[Infowarrior] - Inside NSA's Operation Highlander

[Richard Forno]

Inside Operation Highlander: the NSA's Wiretapping of Americans Abroad
By Kim Zetter  October 10, 2008 | 6:06:27 PM

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/10/kinne.html

A top secret NSA wiretapping facility in Georgia accused of spying on  
Americans illegally was hastily staffed with inexperienced reservists  
in the months following September 11, where they worked under  
conflicting orders and with little supervision, according to three  
former workers at the spy complex.

"Nobody knew exactly what the heck we were doing," said a former  
translator for the project, code named Highlander, who spoke on  
condition of anonymity. "We were figuring out the rules as we were  
going along."

Former Army Reserve linguist Adrienne Kinne, who worked at the  
facility at Fort Gordon, won new attention this week for her year-old  
claim that she intercepted and transcribed satellite phone calls of  
American civilians in the Middle East for the National Security  
Agency. Senate intelligence committee chair Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.)  
opened a probe into the alleged abuses after ABC News reported on them  
Thursday.

Threat Level spoke with Kinne extensively last year about the alleged  
systematic surveillance of Americans and others operating in the  
Middle East following the 9/11 attacks. She provided a number of  
details about some of the calls and how the operation was conducted.

Aid workers and journalists were specifically targeted in the program,  
and their phone numbers were added to a "priority list", Kinne said  
last year. Among those under surveillance were workers from  
nongovernmental organizations such as Doctors Without Borders, the  
International Committee of the Red Cross, and the United Nations  
Developing Countries Program, as well as journalists staying in  
Baghdad at the time of the Iraq invasion. The intercepted calls  
included conversations among American, British, Australian and other  
civilian foreign nationals in the Middle East, as well as  
conversations between aid workers and journalists in the Middle East  
and their family members in the United States.

"If it was happening then I'm sure it's happening now, and who knows  
on what scale," Kinne said. "That's the thing that really bothers me."

But at the time we were unable to confirm her account of the spying.  
Two coworkers of Kinne's, who spoke with Threat Level on condition of  
anonymity, conceded that the group operated under ambiguous rules and  
with poor supervision, but insisted no deliberate eavesdropping on  
Americans occurred.

Now a second former Arabic linguist with the Navy has corroborated her  
claims to ABC, and to NSA expert James Bamford, who includes the story  
in his upcoming book Shadow Factory.

If the allegations are true, it would seem to indicate that  
warrantless spying of Americans approved by President Bush following  
9/11 expanded rapidly beyond U.S. borders to citizens overseas,  
notwithstanding United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18, or  
USSID 18 -- an NSA rule that bars overseas surveillance of Americans  
without authorization and probable cause.

Kinne first raised her allegations in July 2007 to a blogger named  
David Swanson whom she'd encountered after an anti-war protest. Threat  
Level contacted her a couple of days later and spoke with her a number  
of times over several months.

Kinne, who is 31, served in the U.S. Army Reserves as a sergeant and  
an Arabic linguist from October 2001 to August 2003 at a U.S. Army  
Signal Center at Fort Gordon, Georgia, which operated as a listening  
post for the National Security Agency. Kinne had served active duty in  
the U.S. Army as an intelligence linguist with a top secret SCI  
security clearance from 1994 to 1998, and was in the reserves on  
September 11, 2001.

In desperate need of Arabic translators with classified clearances,  
the Army called Kinne's reserve battalion for active duty. Kinne  
served with the 201st Military Intelligence battalion, which is part  
of the 513th Military Intelligence brigade.

Kinne said that during the time she was at Fort Gordon, the government  
was intercepting and listening to phone calls made by American  
citizens and allies working for aid organizations and media outlets.

At first, Kinne didn't think they were doing anything wrong because in  
mid-2002, several months after the surveillance began, a supervisor  
told her group of linguists and analysts that they had received a  
"waiver" that allowed them to intercept and listen to the  
conversations of Americans. The waiver also gave them permission to  
spy on British, Canadian and Australian citizens Kinne said.

Under federal law, such a waiver would usually require special  
national security circumstances –- such as an imminent threat of death  
or attack. But Kinne said the people whose conversations she targeted  
didn't discuss information of a military or terrorist nature, and the  
interceptions occurred over the entire Middle East –- not just in war  
zones. The surveillance was still going on when Kinne left active  
reserve duty in August 2003.

Kinne's mission at Fort Gordon, which was given the name Highlander,  
intercepted only communication sent through satellite phones, which  
included faxes. This represented a change from her active duty in the  
1990s when her group had intercepted only live radio transmissions  
involving military targets in the Middle East. The operation that  
began in 2001 involved region-wide interceptions, which meant that  
satellite calls of businessmen, journalists and other civilians were  
sometimes vacuumed up with everything else.

