History > 2006 > USA > CIA / NI / NSA / NGA (II)

Paul Conrad

California        The Los Angeles Times Syndicate        Cagle        11.5.2006
http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/conrad.asp

Poised to Come Back to the C.I.A., a Former Official Who Has Become a Symbol

May 30, 200
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, May 29 — In his old office at the Central Intelligence Agency, Stephen R. Kappes once hung a World War II-era British poster that announced, "Keep Calm and Carry On." He ignored this admonition 18 months ago, when he resigned in anger after bitter clashes with senior aides to Porter J. Goss.

But now Mr. Goss has been forced out as the agency's director, and Mr. Kappes is poised to return, with a promotion. He would become deputy director, under Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who won Senate confirmation on Friday.

A man of military bearing and a storied past, Mr. Kappes would become the first person since William E. Colby in 1973 to ascend to one of agency's top two positions from a career spent in the clandestine service. General Hayden has said that his return would be a signal that "amateur hour" is over at the C.I.A., which has seen little calm since Mr. Kappes's departure.

A no-nonsense former Marine officer who insists on addressing his elders as "sir," Mr. Kappes speaks Russian and Persian; served as the agency's station chief in Moscow and Kuwait during a quarter-century at the C.I.A.; and played a pivotal role in the secret talks with Libya that culminated in December 2003 in the agreement in which Col. Muammar el-Qadaffi agreed to give up his chemical and biological weapons program.

His appointment has not been formally announced, but intelligence officials as well as Mr. Kappes's friends say he will probably take the deputy director position.

Mr. Kappes, 54, declined to be interviewed for this article, having spent most of his professional career trying hard not to be noticed.

Veteran intelligence officials say his expected return is being celebrated within the agency, and some Democratic lawmakers have even characterized Mr. Kappes as a savior who will rescue a moribund agency.

Some critics, including Representative Peter Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, have portrayed his return as a victory for a hidebound C.I.A. bureaucracy that resists all change. There has even been grumbling among White House officials that Mr. Kappes, the former head of the clandestine service, criticized the Bush administration and its policies after he left the agency in 2004.

People who know Mr. Kappes well reject these descriptions as simplistic.

"I would suggest that we dismiss all of the breathless characterizations of Steve Kappes either from his critics or the people trying to counter his critics," said Milton A. Bearden, who served for three decades in the C.I.A.'s clandestine service. "The simple fact is that he is a very solid choice to come to the agency at a time when it is extremely wobbly."

John E. McLaughlin, deputy director of the C.I.A. from 2000 to 2004, said Mr. Kappes would "bring a sense of leadership and professionalism to the agency's operations division."

Mr. Kappes, a Cincinnati native, joined the C.I.A. in 1981 after five years in the Marine Corps, where he once commanded a platoon of the Marines' legendary "silent drill team" in Washington that performs a tightly scripted rifle ceremony before thousands of spectators each year.

In 1988 he became the deputy chief of a secret C.I.A. station in Frankfurt, the agency's hub for collecting information about Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's government in Iran. From Frankfurt, case officers debriefed Iranian exiles and built up a network of agents inside Iran.

Mr. Kappes later transferred to the Middle East, where he served on the agency's task force before the Persian Gulf war of 1991 and re-opened the C.I.A. station in Kuwait after the war's end.

After running the C.I.A. station in Moscow in the late 1990's, Mr. Kappes returned to C.I.A. headquarters, where he ascended to the top echelon of the directorate of operations, now known as the national clandestine service.

His time at C.I.A. headquarters was marked by an occasionally stormy relationship with the lawmakers who oversee the intelligence community.

One of the biggest successes of Mr. Kappes's career came after he became the clandestine service's second-ranking official and was put in charge of coordinating the C.I.A's effort to penetrate the secret network of a Pakistani nuclear scientist, A. Q. Khan.

Dr. Khan had for years been using the black market to sell nuclear blueprints and centrifuge parts, and in October 2003, American and European authorities intercepted a freighter bound for Libya loaded with nuclear bomb-making material.

Soon afterward, Colonel Qaddafi agreed to allow American and British inspectors to tour suspected nuclear sites, and Mr. Kappes was put in charge of a team that began negotiating directly with the colonel over ending Libya's programs for unconventional weapons.

Former intelligence officials said Mr. Kappes was given the assignment because he had both the background and the temperament for the delicate negotiations with a longtime American adversary.

"You don't send just anyone to do this," Mr. McLaughlin said. "It was an enormously difficult, complicated and high-stakes mission."

After several rounds of talks led by Mr. Kappes, the Bush administration was able to announce in December 2003 that Libya had agreed to abandon the programs.

Yet Mr. Kappes's career track veered off course in late 2004, when Mr. Goss and many of his top aides came to the C.I.A.

The incident that directly led to his resignation occurred in November 2004, shortly after Mr. Goss took over at the agency. Patrick Murray, who was Mr. Goss's chief of staff, ordered Mr. Kappes to fire his deputy, Michael Sulick, after Mr. Sulick had a testy exchange with Mr. Murray.

Mr. Kappes, who at the time was in charge of the C.I.A.'s clandestine service, refused and chose to resign instead.

After leaving the agency, he became an executive vice president at ArmorGroup, a private security firm based in London.

Those who know Mr. Kappes say he bears no grudges for the circumstances of his departure. But while many inside the agency are eagerly awaiting Mr. Kappes's return, his reputation as a taskmaster who does not suffer fools gladly has some bracing for what could lie ahead.

"The really good people are happy he's coming back," said a former top C.I.A. official, speaking on condition of anonymity because Mr. Kappes's return has not yet been made official. "The ones who are scared of him should be scared of him."

    Poised to Come Back to the C.I.A., a Former Official Who Has Become a Symbol, NYT, 30.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/washington/30cia.html

Senate Overwhelmingly Confirms General to Be Director of C.I.A.

May 27, 2006
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, May 26 — The Senate overwhelmingly confirmed Gen. Michael V. Hayden on Friday as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, despite some senators' criticism of his role in overseeing a domestic electronic surveillance program.

The 78-to-15 vote showed that General Hayden's popularity on Capitol Hill as an articulate advocate for the spy agencies outweighed doubts about the legality of the eavesdropping program he ran as director of the National Security Agency. The only Republican to vote against confirmation was Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who has said he believes the program violates the law.

Some senators suggested that they had set aside concerns about the program in part because they believed that General Hayden could restore morale and purpose at the C.I.A. after the tumultuous 19-month directorship of Porter J. Goss. Mr. Goss, a former Republican congressman, was forced to resign after failing to recover from a rocky start in 2004, when his top staff members clashed with agency veterans.

By the time of the vote, the propriety of having an Air Force general on active duty take charge of the civilian spy agency, while initially questioned by several Republicans, had virtually disappeared as an issue.

General Hayden, 61, who has served for 13 months as principal deputy to John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, told senators he did not intend to remain on active military duty after he left the C.I.A. job, easing concerns that he might have a motive to kowtow to the Pentagon.

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, said on the Senate floor on Thursday night that General Hayden had demonstrated "independence and objectivity and a willingness to speak truth to power." Those qualities were especially necessary at the C.I.A., Mr. Levin said, because of what he described as the Bush administration's distortion of intelligence before the war in Iraq.

Mr. Levin said that despite "unanswered questions" about the eavesdropping program and its legal status, "the legal opinions about this program are not General Hayden's."

Since President Bush and two attorneys general had approved the program, he said, General Hayden could not be expected to question its legality.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said that while he respected General Hayden and thought he had "learned important lessons" from the prewar intelligence on Iraq, the general should not be confirmed.

"I cannot support General Hayden's nomination in light of the very serious questions about the scope and legality of the N.S.A. domestic surveillance programs that he helped design, implement and defend," Mr. Kennedy said in a statement.

As the confirmation vote took place, Vice President Dick Cheney again defended the surveillance program, which, without warrants, monitors international phone calls and e-mail messages of Americans and others in the United States who are believed to be linked to Al Qaeda.

Mr. Cheney, who has presided over most of the briefings that have been held on the program for selected members of Congress, said in his commencement address at the United States Naval Academy that the eavesdropping "is conducted in a manner that fully protects the civil liberties of the American people."

The vice president drew applause with his assurance that President Bush "will not relent in the effort to track the enemies of the United States with every legitimate tool."

The easy confirmation of General Hayden underscored the fact that Congressional critics of the surveillance program have questioned only its legal basis, not its intelligence value. Even after USA Today reported this month that the agency had collected data on millions of Americans' phone calls, few members of Congress said the agency should stop such activities.

The administration has thwarted several efforts by the program's critics to subject it to scrutiny.

The Federal Communications Commission declined to investigate because the program was so secret, and officials in the ethics office of the Justice Department were denied the necessary security clearances to conduct a planned review.

Justice Department lawyers cited the "state secrets privilege" to seek dismissal of a suit against AT&T for cooperating with the National Security Agency, and government lawyers have told a New York court that they will do the same in a lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights, a civil liberties group, challenging the surveillance program. Once rarely used, the privilege has been used repeatedly by the Bush administration to block litigation related to intelligence activities.

Senators Specter and Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, have proposed a bill to bring all N.S.A. eavesdropping on Americans under court supervision. It would ban federal spending for electronic monitoring that does not comply with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and would establish faster, more flexible procedures for getting warrants to track potential terrorists.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which on Friday expressed concern about General Hayden's "troubling record" at the security agency, supports the Specter-Feinstein bill. Its prospects for passage are uncertain.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Annapolis, Md., for this article.

    Senate Overwhelmingly Confirms General to Be Director of C.I.A., NYT, 27.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/27/washington/27intel.html

Counsel Says He May Use Cheney in Libby Trial

May 25, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, May 24 — A court filing on Wednesday by the special counsel in the C.I.A. leak case suggested that Vice President Dick Cheney would testify as a government witness in the trial of his former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr.

The legal brief did not say with certainty that Mr. Cheney would be called as a witness. But the latest filing, like earlier court papers, underscored the prosecutor's contention that the vice president's role was critical to understanding Mr. Libby's wrongdoing. But the new filing was the first to indicate that Mr. Cheney himself might be called as a government witness.

On the issue of whether Mr. Cheney will testify, the brief said, "Contrary to defendant's assertion, the government has not represented that it does not intend to call the vice president as a witness at trial."

The prosecution brief, signed by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special counsel, added, "To the best of government's counsel's recollection, the government has not commented on whether it intends to call the vice president as a witness."

Mr. Libby testified to the grand jury in the case that Mr. Cheney had been "upset" by the OpEd article in The New York Times on July 6, 2003, written by Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador, according to the papers, filed in Federal District Court in the District of Columbia.

The article criticized the Bush administration Iraq policy, voicing serious doubts about assertions in the months before the war that Iraq had sought uranium fuel from Africa as part of a suspected program to develop unconventional weapons. Mr. Cheney, according to Mr. Libby's grand jury testimony, believed that the article falsely attacked his credibility because it said his office instigated a trip in 2002 that Mr. Wilson took to Niger to explore reports of possible nuclear purchases.

It was on a copy of the article that Mr. Cheney made handwritten entries asking whether it was Mr. Wilson's wife who sent him on the trip. Mr. Wilson is married to Valerie Plame Wilson, the C.I.A. office, whose name was disclosed in a syndicated column on July 14, 2003. The column by Robert D. Novak led to the inquiry that ended with the perjury and obstruction of justice indictment against Mr. Libby last October. Mr. Libby has pleaded not guilty. The trial is to begin early next year.

The government wants to use Mr. Cheney's notes as evidence, saying they show the state of mind in Mr. Cheney's office and the importance that aides like Mr. Libby attached to rebutting the article.

The prosecution has said that after Mr. Cheney expressed concern, Mr. Libby informed reporters that Mr. Cheney's office did not send Mr. Wilson and that he might have traveled on what was little more than a junket arranged by Ms. Wilson.

