, apparently needed
only an hour or so to thoroughly investigate my allegation and issue a
denial. Whether the IAEA checked with Tretyakov ‹ or CIA and FBI officials,
who vetted Tretyakov when he defected in 2001 ‹ could not be learned. But I
doubt it.

Maybe other media were afraid that naming Rauf as a Russian agent would
undermine his boss, IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei, who has long been at odds
with the Bush administration, first over Iraq, then Iran. Or maybe there¹s
just not enough hours in a day to chase down all the major national security
stories breaking in any given news cycle.

After all, there¹s a war or two on.

Or maybe, as one wag put it to me, the big story would be finding a U.N.
diplomat who¹s NOT on some spy agency¹s payroll.

Whatever, I find it mystifying that so few seem to be interested in whether
a Russian agent is running nuclear inspections on Iran, which Russia wants
to do business with. You, however, now can find more on this by listening to
Tretyakov himself, interviewed on WNYC, New York, last week.

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein at cq.com.