Generally, when incidental interception of Americans occurs, there are  
procedures for handling the intercepts. Under USSID 18, recordings of  
such calls are supposed to be abandoned and destroyed when a U.S.  
citizen is identified. The only exceptions to this rule are when the  
attorney general affirms that the surveillance target is believed to  
be an agent of a foreign power, or the purpose of the collection is to  
acquire "significant foreign intelligence information."

Kinne's description of the interceptions, however, indicated that U.S.  
aid workers and journalists were routinely targeted without cause.

To illustrate that contrast, Kinne recalled a conversation intercepted  
by her army intelligence unit in 1997, in which one of the parties to  
the call mentioned the name of a U.S. politician who was coming to the  
Middle East for a visit. Under USSID 18, the names of members of the  
U.S. legislative branch cannot appear in intelligence reports without  
special authorization, and Kinne said her group deleted every record  
they collected that mentioned the politician's name.

William Weaver, who worked in the U.S. Army signals intelligence for  
eight years in Berlin and Augsberg, Germany, concurred with her  
assessment of how seriously USSID 18 was regarded.

"The way USSID 18 was treated by us was that it came down from God and  
was sacrosanct," said Weaver, who is now an assistant professor of  
political science at the University of Texas, El Paso. "We were told  
at training and many times after that, that if you violated USSID 18  
you could spend the rest of your life in prison. The mindset was that  
you do not intercept U.S. citizens. And the minute you recognized that  
you intercepted, you immediately reported up the chain of command."

Kinne said everything changed shortly after her unit intercepted a  
call in early to mid-2002 between British and U.S. aid workers. The  
two were discussing day-to-day work details when the British worker  
told the American, "You should be careful about what you're saying  
because the Americans are listening to us." The American responded  
that USSID 18 barred U.S. authorities from spying on the communication  
of Americans, so the British worker had nothing to worry about.

Kinne said her supervisor, Chief Warrant Officer John Berry, and  
others were livid.

"[They] acted as if he was betraying some hugely intense national  
secret to a foreigner," she said. "So that's when they were like, 'We  
need to be able to listen to them'."

Shortly thereafter, she said, Berry informed her that they had  
received a waiver from USSID 18. She said it was communicated verbally  
during one of her shifts."They never showed us anything in writing,"  
said Kinne. "But we never expected to get anything in writing."

Berry, who now works as a reporter for the Press-Enterprise in  
Riverside, California, hung up the phone on Threat Level at the first  
mention of Kinne's name.

Kinne said that in the nearly two years she was monitoring  
conversations, her group processed between 300 and 500 calls a day in  
numerous languages, including Farsi, Dari, Tagalog, Japanese, Chinese  
and Russian. Between 10-20 percent of the calls she monitored involved  
English-speakers, which included Americans, Canadians and British  
citizens. Nearly 99 percent of the calls she monitored were non- 
military related. Relatively few of the calls that came in were in  
Arabic.

The calls were intercepted and digitally recorded by members of the  
Army's military intelligence unit in Kuwait then sent to Fort Gordon.  
The system would pick up conversations for whatever phone numbers the  
military programmed into its interception system, though Kinne assumed  
the system also randomly swept satellite calls for untargeted numbers,  
since so many calls were recorded for numbers whose owners were unknown.

For the first couple of months Kinne and her colleagues didn't know  
the identity of the people connected to the phone numbers they  
monitored. "At that point in time, we were just given numbers and  
we ... were still sorting out who belonged to what," she said. "That's  
why we initially started collecting Americans and other nationals  
because we didn't know whose number belonged to whom."

Once they identified speakers, they typed the person's name or  
organization into the system, so that when a conversation involving  
that number was intercepted again, the name appeared on their computer  
screen. Although the system allowed them to block phone numbers  
identified as belonging to a nongovernmental organization or  
journalist, they never did so. Instead, she said, they added the  
numbers of humanitarian aid organizations and journalists to a  
priority list.

"They were 'priority five,' from what I remember," she said.  
"'Priority one' was terrorist organizations. 'Priority five' is middle  
of the road. 'Priority nine' was just unidentified numbers. Not only  
were we given the ability to listen to [NGOs and journalists], but it  
was programmed into our system to listen to them."

Periodically, they received a list of new numbers that had been  
programmed into the system.

"I don't know where the numbers were coming from," Kinne said. "We  
were just given raw materials and we had to identify what number  
belonged to what organization and prioritize and set up a list."

They wrote a report on each call, except those made to parties in the  
U.S. Kinne said they were just instructed to listen to those calls.  
She later said in another conversation that some people in her group  
did write reports involving conversations of Americans and  
Australians, but didn't reference the nationality of the speaker in  
their report.

"Americans 'in-country' were fair game as long as you didn't identify  
them as American," she said. "People wrote reports on what journalists  
said all the time."