Later, the prosecution has said, Mr. Libby misled investigators about his actions, saying the reporters had told him about Ms. Wilson.

    Counsel Says He May Use Cheney in Libby Trial, NYT, 25.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/25/washington/25cheney.html?hp&ex=1148616000&en=aa839825c1929609&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Senate Panel Endorses C.I.A. Nominee

May 24, 2006
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, May 23 — The Senate Intelligence Committee strongly endorsed Gen. Michael V. Hayden on Tuesday to be the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency, with all but three members, all Democrats, voting to send General Hayden's nomination to the Senate floor.

The panel's 12-to-3 vote virtually guarantees that General Hayden will win confirmation by the full Senate, which is likely to vote on his selection before the end of the week.

With the current C.I.A. director, Porter J. Goss, planning to leave the agency on Friday, the White House had urged the Senate to move quickly on General Hayden's confirmation. The vote on Tuesday came just 15 days after President Bush nominated General Hayden.

Four committee Democrats joined all eight Republican members in endorsing the general. Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas and the panel's chairman, called General Hayden "a proven leader and a supremely qualified intelligence professional."

The committee's vice chairman, John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, said General Hayden had shown "the necessary independence that is essential to restoring the C.I.A.'s credibility and stature."

The Democrats who voted against the nomination were Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Evan Bayh of Indiana. Each cited concerns about General Hayden's role in a controversial domestic surveillance program he ran while head of the National Security Agency.

"I am not convinced that the nominee respects the rule of law and Congress's oversight responsibilities," Mr. Feingold said.

During his confirmation hearings last week, General Hayden drew sharp questions from several Democrats who raised concerns about the legality of the N.S.A. program. Under the program, the agency monitors, without court warrants, the international telephone and e-mail communications of terror suspects in the United States.

Committee members from both parties had also questioned whether General Hayden, as a career military officer, might be beholden to the Pentagon at a time when the Defense Department was playing a greater role in intelligence gathering overseas.

Yet statements by committee members after the vote on Tuesday indicated that General Hayden had dispelled this concern.

"He has shown some independence and some backbone and a willingness to say no to power," said Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan. "You've got to have someone in this position who speaks truth to power."

The departure of Mr. Goss, whom the White House had pressured to resign amid turf battles with John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, is expected to be accompanied by considerable turnover throughout the agency's senior ranks.

Mr. Goss's circle of advisers, many of whom the former Republican congressman brought with him from Capitol Hill, are expected to leave the agency. In addition, the agency's deputy director, Vice Adm. Albert M. Calland III of the Navy, is expected to take a new military assignment.

Kyle Foggo, until recently the C.I.A.'s third-ranking official, has resigned as executive director amid accusations that he was involved in a government corruption scandal.

Federal officials raided Mr. Foggo's home and office at the C.I.A. this month looking for evidence of ties to Brent Wilkes, a San Diego military contractor who is named as a co-conspirator in the recent indictment of former Representative Randy Cunningham, Republican of California.

Another top official, the head of the National Clandestine Service, an undercover officer who formerly headed C.I.A. operations for Latin America and directed the agency's Counterterrorism Center, plans to retire this summer.

Intelligence officials said that other senior members of Mr. Goss's team, including the heads of the Directorate of Intelligence and the Directorate of Science and Technology, had no immediate plans to leave the C.I.A. but that General Hayden could decide to appoint a new team upon taking over.

    Senate Panel Endorses C.I.A. Nominee, NYT, 24.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/24/washington/24intel.html

C.I.A. Choice Says He's Independent of the Pentagon

May 19, 2006
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, May 18 — Gen. Michael V. Hayden sought on Thursday to distance himself from the Pentagon and its role in prewar intelligence on Iraq, in an appearance that put him on track to win swift confirmation as the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

In a confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee, General Hayden appeared in the pristine blue uniform he has worn for 36 years as an Air Force officer.

But he repeatedly professed his independence from the Defense Department and its leadership, saying he had been "uncomfortable" with the work of a Pentagon intelligence office run by Douglas J. Feith, a former undersecretary of defense, which asserted in the months before the Iraq war that Iraq had established ties with operatives for Al Qaeda in the Middle East.

General Hayden also recounted disagreements with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld about the Pentagon's control over a large part of America's annual intelligence budget. In characterizing one such conversation, he said, "I think it's what diplomats would call that frank and wide-ranging exchange of views."

General Hayden flatly defended as legal the secret domestic eavesdropping program he ran until last year as director of the National Security Agency, and that argument was directly challenged by only a handful of Democratic senators.

But he notably declined to endorse a Bush administration stance that has severely limited the number of senators who could be briefed on the program. "It was not my decision," he said.

The questioning of General Hayden in more than seven hours of public testimony included moments of tension. But, for the most part, Democrats as well as Republicans praised his experience and said he was a good choice to lead an agency that has been buffeted by recriminations over intelligence failures and the stormy service of its current director, Porter J. Goss, who will leave next week.

None of the 15 senators on the committee indicated that they planned to vote against General Hayden's nomination. By day's end, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, the Republican chairman of the committee, said he hoped to hold votes in the committee and the full Senate next week that could install General Hayden at the C.I.A. by Memorial Day.

General Hayden's assertions of independence appeared intended to address his critics' concerns that a four-star general running the spy agency might be too beholden to the Pentagon at a time when the military is expanding its foreign intelligence operations.

In his current job, as principal deputy to John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence, General Hayden is not in the direct military chain of command. Yet his testimony on Wednesday was the first time that a senior general on active duty had criticized the intelligence office run by Mr. Feith, who left the Pentagon last year after overseeing a critical part of the Pentagon's effort to build the case for war against Saddam Hussein.

In stark contrast to Mr. Goss, who in confirmation hearings 19 months ago pledged "tough love" for the embattled agency, General Hayden went out of his way to praise the work of C.I.A. officials and pledged to "reaffirm the C.I.A.'s proud culture of risk-taking and excellence."

General Hayden, who would become the third C.I.A. director in two years, said he was also eager to restore a sense of continuity at the agency, which has been shaken by turnover at its highest levels. He said the possible return of Stephen R. Kappes, a veteran of the agency's clandestine service who is said to be the leading candidate to become General Hayden's deputy, would help in that effort.

"You get a lot more authority when the work force doesn't think it's amateur hour on the top floor," he said. "You get a lot more authority when you've got somebody welded to your hip whom everybody unarguably respects as someone who knows the business."

He said he also believed it was "time to move past what seems to me to be an endless picking apart of the archeology of every past intelligence failure and success," including those related to the Sept. 11 attacks and faulty assessments about prewar intelligence on Iraq. C.I.A officers, he said, "deserve not to have every action analyzed, second-guessed and criticized on the front pages of the morning paper."

The sharpest criticism from senators came during questions about General Hayden's role in the domestic eavesdropping program. General Hayden said the surveillance program broke no laws and had been carefully vetted by National Security Agency lawyers. He said no lawmaker had ever suggested significant changes to the program in more than a dozen classified briefings before it was publicly revealed in December.

"I never left those sessions thinking I had to change anything," he said.

Yet some lawmakers challenged whether General Hayden had been upfront about the highly classified program in public statements and in past visits to Capitol Hill.

One committee Democrat, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, questioned whether General Hayden had "simply said one thing and done another, or whether you have just parsed your words like a lawyer to intentionally mislead the public."

Mr. Wyden asked, "What's to say that if you're confirmed to head the C.I.A., we won't go through exactly this kind of drill with you over there?"

"Well, senator," the general replied, "you're going to have to make a judgment on my character."

While several senators expressed concern that the Pentagon was muscling onto the C.I.A.'s territory by expanding its intelligence capabilities, General Hayden denied that there was a turf battle between the military and civilian intelligence operatives.

In fact, General Hayden said on several occasions Thursday that Pentagon intelligence-gathering had helped the C.I.A. break free from the military's constant demands to support troops with tactical intelligence.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, General Hayden said, the C.I.A. had initially "picked up a large burden" in providing direct support to military forces.

"To have D.O.D. step up to those kinds of responsibilities doesn't seem to me to be a bad thing," he said. "And if that frees up C.I.A. activity to go back toward the more traditional C.I.A. realm of strategic intelligence, there's a happy marriage to be made here."

At the same time, General Hayden said it was necessary to "create a bright line" distinguishing the field activities of the Pentagon and the C.I.A., which historically has had broader legal authority to run covert operations overseas.

He said his first priority was to strengthen the C.I.A.'s abilities to collect human intelligence, yet he also said the spy agency needed to remain the government's "center of excellence" for intelligence analysis.

At the same time, he said the C.I.A.'s workforce of analysts, known as the directorate of intelligence, suffered from a lack of seasoned veterans who could coach the younger analysts who had joined the agency since the Sept. 11 attacks.

To illustrate this, General Hayden said that for every 10 analysts at the agency with less than four years of intelligence experience, there was only one with more than 10 years of experience.

"This is the least experienced analytic workforce in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency," he said.

Scott Shane contributed reporting for this article.

    C.I.A. Choice Says He's Independent of the Pentagon, NYT, 19.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/19/washington/19intel.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Nominee Says N.S.A. Stayed Within Law on Wiretaps

May 19, 2006
The New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, May 18 — Less than a month after the Sept. 11 attacks, Gen. Michael V. Hayden summoned 80 or 90 staff members to a conference room at the National Security Agency. President Bush had just approved the use of wiretapping on the international calls and e-mail of Americans without warrants, and the general, then leading the spy agency, was setting his troops in motion.

As General Hayden recounted the meeting at his Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday, he explained what the president had authorized and ended his remarks by saying, "We're going to do exactly what he said, and not one photon or one electron more."

"And I think that's what we've done," he told the senators considering his nomination to lead the Central Intelligence Agency.

General Hayden faced sharp questioning from Democrats about whether the eavesdropping operation was legal and whether he had misled Congress and the public about it. But even under attack, he did not stray from the points that he and other administration officials have stressed in defending the operation in recent months. Again and again, he cited the legal and constitutional authority for the program, the safeguards against abuses, and the need for secrecy to ensure its effectiveness.

But while the message was constant, General Hayden sought to put a more human face on the effort, explaining his role and that of his aides in running the surveillance program.

He told, for instance, of meeting with N.S.A. employees after the disclosure of the program in December in The New York Times and seeking to rally them "at the height of the first fur ball about this."

"You know, they're doing their jobs, but it was a difficult time," he told the committee. "But the only emotion they expressed to me was they wanted to be able to continue to do their work. You know, their fear was not for themselves or that they had done anything wrong, but that they wanted to be able to continue to do what it is they had been doing."

He also told of his talks with a handful of agency lawyers about the legality of the program under the president's authority as commander in chief under Article II of the Constitution. "I talked to the N.S.A. lawyers, most of my personal dialogue with them, they were very comfortable with the Article II arguments and the president's inherent authorities," General Hayden said.

At the same time, however, he acknowledged under questioning from Democrats that he did not read the Justice Department's formal opinion laying out the legal rationale for the program. He also said he did not recall any substantive discussion about the Congressional authorization in September 2001 to use all necessary force against Al Qaeda — a resolution that the White House now says helped give it legal authority for the wiretapping operation.

"Our discussion anchored itself on Article II," he said.

He acknowledged that there had been significant discussion within the administration — and between the White House and the security agency — about undertaking the program.

BellSouth Wants Retraction

ATLANTA, May 19 (AP) — The BellSouth Corporation is pressing USA Today to retract assertions that the telecommunications company provided customers' phone records to the National Security Agency.

The Atlanta-based company's chief lawyer, Marc Gary, sent a letter on Thursday to the publisher of USA Today, the Gannett Company's flagship paper, to retract "false and unsubstantiated statements" made in a May 11 article, said a BellSouth spokesman, Jeff Battcher.

A newspaper spokesman, Steve Anderson, said, "We are reviewing it and will be responding."

    Nominee Says N.S.A. Stayed Within Law on Wiretaps, NYT, 19.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/19/washington/19nsa.html

Wider Briefing for Lawmakers on Spy Efforts

May 18, 2006
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, May 17 — Classified briefings provided to lawmakers on Wednesday about a controversial domestic eavesdropping program have smoothed what might have been a contentious path toward confirmation for Gen. Michael V. Hayden as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, senators and Congressional officials said.

The closed-door sessions in the Capitol, on the eve of a confirmation hearing for General Hayden, were the first time the White House had provided briefings to the full Senate and House Intelligence Committees about the program. As director of the National Security Agency until last year, General Hayden oversaw the surveillance program, whose existence came to light in December.

The Bush administration had for months resisted Congressional appeals to expand the number of lawmakers briefed about the program, and lawmakers from both parties had been planning to use General Hayden's confirmation hearings as a public forum to rail against White House stonewalling.

Lawmakers have said that even without Wednesday's briefing, by Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the current N.S.A. director, the Senate was likely to confirm General Hayden. Yet Wednesday's briefings diminished the prospect that the hearings, before the Senate Intelligence Committee, would become a focus of hostile questions from Democrats and Republicans on the panel who had not been briefed on the program, in which the security agency monitored, without court warrants, the international telephone and e-mail communications of those suspected of having links to terrorists.

General Hayden, President Bush's choice to replace Porter J. Goss as C.I.A. director, is likely to face sharp questions about the program on Thursday as well as questions about reported secret C.I.A. prisons overseas, the Pentagon's expanding role in intelligence gathering and the C.I.A.'s efforts to refocus on human intelligence gathering abroad.

Until Wednesday, only seven members of the Senate Intelligence Committee had been briefed about details of the N.S.A. program. On Wednesday the remaining eight members were briefed.

Some Republicans said Wednesday's briefing for the full committee also eliminated the awkward prospect of strains between the group of senators on the panel who had been previously been told about the program and the group that had not.

"It would be very difficult to have a confirmation hearing for General Hayden when half the committee knows what he's been doing and the other half hasn't," said Senator Christopher S. Bond, Republican of Missouri.

One senior Democratic Senate aide, who was granted anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly about his party's strategy, said of Thursday's hearings, "Democrats were much more likely to cause problems if they weren't able to ask knowledgeable questions during the hearing."

The White House press secretary, Tony Snow, sought to play down the significance of the tactical shift. He said Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, argued that the briefings were necessary "to have a full and appropriate confirmation hearing for General Hayden, and we agreed with it."

But Republicans as well as Democrats said the White House had blundered by waiting until the last minute to share information on the spying program with members of the intelligence panel.

"This is something that should have happened, frankly, long before now," said Senator Olympia J. Snowe, a Republican of Maine who serves on the Intelligence Committee. "Congress should be an ally in the war on terror, not an adversary."

Asked if Wednesday's session might prompt Democrats to tamp down their questions during Thursday's confirmation hearing, Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, said: "I hope it does. It should."

Mr. Lott was among a handful of committee members previously briefed on the program. But he said: "I've never been comfortable with this administration's reluctance to give us proper briefings."

The top Democrat on the intelligence committee, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, is recovering from major back surgery, so the Democrats' questioning of General Hayden will be led by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan. On Wednesday, Mr. Rockefeller sent a letter to General Hayden that criticized the public role the general had taken in recent months in his current job as principal deputy director of national intelligence, the point man for the White House in defending the N.S.A. program.

"It is of the utmost importance that officials of the intelligence community avoid even the appearance of politicization, and that its senior leaders set an example," Mr. Rockefeller wrote.

A list issued by the White House on Wednesday chronicled 30 occasions when lawmakers were briefed about the program since its inception, shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. According to the document, the first briefing occurred on Oct. 1, 2001, when the senior leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees received briefings.

Ms. Snowe said that it was still important to have "rigorous questioning" of General Hayden, and Democrats on Wednesday said they intended to grill the nominee on a number of issues, including the independence of the C.I.A. and the Pentagon's efforts to expand its role in intelligence gathering abroad.

One Democrat who will question General Hayden on Thursday was irked that the briefings provided on Wednesday did not give him much time to prepare detailed questions in advance of the hearing. "This will bring new meaning to the concept of a cram course," said the Democrat, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon.

A Democrat who had previously been briefed, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, complained that the White House had made "a political decision on intelligence that because Hayden is up tomorrow, they'd brief the committee."

Ms. Feinstein said he "has to discuss his role in the N.S.A. program and the legal opinions that govern it," during the open session. "And then," she added, "I think he's got to show that, yes, he can stand up to the Pentagon and he can give unvarnished intelligence, speak truth to power."

Jim Rutenberg and James Risen contributed reporting for this article.

    Wider Briefing for Lawmakers on Spy Efforts, NYT, 18.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/18/washington/18nsa.html?hp&ex=1148011200&en=ade45d6241511b38&ei=5094&partner=homepage

C.I.A. Pick Dazzles Many, but Critics See Mixed Résumé

May 18, 2006
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, May 17 — A year ago, when Gen. Michael V. Hayden last sought Senate confirmation to a new job, protecting Americans' privacy from the global eavesdropping system he had overseen for six years at the National Security Agency was almost an afterthought on Capitol Hill.

General Hayden assured senators then that the agency acted "absolutely in compliance with all U.S. law and the Constitution," and sailed to easy confirmation in April 2005 as principal deputy director of national intelligence.

Eight months later, Americans learned that at the direction of President Bush, the N.S.A. had been skirting the law requiring court approval for wiretaps on American soil.

On Thursday, General Hayden again appears before the Senate Intelligence Committee, seeking its approval to add another job, that of director of the Central Intelligence Agency, to a résumé possibly unmatched in the history of American spying.

The question of whether General Hayden misled the committee last year is only one of several that could, in theory, cause trouble. Senators could press him on his role in costly, floundering modernization programs at the N.S.A., or his views on the C.I.A.'s secret prisons for terrorism suspects.

But people who have followed the rise of General Hayden, 61, from blue-collar Pittsburgh through Air Force assignments and into the top jobs in the spy bureaucracy, do not predict a major clash. Through careful cultivation of superiors, Congress and the news media, and a knack for mastery of arcane facts and homespun metaphors, he usually escapes such encounters unscathed.

Former Senator Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat who headed the Intelligence Committee until 2003, recalls coming away dazzled from tours in which General Hayden showed off satellite dishes and supercomputers at N.S.A. headquarters at Fort Meade, Md.

"He builds up your sense of confidence in him as both a visionary leader and one with his mind wrapped around the details," Mr. Graham said.

Brent Scowcroft, under whom General Hayden served from 1989 to 1991 on the National Security Council staff of the first President Bush, also piles on the superlatives.

"He's exceedingly smart, he's very hardworking, he has great integrity, and he knows the intelligence business," said Mr. Scowcroft, himself a retired Air Force lieutenant general who, as chairman of the current president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board until 2005, closely followed General Hayden's work at the N.S.A. "That's a combination that's really needed right now at C.I.A."

But Mr. Scowcroft, an experienced judge of Washington insiders, added, "It's easy to snow people on a subject few people know much about."

Whether with substance or with flair, General Hayden began impressing superiors long ago. Dan Rooney, now owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, coached him when he was a 12-year-old on the football team at St. Peter's Catholic School and quickly picked him out as quarterback.

"He wasn't the biggest or the strongest kid on the team, but he was the smartest," Mr. Rooney recalled. "He exuded confidence, and the other kids gathered confidence from him."

Mr. Rooney later hired the young Mike Hayden, then a student at Duquesne University, to help in the Steelers' front office. But he was as surprised as other friends and relatives when the studious history major chose a military career.

"He was so interested in history that I guess he wanted to become part of it," General Hayden's younger brother, Harry, a truck driver in Pittsburgh, said in an interview last year.

Mr. Hayden's fans in Pittsburgh watched with pride as he rose steadily in the Air Force ranks and became director of the N.S.A., by far the most public chief in the secretive agency's history. He pays regular visits home, seeing the old North Side neighborhood or taking in a Steelers game.

His six-year tenure at the N.S.A., the longest ever, has drawn lavish praise for his undertaking urgently needed change at a time the agency was rapidly falling behind a revolution in communications.

"He changed the culture out there," Mr. Scowcroft said. "Typically, N.S.A. was run by the permanent staff, and directors passed through every couple of years without much impact. He shook it up when it needed shaking up."

That view is widely shared by many government officials. But there is also a pronounced minority view, expressed by some former senior N.S.A. officials and advisers: that General Hayden is better at public relations than at management, and that his record at the agency was far more mixed than his many admirers realize.

"He's masterful at spinning the facts to make himself look good," said one former senior N.S.A. official who worked with General Hayden for several years. Like a number of other critics interviewed for this article, he would not speak for attribution, because he now works for a company that depends on contracts with the N.S.A., the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies.

The critics, some of whom say they like General Hayden personally and admire his vision, maintain that he showed erratic judgment in crucial personnel decisions and embraced overly ambitious programs that became expensive failures.

Despite the secrecy that hides most of the agency's activities, there is at least some independent evidence to support the critics' claims.

The centerpiece of General Hayden's effort to modernize the agency's technology, a classified program called Trailblazer, ran up bills of more than $1.2 billion and produced few useful results, according to former N.S.A. officials and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Trailblazer, undertaken in 2001, was intended to improve radically the agency's ability to sort through its haul of intercepted communications, estimated in a 2002 Congressional report at 650 million messages a day.

Another major effort, called Groundbreaker, contracted out the agency's basic computer functions to a consortium of companies starting in 2000. According to N.S.A. officers, the contract produced years of headaches for intelligence officers as they struggled with new software and endured computer crashes. The agency's computer woes were detailed this year in The Baltimore Sun.

In 2003, the Senate Intelligence Committee said in a report that it continued to be concerned with the N.S.A. purchasing process "and frustrated by the lack of progress realized in remedying this problem over the past three years." The same year, Congress stripped the agency of procurement authority over Trailblazer and certain other major classified programs, requiring Pentagon approval of all spending.

General Hayden declined to comment in advance of Thursday's hearing. But in testimony last year, he acknowledged the problems with Trailblazer, describing it as a "moon shot" with excessively ambitious goals. The delays, he said, were even more serious than the cost overruns, which he estimated at "a couple to several hundred million" dollars.

"Hayden had a lot of great ideas," said Matthew M. Aid, a onetime N.S.A. analyst who is writing a history of the agency. "But when he left N.S.A. last year, none of his modernization programs had been completed, and the agency's fiscal management was still broken."

But General Hayden's fans remain loyal. Mr. Graham, who was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee when the problems with Trailblazer became evident, said he preferred to attribute the difficulties to worthy ambitions.

"There were failures, but in my judgment they were not failures of competence or management," he said. "When you're Christopher Columbus, you're not going to get to your destination on the first try."

    C.I.A. Pick Dazzles Many, but Critics See Mixed Résumé, NYT, 18.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/18/washington/18hayden.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

U.S. Focused on Obtaining Long-Distance Phone Data, Company Officials Indicate

May 18, 2006
The New York Times
By MATT RICHTEL and KEN BELSON

Government efforts to obtain data from the nation's largest phone companies for a national security database appear to have focused on long-distance carriers, not local ones, statements by company officials indicate.

The statements have come in the week since USA Today reported that the National Security Agency had collected local and long-distance phone records on tens of millions of Americans from Verizon, BellSouth and AT&T in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The responses by the companies suggest that the agency, in an effort to find patterns that could identify terrorists, sought records from major long-distance providers like the former MCI (now part of Verizon), AT&T and Qwest, but did not ask for data on local calls.