Kinne's recollections of intercepted calls were vague on details, as  
one might expect of someone recalling four-year-old conversations that  
held no significance at the time. She was generally unable, for  
example, to recall the names of people whose calls were intercepted or  
the names of specific media outlets to which the monitored journalists  
belonged. The few she did remember stood out in her mind because of  
the nature of the calls or circumstances surrounding them.

For example, Kinne was reprimanded for listening to one call when she  
should have been focused on a fax that her unit intercepted purporting  
to identify the location of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The fax arrived in the middle of the night, around the time of the  
Iraq invasion Kinne was monitoring a call involving two English- 
speaking humanitarian aid workers who were in a vehicle frantically  
trying to reach their office to find cover before bombs began raining  
on the city.

"I just remember they were ... calling in their position [to their  
colleagues] every 10 to 15 minutes or so because they were worried  
about their safety," she said.

Kinne filed several reports about the aid workers and gave their  
location to her supervisor, believing that U.S. military personnel  
might help the aid workers, or at least refrain from shooting their  
vehicle. But while she was monitoring the workers, a fax arrived,  
several pages long and written in Arabic. Even though the fax was from  
a phone number with a higher priority, Kinne ignored it because she  
felt the lives of the aid workers were more important.

When another worker later read the fax and realized its significance,  
all of the workers were instructed to drop everything to translate it.  
Kinne said the fax purported to describe the location of chemical,  
biological and other weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

As soon as her group completed the translation, she said it was sent  
to the White House -– the only time information was sent directly in  
this manner.

After the information was on its way, Kinne looked at the source of  
the document and began to doubt its authenticity. She said it came  
from the Iraqi National Congress or Iraqi National Accord -- she  
couldn't remember which.

Kinne said she expressed doubts to her commanding officer, John Berry,  
about the authenticity of the information and was told that her job  
was to collect the information, not analyze it. "He said I didn't care  
about our mission or our country ... and I needed to stop asking  
questions," she said.

Kinne was written up in an incident report for having ignored the fax  
when it came in.

When she later read news reports confirming that an Iraqi group had  
fed the military intelligence false information, she suspected the fax  
had been deliberately sent through an open satellite network so that  
her unit would intercept it and give it to the White House.

The only other conversations Kinne recalled with any detail involved  
journalists staying at a hotel in Baghdad around the time of the U.S.  
invasion. The journalists revealed their location in calls to U.S.  
family members. Kinne said she'd been monitoring the conversations of  
journalists at the hotel for a while, when the name of the hotel  
appeared on a military list of targets for bombing. Kinne said she  
brought the information to Berry's attention.

"I told him, you realize there are journalists staying in that hotel  
and we have just said that we are going to bomb it," she said. "I  
assumed that ... whoever made the targeting list didn't know  
journalists were staying there."

She didn't know if the information was passed on to anyone, but in  
April 2003, a U.S. tank fired on the Palestine hotel, which was  
serving as a base for many journalists. Two journalists were killed.  
Two subsequent investigations by the army and the Committee to Protect  
Journalists concluded that the gunners had never been told journalists  
were at the hotel.

Two fellow linguists who had worked with Kinne at Fort Gordon disputed  
Kinne's story of illegal surveillance. They asked to remain anonymous  
because they were violating orders to not discuss their work at Fort  
Gordon.

Both linguists said they never violated USSID 18 and had never heard  
about a waiver, which one of them called implausible. They said USSID  
18 was drummed into their heads and was posted everywhere at work as a  
constant reminder.

"There is just no breaking that rule," one linguist said. "There are a  
lot of other rules they can change and have changed, but they don't  
change that one. We don't want to have a Watergate experience."

The same linguist said if there had been any guidance from supervisors  
about violating USSID 18, it would have been along the lines of "if  
you hear something that meets this high criteria .. and there are  
words that are scaring you, tip it off to the head chief and they will  
decide if there is imminent risk. That is the only way we deviate ...  
So if [Kinne's] understanding is that all the rules got tossed, there  
is no way [that happened]."

The other linguist was just as emphatic. "[N]ever in my entire  
military career have I ever been told that it was okay to listen to  
U.S. citizens. [If] an intercept came in that had a citizen's  
conversation, I was never told I could report what came from Americans."

They were both angry with Kinne for discussing their work. One said if  
Kinne thought their mission had been illegal, she should have gone  
through internal processes or reported it to the FBI.

"If there was something going on, she had methods to handle it. To go  
outside and do it in this way indicates a need to make it fantastical.  
Or to get back at somebody."