Technical experts said long-distance calling records could yield information not only on the companies' own long-distance customers, but also on traffic that the carriers connect on behalf of others, including some calls placed on cellphones or on Internet voice connections.

But they added that unless the data was supplemented, considerable holes would remain, since cell companies route their long-distance calls over a variety of networks, as do providers of Internet phone service. For example, "They wouldn't have much information about cellular calls, whether cellular-to-cellular or cellular-to-wired calls," said Andrew Odlyzko, the director of the Digital Technology Center at the University of Minnesota and former researcher at AT&T Labs.

Records directly turned over by the long-distance carriers might be only one of several sources for such a database. The New York Times reported in December that the National Security Agency had gained backdoor access to streams of domestic and international phone and e-mail traffic with the cooperation of telecommunications companies.

And a former AT&T technician, Mark Klein, provided documents to reporters this year describing equipment installed at an AT&T office in San Francisco in 2003 capable of monitoring a large quantity of e-mail messages, Internet phone calls and other Internet traffic.

Mr. Klein's documents are at the heart of a class-action lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group, asking a federal court to bar AT&T from turning over customer records to the government without proper court authorization. Mr. Klein stated in a deposition that he had been told by other AT&T employees that the security agency had set up monitoring rooms in San Francisco, Seattle, San Jose, Calif., Los Angeles and San Diego.

At a hearing on the lawsuit yesterday in San Francisco, Judge Vaughn R. Walker rejected an AT&T request to force the plaintiffs to return the documents. Justice Department lawyers argued that the lawsuit should be quashed on national security grounds. Another hearing was scheduled for June 23.

In response to both the suit and the report last week in USA Today, AT&T has affirmed its vigilance about its customers' privacy but would not comment on matters of national security. Verizon said Tuesday that it had not been asked by the National Security Agency to supply phone records, nor had it done so. But it said its denial covered the businesses it operated before acquiring MCI in January. Asked whether records had been provided by MCI before or since the merger, Verizon declined to comment.

The former chief executive of Qwest — a Bell company that, like Verizon and AT&T, includes a major long-distance operation — has said that he was approached by the National Security Agency after 9/11 but rebuffed a request for records. Qwest itself would not comment. The other major Bell company, BellSouth, which said Monday that it had not been asked for records or provided them, has no significant long-distance operation outside its region.

Sprint Nextel, which operates both long-distance and cellular networks, has declined to comment on any cooperation with the security agency. Cellular companies including Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile, Alltel and U.S. Cellular have said they did not hand over records; Cingular Wireless declined to comment.

The long-distance networks are sizable data pipes that sit in the middle of most telephone calls that leave local and sometimes regional call areas. The information yielded by long-distance call records can be vast, said Lisa Pierce, a telecommunications analyst with Forrester Research. "Any call that transits a long-distance network, regardless of whether it's an international or domestic, wireless or wire line, will have a call detail record," she said.

Ms. Pierce said that the network infrastructure was known as Signaling System 7 and that it created an automatic record of such things as the two numbers that are connected, and the time and duration of a call. This architecture also creates a record when a call is delivered onto a domestic long-distance network from overseas or from a cellphone. In some instances, when a cellphone caller places a long-distance call, the transmission originates on a cell network, then is delivered to a long-distance network that carries it across the country, where it might be connected to another cell network.

Ms. Pierce said only 20 percent to 30 percent of long-distance cellphone calls created such a record; in other cases, she said, the cellphone carriers might deliver the calls not over a long-distance carrier but over private network lines that may not create a record.

Long-distance companies also carry most international calls. TeleGeography, a research company, says AT&T and Verizon each handle 26 percent of the international calls in the United States, followed by IDT, with 17 percent, and Sprint, with 13 percent. Jason Kowal, a managing director at TeleGeography, said about 15 percent of international calls from the United States were made with Internet-based phone services, and traveled over networks tracked differently.

John Markoff contributed reporting for this article.

    U.S. Focused on Obtaining Long-Distance Phone Data, Company Officials Indicate, NYT, 18.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/18/us/18call.html

C.I.A. Making Rapid Strides for Regrowth

May 17, 2006
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, May 16 — For all its dysfunction and recent failures, the Central Intelligence Agency that Gen. Michael V. Hayden stands to inherit is far along a path toward rebuilding its network of foreign stations and replenishing ranks that were eviscerated during the years after the cold war.

The rocky 19-month tenure of Porter J. Goss was characterized by turf battles and the bitter departure of many seasoned operatives. Yet it was also a time when a flood of new recruits entered the agency and more than 20 stations and bases abroad were opened or reopened.

By next year, C.I.A. officials say, the agency expects to have tripled the number of trained case officers from the number in 2001. The hope is that a bulked-up spy network will allow the agency at least to begin penetrating closed societies like North Korea and Iran.

Information concerning the sharp increase in case officers and overseas stations, which has not been previously disclosed, was provided in response to questions about the state of the agency's rebuilding effort. Current and former intelligence officials interviewed for this article were granted anonymity to speak about hiring trends and foreign operations, the details of which are classified. They would not discuss precise numbers of case officers or overseas stations, however.

The long-term rebuilding of the agency began under Mr. Goss's predecessor, George J. Tenet, who during the late 1990's persuaded Congress to begin reversing the budget and staff cuts that had set in after the breakup of the Soviet Union, when the agency lost the mission it had been founded to carry out a half-century earlier.

Current and former intelligence officials say it will still be several years before the agency can meet the goals of a presidential directive, announced in late 2004, to increase the number of case officers and intelligence analysts by an additional 50 percent. Some also point out that merely becoming bigger will not necessarily yield better intelligence. In fact, an emphasis on size alone could divert resources from strategic locations where they are most needed — "robbing Peter to pay Paul," in the words of Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee.

"I have some concern about that," Mr. Roberts said. "It's not just about numbers. It's about being more aggressive."

But the rebuilding of the C.I.A.'s overseas spying operations is expected to aid the push by John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, to refocus the agency's efforts on its core missions of fighting terrorism and stealing secrets abroad. General Hayden, nominated by President Bush to succeed Mr. Goss as director of the agency, is currently Mr. Negroponte's principal deputy, and he is regarded as a champion of strengthening the agency's human intelligence.

General Hayden faces questioning on Thursday at a confirmation hearing before the Intelligence Committee.

As for Mr. Goss, he has said little publicly since he was forced to step down on May 5, after what President Bush called a time of transition, a turbulent period in which the C.I.A. lost its status as the premier spy agency. But his associates say Mr. Goss, a former case officer himself, made strengthening of spy networks a particular focus of his tenure.

While the purges and resignations of senior officials under Mr. Goss have shaken the agency's northern Virginia headquarters and contributed to a sharp decline in morale, some veteran intelligence officers say it is not likely that the turmoil there has had a major effect on case officers overseas.

Americans "tend to have a very top-down view of the world and think that directors really make a big difference," said Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former member of the C.I.A.'s clandestine service and now a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "That certainly isn't true at the agency."

Further, the agency is still enjoying a surge of applicants hoping to join its ranks, a wave that has subsided little since the period immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks. In the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, the number of applicants was 121,000, compared with 136,000 in 2002 and 138,000 in 2003. This year, the agency's statistics show, it has already received 84,000 résumés, an average of 2,000 more a month than last year.

A bigger problem has been getting the new hires to stay. The highest attrition rate, at 5.9 percent, occurs among the newest employees, those with less than five years of service. Some officials say that with the spate of hiring since the Sept. 11 attacks, it has been a struggle to push new recruits through the training pipeline and into field positions, a problem contributing to some disgruntled new hires' quitting the agency.

Quite apart from those departures, intelligence officials say, the chief of the National Clandestine Service — a veteran officer who formerly headed C.I.A. operations for Latin America and directed the agency's Counter Terrorism Center, but who remains undercover — is planning to retire this summer. Should General Hayden win Senate confirmation, he will name the fourth director in two years for the clandestine service, formerly the Directorate of Operations.

Current and past intelligence officials say that in terms of personnel numbers, the low point for the C.I.A., especially for the clandestine service, occurred in 1999, by which time the human intelligence arm had been cut by 20 percent from its cold-war highs. Yet lawmakers' criticism about shortcomings in the agency's ability to steal secrets has intensified more recently, especially in light of the faulty assessments about Iraq's weapons programs and the continued difficulty in determining the state of such programs in Iran and North Korea.

In its report authorizing the 2005 intelligence bill, the House Intelligence Committee, then headed by Mr. Goss, criticized what it called the "dysfunctional denial of any need for corrective action" in the way the C.I.A. collects human intelligence, or Humint.

"After years of trying to convince, suggest, urge, entice, cajole and pressure C.I.A. to make wide-reaching changes to the way it conducts its Humint mission," the report said, "the C.I.A., in the committee's view, continues down a road leading over the proverbial cliff."

After taking over the agency in October 2004, Mr. Goss pushed to reopen a number of the stations and bases that were closed during the 1990's. But he never built close ties to the White House, was regarded by subordinates as aloof and clashed with Mr. Negroponte about where the C.I.A. fit within the new intelligence network.

Whatever the additions now to the agency's human intelligence muscle, General Hayden would be the first director to begin his tenure knowing that the C.I.A. is no longer at the center of America's vast intelligence bureaucracy. Its historical role as the premier agency for collecting and analyzing raw intelligence is being challenged on multiple fronts, with the Pentagon increasing its role in intelligence collection while Mr. Negroponte has pushed to bring some of the C.I.A.'s intelligence analysts directly under his control.

    C.I.A. Making Rapid Strides for Regrowth, NYT, 17.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/17/washington/17cia.html?hp&ex=1147924800&en=b61021cdea26eb03&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Full Panels to Get Surveillance Briefing

May 17, 2006
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

WASHINGTON, May 16 — The full Senate and House Intelligence Committees are to be briefed on Wednesday for the first time on details of the domestic telephone surveillance program that the White House has previously described to only a few members of Congress, lawmakers said Tuesday.

The decision to give the briefings was a clear effort to head off criticism that might overshadow confirmation hearings scheduled for Thursday for Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the choice to lead the Central Intelligence Agency. As director of the National Security Agency until last year, General Hayden oversaw the program, and he will provide the classified briefing to the committees. Some members of the Senate committee have promised to use General Hayden's confirmation hearings to raise their concerns about the legality of the program.

The decision to brief lawmakers indicates concern at the White House that Democrats may use the hearings to criticize the administration for withholding information about the surveillance.

"It became apparent that in order to have a fully informed confirmation hearing, all members of my committee needed to know the full width and breadth of the president's program," Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement.

    Full Panels to Get Surveillance Briefing, NYT, 17.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/17/washington/17intel.html

Cheney the focus of CIA leak court filing

Updated 5/14/2006 3:15 AM ET
USA Today

WASHINGTON (AP) — In a new court filing, the prosecutor in the CIA leak case revealed that Vice President Dick Cheney made handwritten references to CIA officer Valerie Plame — albeit not by name — before her identity was publicly exposed.

The new court filing is the second in little more than a month by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald mentioning Cheney as being closely focused with his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, on Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson, who is married to Plame.

With the two court filings, Fitzgerald has pointed to an important role for the vice president in the weeks leading up to the leaking of Plame's identity.

In the latest court filing late Friday, Fitzgerald said he intends to introduce at Libby's trial in January a copy of Wilson's op-ed article in The New York Times "bearing handwritten notations by the vice president." The article was published on July 6, 2003, eight days before Plame's identity was exposed by conservative columnist Bob Novak.

The notations "support the proposition that publication of the Wilson Op Ed acutely focused the attention of the vice president and the defendant — his chief of staff — on Mr. Wilson, on the assertions made in the article and on responding to those assertions."

The article containing Cheney's notes "reflects the contemporaneous reaction of the vice president to Mr. Wilson's Op Ed article," the prosecutor said. "This is relevant to establishing some of the facts that were viewed as important by the defendant's immediate superior, including whether Mr. Wilson's wife had 'sent him on a junket,' the filing states.

The reference is to the fact that the CIA sent Wilson on a trip to Africa in 2002 to check out a report that Iraq had made attempts to acquire uranium yellowcake from Niger.

Wilson concluded that it was highly doubtful an agreement to purchase uranium had been made.

The Bush administration used the intelligence on supposed efforts by Iraq to acquire uranium from Africa to bolster its case for going to war.

After the invasion, with the Bush White House under pressure because no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, Wilson wrote the op ed piece for The Times. In it, he accused the Bush administration of exaggerating prewar intelligence to exaggerate an Iraqi threat from weapons of mass destruction.

Defending the administration against Wilson's accusations, Libby and presidential adviser Karl Rove promoted the idea that Wilson's wife, Plame, had sent him on the trip to Africa. Administration critics have said such a move was an attempt to undercut Wilson's credibility.

The prosecution's court papers also stated that Cheney told Libby around June 12, 2003, that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA, a month before her identity was outed.

    Cheney the focus of CIA leak court filing, UT, 14.5.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-13-cia-leak_x.htm

Cheney Pushed U.S. to Widen Eavesdropping

May 14, 2006
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE and ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, May 13 — In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney and his top legal adviser argued that the National Security Agency should intercept purely domestic telephone calls and e-mail messages without warrants in the hunt for terrorists, according to two senior intelligence officials.

But N.S.A. lawyers, trained in the agency's strict rules against domestic spying and reluctant to approve any eavesdropping without warrants, insisted that it should be limited to communications into and out of the country, said the officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss the debate inside the Bush administration late in 2001.

The N.S.A.'s position ultimately prevailed. But just how Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the agency at the time, designed the program, persuaded wary N.S.A. officers to accept it and sold the White House on its limits is not yet clear.

As the program's overseer and chief salesman, General Hayden is certain to face questions about his role when he appears at a Senate hearing next week on his nomination as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Criticism of the surveillance program, which some lawmakers say is illegal, flared again this week with the disclosure that the N.S.A. had collected the phone records of millions of Americans in an effort to track terrorism suspects.

By several accounts, including those of the two officials, General Hayden, a 61-year-old Air Force officer who left the agency last year to become principal deputy director of national intelligence, was the man in the middle as President Bush demanded that intelligence agencies act urgently to stop future attacks.

On one side was a strong-willed vice president and his longtime legal adviser, David S. Addington, who believed that the Constitution permitted spy agencies to take sweeping measures to defend the country. Later, Mr. Cheney would personally arrange tightly controlled briefings on the program for select members of Congress.

On the other side were some lawyers and officials at the largest American intelligence agency, which was battered by eavesdropping scandals in the 1970's and has since wielded its powerful technology with extreme care to avoid accusations of spying on Americans.

As in other areas of intelligence collection, including interrogation methods for terrorism suspects, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Addington took an aggressive view of what was permissible under the Constitution, the two intelligence officials said.

If people suspected of links to Al Qaeda made calls inside the United States, the vice president and Mr. Addington thought eavesdropping without warrants "could be done and should be done," one of them said.

He added: "That's not what the N.S.A. lawyers think."

The other official said there was "a very healthy debate" over the issue. The vice president's staff was "pushing and pushing, and it was up to the N.S.A. lawyers to draw a line and say absolutely not."

Both officials said they were speaking about the internal discussions because of the significant national security and civil liberty issues involved and because they thought it was important for citizens to understand the interplay between Mr. Cheney's office and the N.S.A. Both spoke favorably of General Hayden; one expressed no view on his nomination for the C.I.A. job, and the other was interviewed by The New York Times weeks before President Bush selected the general.

Mr. Cheney's spokeswoman, Lee Anne McBride, declined to discuss the deliberations about the classified program. "As the administration, including the vice president, has said, this is terrorist surveillance, not domestic surveillance," she said. "The vice president has explained this wartime measure is limited in scope and conducted in a lawful way that safeguards our civil liberties."

Representatives for the N.S.A. and for the general declined to comment.

Even with the N.S.A. lawyers' reported success in limiting its scope, the program represents a fundamental expansion of the agency's practices, one that critics say is illegal. For the first time since 1978, when the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed and began requiring court approval for all eavesdropping on United States soil, the N.S.A. is intentionally listening in on Americans' calls without warrants.

The spying that would become such a divisive issue for the White House and for General Hayden grew out of a meeting days after the Sept. 11 attacks, when President Bush gathered his senior intelligence aides to brainstorm about ways to head off another attack.

"Is there anything more we could be doing, given the current laws?" the president later recalled asking.

General Hayden stepped forward. "There is," he said, according to Mr. Bush's recounting of the conversation in March during a town-hall-style meeting in Cleveland.

By all accounts, General Hayden was the principal architect of the plan. He saw the opportunity to use the N.S.A.'s enormous technological capabilities by loosening restrictions on the agency's operations inside the United States.

For his part, Mr. Cheney helped justify the program with an expansive theory of presidential power, which he explained to traveling reporters a few days after The Times first reported on the program last December.

Mr. Cheney traced his views to his service as chief of staff to President Gerald R. Ford in the 1970's, when post-Watergate changes, which included the FISA law, "served to erode the authority I think the president needs to be effective, especially in a national security area."

Senior intelligence officials outside the N.S.A. who discussed the matter in late 2001 with General Hayden said he accepted the White House and Justice Department argument that the president, as commander in chief, had the authority to approve such eavesdropping on international calls.

"Hayden was no cowboy on this," said another former intelligence official who was granted anonymity because it was the only way he would talk about a program that remains classified. "He was a stickler for staying within the framework laid out and making sure it was legal, and I think he believed that it was."

The official said General Hayden appeared particularly concerned about ensuring that one end of each conversation was outside the United States. For his employees at the N.S.A., whose mission is foreign intelligence, avoiding purely domestic eavesdropping appears to have been crucial.

But critics of the program say the law does not allow spying on a caller in the United States without a warrant, period — no matter whether the call is domestic or international.

"Both would violate FISA," said Nancy Libin, staff counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a civil liberties group.

Ms. Libin said limiting the intercepts without warrants to international calls "may have been a political calculation, because it sounds more reassuring."

One indication that the restriction to international communications was dictated by more than legal considerations came at a House hearing last month. Asked whether the president had the authority to order eavesdropping without a warrant on purely domestic communications, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales replied, "I'm not going to rule it out."

Despite the decision to focus on only international calls and e-mail messages, some domestic traffic was inadvertently picked up because of difficulties posed by cellphone and e-mail technology in determining whether a person was on American soil, as The Times reported last year.

And one government official, who had access to intelligence from the intercepts that he said he would discuss only if granted anonymity, believes that some of the purely domestic eavesdropping in the program's early phase was intentional. No other officials have made that claim.

A White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, said Saturday, "N.S.A. has not intentionally listened in on domestic-to-domestic calls without a court order."

President Bush and other officials have denied that the program monitors domestic calls. They have, however, generally stated their comments in the present tense, leaving open the question of whether domestic calls may have been captured before the program's rules were fully established.

After the program started, General Hayden was the one who briefed members of Congress on it and who later tried to dissuade The Times from reporting its existence.

When the newspaper published its first article on the program in December, the general found himself on the defensive. He had often insisted in interviews and public testimony that the N.S.A. always followed laws protecting Americans' privacy. As the program's disclosure provoked an outcry, he had to square those assurances with the fact that the program sidestepped the FISA statute.

Nonetheless, General Hayden took on a prominent role in explaining and defending the program. He appeared at the White House alongside Mr. Gonzales, spoke on television and gave an impassioned speech at the National Press Club in January.

Some of the program's critics have found his visibility in defending a controversial presidential policy inappropriate for an intelligence professional. "There's some unhappiness at N.S.A. with Hayden taking such an upfront role," said Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian and former N.S.A. analyst who keeps in touch with some employees. "If the White House got them into this, why is Hayden the one taking the flak?"

But General Hayden seems determined to stand up for the agency's conduct — and his own. In the press club speech, General Hayden recounted remarks he made to N.S.A. employees two days after the Sept. 11 attacks: "We are going to keep America free by making Americans feel safe again."

He said that the standards for what represented a "reasonable" intrusion into Americans' privacy had changed "as smoke billowed from two American cities and a Pennsylvania farm field."

"We acted accordingly," he said.

In the speech, General Hayden hinted at the internal discussion of the proper limits of the N.S.A. program. Although he did not mention Mr. Cheney or his staff, he said the decision to limit the eavesdropping to international phone calls and e-mail messages was "one of the decisions that had been made collectively."

"Certainly, I personally support it," General Hayden said.

President Defends Pick

WASHINGTON, May 13 (Bloomberg News) — In his weekly radio address on Saturday, President Bush defended the qualifications of General Hayden to be C.I.A. director and sought to ease concern about the domestic eavesdropping program that the general helped create.

In General Hayden, "the men and women of the C.I.A. will have a strong leader who will support them as they work to disrupt terrorist attacks, penetrate closed societies and gain information that is vital to protecting our nation," Mr. Bush said.

He urged the Senate to confirm the general "promptly."

    Cheney Pushed U.S. to Widen Eavesdropping, NYT, 14.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/washington/14nsa.html?hp&ex=1147665600&en=8d6b912ef955133b&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Details of Two Surveillance Programs

May 14, 2006
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Two related National Security Agency surveillance programs begun after the Sept. 11 attacks have provoked legal controversy because the agency does not seek court warrants for their operation.

In the domestic eavesdropping program, the N.S.A. listens in on phone calls and reads e-mail messages to and from Americans and others in the United States who the agency believes may be linked to Al Qaeda. Only international communications — those into and out of the country — are monitored, according to administration officials. Until late 2001, the N.S.A. focused on only the foreign end of such conversations; if it decided someone in the United States was of intelligence interest, it had to get a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Now such warrants are sought only for communications between two people who are both in the United States.

In the telephone record data-mining program, the N.S.A. has obtained from at least three phone companies the records of all calls — domestic and international — showing the phone numbers on both ends of each conversation, and its date, time, duration and other details. The records do not include the contents of any call or e-mail message and do not include personal data like credit card numbers and home addresses, officials say.

Security agency employees perform computer analysis in an effort to identify possible associates of terror suspects.

    Details of Two Surveillance Programs, NYT, 14.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/washington/14nsabox.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

                                                                                                                                                                      Langley, We Have a Problem        NYT        14.5.2006
                                                                                                                                                                http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/weekinreview/14weiner.html

Fading Fast

Langley, We Have a Problem

May 14, 2006
The New York Times
By TIM WEINER

THE men who dreamed up the Central Intelligence Agency 60 years ago had one idea in mind: to pull together all the information the United States could gather about the rest of the world, analyze it, and present it to the president. They would produce strategic intelligence — the big picture of the intentions and abilities of America's enemies — to prevent the next Pearl Harbor.

They founded a small, weak, unfocused organization, scattered around Washington in shoddy barracks and outbuildings. They set out to know the world. During the cold war, the C.I.A. built an empire of intelligence. But now it finds itself back where it began. The question now at hand is whether the world's most famous intelligence service is ready for the wrecking ball.

The Pentagon always hated the idea of an independent civilian intelligence service. But the founders of the national security system after World War II thought it wise to have civilians, rather than the military, gathering and analyzing foreign intelligence to aid diplomats and soldiers, balancing the Pentagon's mandate to prepare for war.