The other translator noted that Kinne had conflicts with a number of  
people she worked with -- particularly her supervisor Berry -- and had  
a negative view of their team and its mission, which may have affected  
her perception of the operation. They described Berry as a problematic  
and hostile manager who didn't seem to know what he was doing. Adding  
to this was a pervasive sense of confusion around their mission, which  
was set up quickly on the fly and being run by reservists who had no  
experience intercepting phone calls.

The unit was overworked, understaffed and undertrained. They didn't  
have a standard of operation, or SOP, when they started the mission  
and had to cobble one together from other SOPs. Many conversations  
they had to translate were in dialects unfamiliar to them or  
languages, such as Pashtu, in which they had no proficiency.

In that confusion, there might have been times when people  
inadvertently listened to conversations they shouldn't have, but both  
linguists said the policy was clear that they were not to listen or  
report on U.S. citizens or allies.

"There was a lot of crazy stupidity going on, but [Berry] wasn't  
abusing USSID 18 because he didn't have the authority," one said.

The other linguist said, "[T]he entire way of using intelligence and  
the dissemination of information ... were changing, and as things were  
changing and we were trying to figure things out, I think there could  
have been a lot of gray lines that were walked instead of black and  
white."

Asked for an example of these gray lines, the linguist explained:

"[S]ometimes when you are searching for information ... things come  
across your way that are extraneous or not pertinent to what you  
should be doing, and if you come across that and you don't act on it,  
you don't report it, it's like it never happened. I can say there are  
times when that's possibly a gray area ... You hear a lot of things,  
you see a lot of things, but a lot of it is junk ... [and] some of it  
might be accidental. But the number one mandate [that] you are  
conscious of is, 'Is this something I should be listening to? Is this  
something I can report on?' If it doesn't meet those two criteria,  
you're going to discard it."

It's worth noting that Kinne began speaking about her surveillance  
activities only after becoming an anti-war activist, and working with  
groups calling for the impeachment of President Bush.

When Threat Level spoke with her last year, she was working as a  
research assistant for the Veterans Administration in Vermont and was  
becoming increasingly active politically. She had worked on get-out- 
the-vote campaigns for Moveon.org in November 2006, and in January  
2007 began meeting with members of Iraq Veterans Against the War. She  
participated in a rally and a sit-in at the Vermont state house and  
went on a bus tour with anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan calling for  
the impeachment of President Bush.

Kinne said that after the White House announced a troop escalation in  
Iraq, she became very angry that the 2006 mid-term elections and  
subsequent changes in Congress hadn't led to pressure on the  
Administration to pull out of Iraq.

But it wasn't until details of the government's illegal domestic  
spying operation on Americans were revealed in late 2005, that she had  
reason to ponder her surveillance work, she said. Even then, her  
realization came slowly.

"I never really thought about how what we did related to [those news  
reports]," she said. "It took me quite a while to put the pieces  
together. I just figured we were one mission, and I never thought that  
probably military intelligence groups across the country were all  
being given waivers to listen to whomever they wanted."

It was another year and a half after the New York Times broke the  
story on the domestic surveillance program before Kinne uttered her  
first public words about the surveillance she had conducted on behalf  
of the NSA.

"I still felt like it was all classified and I wasn't supposed to talk  
about it," she said. "But the more I got involved in things, the more  
I started getting really angry that people in government were not  
telling the truth and that people who know what's going on [are] not  
speaking out. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I  
should tell people what I knew and hopefully that would encourage  
other people to say what they know."

She said she just wanted to pass the information to others who could  
determine whether the army and administration broke the law. To that  
end, she had submitted her allegations to Sen. Patrick Leahy's office  
(D-Vermont) in the hope that his staff would look into the matter to  
determine if laws had been broken. Leahy's staff sent her an e-mail  
indicating that they sent her letter to the Department of Defense  
Inspector General. But Kinne never heard anything after that.

Given her political activities and the delay in reporting the alleged  
abuse, the denials of her peers and the lack of corroborating  
evidence, Threat Level elected not to publish her claims last year.  
But in his upcoming book, The Shadow Factory, journalist James Bamford  
-- the leading civilian expert on the NSA -- reports that he confirmed  
the illegal surveillance with another linguist named David Murfee  
Faulk, who worked on the program through the Navy.  One of Faulk's  
coworkers -- not Kinne -- asked a supervisor about USSID 18, and was  
ordered to disregard the directive, Bamford reports.

James Dempsey, policy director of the Center for Democracy and  
Technology, said last year that if Kinne's information was accurate,  
it would be a significant advancement to what we knew about the  
administration's warrantless surveillance.

"Up to now the administration has said that every single phone call  
that we intercepted we did so because we knew there was al-Qaida on  
the phone," Dempsey said. "Now you're saying that, at least overseas,  
they were targeting Americans when they had no reason to believe an al- 
Qaida member was on the other line. This is the first indication that  
the government was targeting not terrorists but Americans overseas on  
less than probable cause."