Now the battle begins over whether the C.I.A. will continue to be the central source of intelligence analysis. If the agency's analytic heart is transplanted, as some propose, the C.I.A. of old will cease to be. The mission for which it was created could be lost. Would it matter? It might matter enormously. These civilians are supposed to warn the White House of mortal threats from afar, and ripping apart their offices might make a hard job only harder.

The greatest problem in the eyes of some C.I.A. and other intelligence officials who served before and after 9/11 is that the agency can no longer produce strategic intelligence. It can no longer advise the president on the wisest ways to use military and diplomatic force. Its ability to see over the horizon has dwindled until its thousands of analysts can't see past the end of their desks.

The big picture has been bumped by spot news. Strategic intelligence is the power to know your enemies' intentions. Spot news is what happened last night in Waziristan. Drowned by demands from the White House and the Pentagon for instant information, "intelligence analysts end up being the Wikipedia of Washington," John McLaughlin, the deputy director and acting director of central intelligence from October 2000 to September 2004, said in an interview.

Carl W. Ford Jr., assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research from May 2001 to October 2003, argues that it's worse than that. "We haven't done strategic intelligence for so long that most of our analysts don't know how to do it anymore," he said.

"When we routinely fail to produce the new knowledge policy makers desperately need," Mr. Ford added, "they lose confidence in us. Who can blame them? Smart guesses aren't worth spit."

Gen. Michael V. Hayden is going to have to answer for a lot when he faces confirmation hearings in the Senate, set to begin Thursday, on his nomination as the next chief of the C.I.A. Much of his public testimony may be consumed by questions on his role in domestic-surveillance operations as director of the National Security Agency. But the argument is really over whether he wants the C.I.A. to be central to national security or merely a second-echelon support service for the Pentagon.

Once upon a time in the cold war, the C.I.A. could produce strategic intelligence. It countered the Pentagon's wildly overstated estimates of Soviet military power. It cautioned that the war in Vietnam could not be won by military force. It helped keep the cold war cold.

"You need to have a civilian check on the military in American society," said Richard L. Russell, a decorated C.I.A. analyst who now teaches senior diplomats and military officers at the National Defense University. "It's healthy for the president to have a second opinion on military affairs."

Now the same lawmakers who created the new bureaucratic behemoth that governs American intelligence voice nervousness about a four-star general taking over the C.I.A. They fear the civilian analysts will wind up being a military staff.

But in truth, that is already happening. The agency is becoming "a battlefield combat support agency," Mr. Russell said. C.I.A. officers in Baghdad and at headquarters are pinned down answering daily tactical questions of the military: How strong is that bridge? How wide is that road?

Those are not the big strategic questions: How can the United States drain the swamp that breeds terrorism instead of killing snakes? What are the bricks and mortar for building democratic institutions in undemocratic states? Those questions are unanswered. "The C.I.A. becomes so consumed by the current crisis that it can't anticipate the next one," Mr. Russell said. "It becomes so balkanized that it becomes blinkered. Everyone's looking at their blades of grass and nobody's surveying the forest."

How is it possible that the $40-billion-a-year empire of American intelligence cannot think ahead?

It started 20 years ago, when the C.I.A. confronted the culture of CNN. Instant news spawned instant analysis and suffocated deep thought. "A number of intelligence officials have lamented that the practice of strategic intelligence has eroded" in "an emerging information age of instant news bites," Douglas MacEachin, the C.I.A.'s deputy director for intelligence from 1993 to 1995, wrote last year.

Then, when the Soviet Union began to break up, so did the agency's expertise in long-range thinking. Over a decade starting in 1987, a third of its analysts departed. The best left first; the loss of knowledge and experience was greater than mere numbers.

"They just don't have substantive experts," Mr. Russell said. "Name five C.I.A. experts on anything. I can't do it."

The solution posed by President Bush after his re-election was to increase the agency's ranks by 50 percent. But it takes five to seven years to hire and train intelligence officers. And a hiring binge was no answer for the lack of strategic intelligence, said Mr. Ford, who held senior posts at the C.I.A. and Pentagon during a 38-year career.

Without fundamental changes in the ways American intelligence is analyzed and reported, Mr. Ford said, "we will continue to turn out the $40 billion pile of fluff we have become famous for."

"What we don't need is more money and people, at least not for now," he said. "Give us $20 billion more a year and we will give you just that much more fluff."

The analysts never see 95 percent of the intelligence that the United States collects. Mr. McLaughlin, the former deputy director of central intelligence, proposes to let them see it by inventing a kind of secret Google; creating it would require an effort of the order of the Manhattan Project, he said, but it would be worth it.

Mr. Ford agreed: "Why spend $40 billion a year to store data on hard discs that analysts can't get to? We probably use 5 percent of the data we collect on a daily basis. If we got to 15 percent it would revolutionize intelligence." What happens when the C.I.A. fails to deliver the big picture was made clear by last year's presidential commission on weapons of mass destruction. How did the C.I.A. manage to report falsely that Iraq had a nuclear-bomb program, biological weapons, mobile biowarfare labs and huge stockpiles of chemical weapons?

One great problem was an inability to ask the right questions. How had the Iraqi Army changed over the past decade? Might Saddam Hussein want to deceive his foreign and domestic enemies into thinking he had a doomsday arsenal? The right answers might have revealed that there was no such arsenal. That was a failure of strategic thinking and strategic intelligence.

"I can't believe that as a nation we are incapable of doing this right," said Henry S. Rowen, a member of the W.M.D. commission and a former senior official at the Pentagon and at C.I.A. headquarters. "A lot of strategic intelligence is not secret. It's out there. You better have some people who understand history. Instead, they've gotten sucked into the current-intelligence business, which is death. It's death to knowing what's going on."

The problem really is a matter of life and death: war is the ultimate intelligence failure. "We think intelligence is important to win wars," said David Kay, whom the C.I.A. sent on a futile mission to find the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. "What intelligence really does when it is working well is to help avoid wars."

    Langley, We Have a Problem, NYT, 14.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/weekinreview/14weiner.html

Little-known spy agency keeps watch on U.S. soil

Posted 5/13/2006 4:10 AM ET
By Katherine Shrader, Associated Press Writer
USA Today

WASHINGTON — A little-known spy agency that analyzes imagery taken from the skies has been spending significantly more time watching U.S. soil.
In an era when other intelligence agencies try to hide those operations, the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, is proud of that domestic mission.

He said the work the agency did after hurricanes Rita and Katrina was the best he'd seen an intelligence agency do in his 42 years in the spy business.

"This was kind of a direct payback to the taxpayers for the investment made in this agency over the years, even though in its original design it was intended for foreign intelligence purposes," Clapper said in a Thursday interview with The Associated Press.

Geospatial intelligence is the science of combining imagery, such as satellite pictures, to physically depict features or activities happening anywhere on the planet. A part of the Defense Department, the NGA usually operates unnoticed to provide information on nuclear sites, terror camps, troop movements or natural disasters.

After last year's hurricanes, the agency had an unusually public face. It set up mobile command centers that sprung out of the backs of Humvees and provided imagery for rescuers and hurricane victims who wanted to know the condition of their homes. Victims would provide their street address and the NGA would provide a satellite photo of their property. In one way or another, some 900 agency officials were involved.

Spy agencies historically avoided domestic operations out of concern for Pentagon regulations and Reagan-era executive order, known as 12333, that restricted intelligence collection on American citizens and companies. Its budget, like all intelligence agencies, is classified.

On Clapper's watch of the last five years, his agency has found ways to expand its mission to help prepare security at Super Bowls and political conventions or deal with natural disasters, such as hurricanes and forest fires.

With help, the agency can also zoom in. Its officials cooperate with private groups, such as hotel security, to get access to footage of a lobby or ballroom. That video can then be linked with mapping and graphical data to help secure events or take action, if a hostage situation or other catastrophe happens.

Privacy advocates wonder how much the agency picks up — and stores. Many are increasingly skeptical of intelligence agencies with recent revelations about the Bush administration's surveillance on phone calls and e-mails.

Among the government's most closely guarded secrets, the quality of pictures NGA receives from classified satellites is believed to far exceed the one-meter resolution available commercially. That means they can take a satellite "snapshot" from high above the atmosphere that is crisply detailed down to one meter level, which is 3.3 feet.

Clapper says his agency only does big pictures, so concerns about using the NGA's foreign intelligence apparatus at home doesn't apply.

"We are not trying to examine an individual dwelling, for example, because what our mission is normally going to be is looking at large areas," he said. "It doesn't really affect or threaten anyone's privacy or civil liberties when you are looking at a large collective area."

When asked what additional powers he'd ask Congress for, he said, "I wouldn't."

His agency also handles its historic mission: regional threats, such as Iran and North Korea; terrorist hideouts; and tracking drug trade. "Everything and everybody has to be some place," he said.

He considers his brand of intelligence a chess match. "There are sophisticated nation states that have a good understanding of our surveillance capabilities," including Iran, he said. "What we have to do is counter that" by taking advantage of anomalies or sending spy planes and satellites over more frequently.

Adversaries who hide their most important facilities underground is a trend the agency has to work at, he said.

NGA was once a stepchild of the intelligence community. But Clapper said it has come into its own and become an equal partner with the other spy agencies, such as the CIA.

Experience-wise, the agency is among the youngest of the spy agencies. About 40% of the agency's analyst have been hired in the last five years.

"They are very inexperienced, and that's just fine. They don't have any baggage," said Clapper, who retires next month as the longest serving agency director. "The people that we are getting now are bright, computer literate. ... That is not something I lie awake and worry about."

    Little-known spy agency keeps watch on U.S. soil, UT, 13.5.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-13-spy-eyes_x.htm

C.I.A. Aide's House and Office Searched

May 13, 2006
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI and DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, May 12 — Federal agents conducted searches on Friday at the office and home of Kyle Foggo, who stepped down this week as the Central Intelligence Agency's third-ranking official.

The searches were part of a widening criminal investigation of possible contracting fraud that has also focused on lawmakers on the House Appropriations Committee.

The searches followed a week of tumult for the C.I.A. that began with the resignation last Friday of its director, Porter J. Goss. Mr. Goss had promoted Mr. Foggo.

Officials say that Mr. Goss had clashed with John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, and that Mr. Negroponte joined with White House officials to force Mr. Goss out of his position.

The searches, including the one at agency headquarters in McLean, Va., were carried out by agents of the F.B.I. and investigators from the Defense Criminal Investigative Service and the Internal Revenue Service, all of which are involved in the inquiry, officials said.

Mr. Foggo announced on Monday that he was stepping down, after it became known that he was under scrutiny by the C.I.A. and federal investigators in the inquiry into the awarding of government contracts. That case has brought a prison term for former Representative Randy Cunningham of California.

Current and former intelligence officials said they could not recall another time in the 59-year history of the agency that a senior official had been involved in a criminal investigation. Intelligence officials said that although Mr. Foggo had resigned as executive director, he remained an agency employee, but without access to headquarters.

The searches were conducted at the request of federal authorities in San Diego, who are pursuing leads in a case that began with the prosecution of Mr. Cunningham, the Republican on the House Appropriations Committee who resigned and pleaded guilty to taking more than $2 million in cash and gifts in return for helping supporters obtain contracts.

Among those identified as a co-conspirator in his plea agreement was Brent Wilkes of San Diego, according to lawyers in the case. Mr. Wilkes was identified, although not by name, as a person whose company had obtained military contracts through Mr. Cunningham's efforts on the defense subcommittee of the Appropriations panel.

Mr. Wilkes has not been charged but has been a subject of months of scrutiny. Lawyers with clients in the case said the searches of Mr. Foggo's house and office were part of an effort by the authorities in San Diego to determine whether Mr. Wilkes had improper dealings with Mr. Foggo. Mr. Wilkes and Mr. Foggo have been close friends from childhood in California, and investigators are also pursuing trips that the two men took together to places like Florida and Hawaii.

Mr. Wilkes's nephew Joel Combs led a company with a multimillion-dollar contract to provide bottled water for the C.I.A. in Iraq, a contract reissued through a local company to disguise the agency's role.

A spokeswoman for the F.B.I. office in San Diego, April Langwell, said Mr. Foggo's house and office had been searched under a sealed warrant. Senior officials at the intelligence agency were notified of the search shortly before agents carried it out, a spokeswoman for the agency, Jennifer Dyck, said.

Intelligence officials have said Mr. Goss asked Mr. Foggo to step down from his post because his association with the corruption scandal had become a distraction and could damage the agency's reputation. Ms. Dyck said that the inquiries about Mr. Foggo had nothing to do with Mr. Goss's decision to resign.

"Absolutely not," she said. "Nothing whatsoever."

Agency officials said Mr. Goss had met Mr. Foggo just once before interviewing him for the No. 3 post.

Mr. Foggo was recommended by staff members whom Mr. Goss, a former representative, had brought with him from the Capitol, current and former intelligence officials said. The officials added that one of the former Congressional aides who recommended Mr. Foggo was Brant G. Bassett, who had been a covert operative for the clandestine service of intelligence agency before working for Mr. Goss on the House Intelligence Committee.

Before ascending to the top tier of the agency, Mr. Foggo had spent more than 20 years as an undercover logistics officer in stations in Central America and Europe.

William G. Hundley, a lawyer here who represents Mr. Foggo, said on Thursday that investigators were looking into at least one contract that Mr. Foggo might have awarded when he ran a logistics base in Frankfurt. The base supports agency operations in the Middle East and Africa.

Mr. Hundley said the contract, with Archer Logistics Inc. of Chantilly, Va., was for supplying bottled water to agency operatives in Iraq. Archer Logistics is run by Mr. Combs, Mr. Wilkes's nephew.

Mr. Hundley did not return calls on Friday for comment.

Searches at the offices and homes of intelligence officials have been carried out in criminal cases, almost always in connection with counterespionage investigations. In two inquiries in the 1990's, investigators searched the offices of Aldrich H. Ames and Harold J. Nicholson, who pleaded guilty to spying.

    C.I.A. Aide's House and Office Searched, NYT, 13.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/13/washington/13foggo.html?hp&ex=1147579200&en=7281a38288fc5cf7&ei=5094&partner=homepage

NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls

Updated 5/11/2006 12:30 AM ET
USA TODAY
By Leslie Cauley

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren't suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.

"It's the largest database ever assembled in the world," said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA's activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency's goal is "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders, this person added.

For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made — across town or across the country — to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.

The three telecommunications companies are working under contract with the NSA, which launched the program in 2001 shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the sources said. The program is aimed at identifying and tracking suspected terrorists, they said.

The sources would talk only under a guarantee of anonymity because the NSA program is secret.

Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, nominated Monday by President Bush to become the director of the CIA, headed the NSA from March 1999 to April 2005. In that post, Hayden would have overseen the agency's domestic call-tracking program. Hayden declined to comment about the program.

The NSA's domestic program, as described by sources, is far more expansive than what the White House has acknowledged. Last year, Bush said he had authorized the NSA to eavesdrop — without warrants — on international calls and international e-mails of people suspected of having links to terrorists when one party to the communication is in the USA. Warrants have also not been used in the NSA's efforts to create a national call database.

In defending the previously disclosed program, Bush insisted that the NSA was focused exclusively on international calls. "In other words," Bush explained, "one end of the communication must be outside the United States."

As a result, domestic call records — those of calls that originate and terminate within U.S. borders — were believed to be private.

Sources, however, say that is not the case. With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans. Customers' names, street addresses and other personal information are not being handed over as part of NSA's domestic program, the sources said. But the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information.

Don Weber, a senior spokesman for the NSA, declined to discuss the agency's operations. "Given the nature of the work we do, it would be irresponsible to comment on actual or alleged operational issues; therefore, we have no information to provide," he said. "However, it is important to note that NSA takes its legal responsibilities seriously and operates within the law."

The White House would not discuss the domestic call-tracking program. "There is no domestic surveillance without court approval," said Dana Perino, deputy press secretary, referring to actual eavesdropping.

She added that all national intelligence activities undertaken by the federal government "are lawful, necessary and required for the pursuit of al-Qaeda and affiliated terrorists." All government-sponsored intelligence activities "are carefully reviewed and monitored," Perino said. She also noted that "all appropriate members of Congress have been briefed on the intelligence efforts of the United States."

The government is collecting "external" data on domestic phone calls but is not intercepting "internals," a term for the actual content of the communication, according to a U.S. intelligence official familiar with the program. This kind of data collection from phone companies is not uncommon; it's been done before, though never on this large a scale, the official said. The data are used for "social network analysis," the official said, meaning to study how terrorist networks contact each other and how they are tied together.

Carriers uniquely positioned

AT&T recently merged with SBC and kept the AT&T name. Verizon, BellSouth and AT&T are the nation's three biggest telecommunications companies; they provide local and wireless phone service to more than 200 million customers.

The three carriers control vast networks with the latest communications technologies. They provide an array of services: local and long-distance calling, wireless and high-speed broadband, including video. Their direct access to millions of homes and businesses has them uniquely positioned to help the government keep tabs on the calling habits of Americans.

Among the big telecommunications companies, only Qwest has refused to help the NSA, the sources said. According to multiple sources, Qwest declined to participate because it was uneasy about the legal implications of handing over customer information to the government without warrants.

Qwest's refusal to participate has left the NSA with a hole in its database. Based in Denver, Qwest provides local phone service to 14 million customers in 14 states in the West and Northwest. But AT&T and Verizon also provide some services — primarily long-distance and wireless — to people who live in Qwest's region. Therefore, they can provide the NSA with at least some access in that area.

Created by President Truman in 1952, during the Korean War, the NSA is charged with protecting the United States from foreign security threats. The agency was considered so secret that for years the government refused to even confirm its existence. Government insiders used to joke that NSA stood for "No Such Agency."

In 1975, a congressional investigation revealed that the NSA had been intercepting, without warrants, international communications for more than 20 years at the behest of the CIA and other agencies. The spy campaign, code-named "Shamrock," led to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was designed to protect Americans from illegal eavesdropping.

Enacted in 1978, FISA lays out procedures that the U.S. government must follow to conduct electronic surveillance and physical searches of people believed to be engaged in espionage or international terrorism against the United States. A special court, which has 11 members, is responsible for adjudicating requests under FISA.

Over the years, NSA code-cracking techniques have continued to improve along with technology. The agency today is considered expert in the practice of "data mining" — sifting through reams of information in search of patterns. Data mining is just one of many tools NSA analysts and mathematicians use to crack codes and track international communications.

Paul Butler, a former U.S. prosecutor who specialized in terrorism crimes, said FISA approval generally isn't necessary for government data-mining operations. "FISA does not prohibit the government from doing data mining," said Butler, now a partner with the law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in Washington, D.C.

The caveat, he said, is that "personal identifiers" — such as names, Social Security numbers and street addresses — can't be included as part of the search. "That requires an additional level of probable cause," he said.

The usefulness of the NSA's domestic phone-call database as a counterterrorism tool is unclear. Also unclear is whether the database has been used for other purposes.

The NSA's domestic program raises legal questions. Historically, AT&T and the regional phone companies have required law enforcement agencies to present a court order before they would even consider turning over a customer's calling data. Part of that owed to the personality of the old Bell Telephone System, out of which those companies grew.

Ma Bell's bedrock principle — protection of the customer — guided the company for decades, said Gene Kimmelman, senior public policy director of Consumers Union. "No court order, no customer information — period. That's how it was for decades," he said.

The concern for the customer was also based on law: Under Section 222 of the Communications Act, first passed in 1934, telephone companies are prohibited from giving out information regarding their customers' calling habits: whom a person calls, how often and what routes those calls take to reach their final destination. Inbound calls, as well as wireless calls, also are covered.

The financial penalties for violating Section 222, one of many privacy reinforcements that have been added to the law over the years, can be stiff. The Federal Communications Commission, the nation's top telecommunications regulatory agency, can levy fines of up to $130,000 per day per violation, with a cap of $1.325 million per violation. The FCC has no hard definition of "violation." In practice, that means a single "violation" could cover one customer or 1 million.

In the case of the NSA's international call-tracking program, Bush signed an executive order allowing the NSA to engage in eavesdropping without a warrant. The president and his representatives have since argued that an executive order was sufficient for the agency to proceed. Some civil liberties groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, disagree.

Companies approached

The NSA's domestic program began soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the sources. Right around that time, they said, NSA representatives approached the nation's biggest telecommunications companies. The agency made an urgent pitch: National security is at risk, and we need your help to protect the country from attacks.

The agency told the companies that it wanted them to turn over their "call-detail records," a complete listing of the calling histories of their millions of customers. In addition, the NSA wanted the carriers to provide updates, which would enable the agency to keep tabs on the nation's calling habits.

The sources said the NSA made clear that it was willing to pay for the cooperation. AT&T, which at the time was headed by C. Michael Armstrong, agreed to help the NSA. So did BellSouth, headed by F. Duane Ackerman; SBC, headed by Ed Whitacre; and Verizon, headed by Ivan Seidenberg.

With that, the NSA's domestic program began in earnest.

AT&T, when asked about the program, replied with a comment prepared for USA TODAY: "We do not comment on matters of national security, except to say that we only assist law enforcement and government agencies charged with protecting national security in strict accordance with the law."

In another prepared comment, BellSouth said: "BellSouth does not provide any confidential customer information to the NSA or any governmental agency without proper legal authority."

Verizon, the USA's No. 2 telecommunications company behind AT&T, gave this statement: "We do not comment on national security matters, we act in full compliance with the law and we are committed to safeguarding our customers' privacy."

Qwest spokesman Robert Charlton said: "We can't talk about this. It's a classified situation."

In December, The New York Times revealed that Bush had authorized the NSA to wiretap, without warrants, international phone calls and e-mails that travel to or from the USA. The following month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group, filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T. The lawsuit accuses the company of helping the NSA spy on U.S. phone customers.

Last month, U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales alluded to that possibility. Appearing at a House Judiciary Committee hearing, Gonzales was asked whether he thought the White House has the legal authority to monitor domestic traffic without a warrant. Gonzales' reply: "I wouldn't rule it out." His comment marked the first time a Bush appointee publicly asserted that the White House might have that authority.

Similarities in programs

The domestic and international call-tracking programs have things in common, according to the sources. Both are being conducted without warrants and without the approval of the FISA court. The Bush administration has argued that FISA's procedures are too slow in some cases. Officials, including Gonzales, also make the case that the USA Patriot Act gives them broad authority to protect the safety of the nation's citizens.

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., would not confirm the existence of the program. In a statement, he said, "I can say generally, however, that our subcommittee has been fully briefed on all aspects of the Terrorist Surveillance Program. ... I remain convinced that the program authorized by the president is lawful and absolutely necessary to protect this nation from future attacks."

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., declined to comment.

One company differs

One major telecommunications company declined to participate in the program: Qwest.

According to sources familiar with the events, Qwest's CEO at the time, Joe Nacchio, was deeply troubled by the NSA's assertion that Qwest didn't need a court order — or approval under FISA — to proceed. Adding to the tension, Qwest was unclear about who, exactly, would have access to its customers' information and how that information might be used.

Financial implications were also a concern, the sources said. Carriers that illegally divulge calling information can be subjected to heavy fines. The NSA was asking Qwest to turn over millions of records. The fines, in the aggregate, could have been substantial.

The NSA told Qwest that other government agencies, including the FBI, CIA and DEA, also might have access to the database, the sources said. As a matter of practice, the NSA regularly shares its information — known as "product" in intelligence circles — with other intelligence groups. Even so, Qwest's lawyers were troubled by the expansiveness of the NSA request, the sources said.

The NSA, which needed Qwest's participation to completely cover the country, pushed back hard.

Trying to put pressure on Qwest, NSA representatives pointedly told Qwest that it was the lone holdout among the big telecommunications companies. It also tried appealing to Qwest's patriotic side: In one meeting, an NSA representative suggested that Qwest's refusal to contribute to the database could compromise national security, one person recalled.

In addition, the agency suggested that Qwest's foot-dragging might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government. Like other big telecommunications companies, Qwest already had classified contracts and hoped to get more.

Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest's lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.

The NSA's explanation did little to satisfy Qwest's lawyers. "They told (Qwest) they didn't want to do that because FISA might not agree with them," one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest's suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general's office. A second person confirmed this version of events.

In June 2002, Nacchio resigned amid allegations that he had misled investors about Qwest's financial health. But Qwest's legal questions about the NSA request remained.

Unable to reach agreement, Nacchio's successor, Richard Notebaert, finally pulled the plug on the NSA talks in late 2004, the sources said.

Contributing: John Diamond

    NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls, UT, 11.5.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm

Questions and answers about the NSA phone record collection program

Updated 5/11/2006 12:31 AM ET
USA Today

The National Security Agency has been collecting domestic calling records from major telecommunications companies, sources told USA TODAY. Answers to some questions about the program, as described by those sources:

Q: Does the NSA's domestic program mean that my calling records have been secretly collected?

A: In all likelihood, yes. The NSA collected the records of billions of domestic calls. Those include calls from home phones and wireless phones.

Q: Does that mean people listened to my conversations?

A: Eavesdropping is not part of this program.

Q: What was the NSA doing?

A: The NSA collected "call-detail" records. That's telephone industry lingo for the numbers being dialed. Phone customers' names, addresses and other personal information are not being collected as part of this program. The agency, however, has the means to assemble that sort of information, if it so chooses.

Q: When did this start?

A: After the Sept. 11 attacks.

Q: Can I find out if my call records were collected?

A: No. The NSA's work is secret, and the agency won't publicly discuss its operations.

Q: Why did they do this?

A: The agency won't say officially. But sources say it was a way to identify, and monitor, people suspected of terrorist activities.

Q: But I'm not calling terrorists. Why do they need my calls?

A: By cross-checking a vast database of phone calling records, NSA experts can try to pick out patterns that help identify people involved in terrorism.

Q: How is this different from the other NSA programs?

A: NSA programs have historically focused on international communications. In December, The New York Times disclosed that President Bush had authorized the NSA to eavesdrop — without warrants — on international phone calls to and from the USA. The call-collecting program is focused on domestic calls, those that originate and terminate within U.S. borders.

Q: Is this legal?

A: That will be a matter of debate. In the past, law enforcement officials had to obtain a court warrant before getting calling records. Telecommunications law assesses hefty fines on phone companies that violate customer privacy by divulging such records without warrants. But in discussing the eavesdropping program last December, Bush said he has the authority to order the NSA to get information without court warrants.

Q: Who has access to my records?

A: Unclear. The NSA routinely provides its analysis and other cryptological work to the Pentagon and other government agencies.

Contributing: Leslie Cauley

    Questions and answers about the NSA phone record collection program, UT, 11.5.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa-qna_x.htm

 

Clash Foreseen Between C.I.A. and Pentagon

May 10, 2006
The New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, May 9 — President Bush's selection of Gen. Michael V. Hayden to be the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency sets the stage for new wrangling with the Pentagon, which is rapidly expanding its own global spying and terrorist-tracking operations, both long considered C.I.A. roles.

Overseeing Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's drive to broaden the military's clandestine reconnaissance and man-hunting missions is Stephen A. Cambone, the Pentagon's intelligence czar and one of Mr. Rumsfeld's most trusted aides, whose low public profile masks his influence as one of the nation's most powerful intelligence officials.

Since his office was created three years ago, Mr. Cambone and his deputy, Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, a former commander of the Army's elite Delta Force, have carried out a wide-ranging restructuring of the Pentagon's sprawling intelligence bureaucracy.

The C.I.A. has the lead role in managing "human intelligence," or spying in the government. Whether by design or circumstance, though, much of the growth in the military's spy missions has come in the Special Operations Command, which reports to Mr. Rumsfeld and falls outside the orbit controlled by John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence.

In one of the boldest new missions, the Pentagon has sharply increased the number of clandestine teams of Defense Intelligence Agency personnel and Special Operations forces conducting secret counterterrorism missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and other foreign countries. Using a broad definition of its current authority to conduct "traditional military activities" and "prepare the battlefield," the Pentagon has dispatched teams to gather information about potential foes well before any shooting starts.

In an effort to enhance military interrogations, Mr. Cambone is also overseeing the politically sensitive task of rewriting the Army's field manual. Just last week, he and other top Pentagon officials briefed senior senators on a Pentagon proposal to have one set of interrogation techniques for enemy prisoners of war and another, presumably more coercive, set for the suspected terrorists imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, said Senate aides, who were granted anonymity because the discussions were confidential.

At the Pentagon Tuesday, Mr. Rumsfeld voiced support for General Hayden's nomination and dismissed any reported rivalries with his intelligence brethren as "theoretical conspiracies" that were "all off the mark." He added, "There's no power play taking place in Washington."

Some of the Pentagon's new initiatives have been previously disclosed. But in interviews, more than two dozen officials from intelligence agencies, the Defense Department and Congress provided new details of what they described as a strong effort by the Pentagon to assert a much broader role in the clandestine world of intelligence.

Mr. Cambone insisted that the Pentagon was working closely with the C.I.A. and Mr. Negroponte's office, saying that he held a 20-minute conference call with officials from a dozen intelligence agencies every Tuesday and Thursday morning. But Mr. Cambone said the military's thirst for information to help soldiers on the ground after the Sept. 11 attacks had fueled the Pentagon's intelligence-gathering expansion, particularly against shadowy terrorist cells.

"There's a lot more to do today than on Sept. 10," Mr. Cambone said in an interview in his office last Friday, just before Mr. Bush's announcement. "The department has taken the responsibility to better prepare itself and to be prepared to operate in environments we encounter. Is that different than in the past? I think the difference is more the amount of activity as opposed to the activity itself."

The Pentagon has always been a behemoth in the intelligence world, largely because it controlled agencies with multibillion-dollar budgets like the National Security Agency and National Reconnaissance Office that are responsible for eavesdropping and satellites. What is different now is that the Pentagon is pushing deeper into human intelligence.

The C.I.A. has always been a much smaller organization than the Pentagon that served both the military and senior policy makers in Washington, including the president. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Pentagon felt it had to step in to fulfill many of its own additional intelligence needs that the C.I.A. could not.

This activity has stirred criticism from some lawmakers who express concern that the Pentagon is creating a parallel intelligence-gathering network independent from the C.I.A. or other American authorities, and one that encroaches on the C.I.A.'s realm.

"I still harbor concerns that some things are being done under the rubric of preparing the battlefield that I'd consider to be intelligence-collection activities, are being run separately and are feeding a planning apparatus that's not well understood by Congress," said Representative Jane Harman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

General Hayden, while seeking to play down any turf war with the Pentagon, acknowledged some skirmishes over staff. The new law creating Mr. Negroponte's job gave the director the authority to transfer personnel from individual intelligence agencies into joint centers or other agencies to speed the integration of the civilian and military intelligence communities. But Mr. Rumsfeld made that process more difficult, some lawmakers said, by issuing a directive last November that required "the concurrence" of Mr. Cambone before any transfers could take place.

General Hayden said in a telephone interview last Thursday that while the Pentagon adopted every one of his suggested changes to the 11-page document, the timing of its release just a few months after Mr. Negroponte's office was established "created a horrible optic." On the personnel issue, General Hayden acknowledged that "there is genuine overlap" that will have to be resolved "one step at a time."

Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who played a chief role in writing the intelligence overhaul, criticized the directive as a Department of Defense power grab. "The issuance of the directive sent exactly the wrong signal," Ms. Collins said.

She said it implied a questioning of Mr. Negroponte's authority "over those agencies that I find to be contrary to the intent of the legislation," adding, "D.O.D. is very eager to fill any vacuum or even create one, if necessary."

A central figure in how this debate plays out is Mr. Cambone, a 53-year-old native of Highland, N.Y., who as undersecretary of defense for intelligence oversees 130 full-time employees and more than 100 contractors. His office's responsibilities include domestic counterintelligence, long-range threat planning and budgeting for new technologies.

Mr. Cambone emphasized that his office did not collect or analyze intelligence itself; it oversees those who do, assessing the quality of what organizations like the N.S.A. and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency collect and analyze.

Colleagues say that Mr. Cambone, who holds a doctorate in political science from Claremont Graduate School, is a skilled bureaucrat who can dominate a briefing with his mastery of complex subjects but can also rub people the wrong way with what some say is his abrasive style.

"He has a strong personality and can be a lightning rod for controversy," said Barry Blechman, a longtime friend who is a member of the Defense Policy Board.

Mr. Cambone draws much of his influence from the close working relationship he has developed with Mr. Rumsfeld, beginning in the late 1990's when Mr. Cambone served as staff director for independent commissions on space and ballistic missile threats that Mr. Rumsfeld headed when both men were out of government.

Mr. Cambone was at Mr. Rumsfeld's elbow on Sept. 11, taking notes from his boss to look into Iraq's possible role in the attacks. Later, he served in important jobs forming policy and deciding which weapons systems to buy or cancel. "He's Rumsfeld's go-to guy," said Dov S. Zakheim, the Pentagon's comptroller until May 2004.

In a sign of the importance Mr. Rumsfeld places on the intelligence czar position, last December he quietly revamped the civilian line of succession in the Pentagon hierarchy in the event the secretary and deputy secretary died or were incapacitated. He put the undersecretary for intelligence next in line. The secretary of the Army had traditionally been No. 3.

But few issues have stirred the passions of lawmakers and intelligence officials like the Pentagon's expanding clandestine missions.

"The question in my mind is with such a large expansion, are some of these people really qualified?" said W. Patrick Lang, a former head of the Defense Human Intelligence Service.

Since the Afghan war, elite Special Operations forces have worked with C.I.A. counterparts to kill or capture fighters for Al Qaeda or other terrorists. But Mr. Rumsfeld, frustrated with the C.I.A.'s limited resources to provide fresh targets, has pushed the military to develop more of its own intelligence abilities.

Last year, Congress gave the Pentagon important new authority to fight terrorism by authorizing Special Operations forces for the first time to spend $25 million a year through 2007 to pay informants and recruit foreign paramilitary fighters.

The money was requested by the Pentagon and the commander of Special Operations forces as part of a broader effort to make the military less reliant on the C.I.A. In the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Special Operations troops had to wait for the C.I.A. to pay informants and could not always count on timely support, the Pentagon concluded.

General Hayden, who is Mr. Negroponte's deputy and formerly served as head of the N.S.A., is seen by many intelligence officials and lawmakers as independent and forceful enough to lay down markers with the Pentagon. In the interview, General Hayden said it had become more difficult to distinguish between traditional secret intelligence missions carried out by the military and those by the C.I.A.

"There's a blurring of functions here," General Hayden said. "My intent is that we'll work this out on a case by case basis."

At the Pentagon, Mr. Cambone said American troops were now more likely to be working with indigenous forces in countries like Iraq or Afghanistan to combat stateless terrorist organizations and needed as much flexibility as possible. "We're lending support of a very different kind than you might have in the past," Mr. Cambone said. "It's a very different world in which you're operating."

    Clash Foreseen Between C.I.A. and Pentagon, NYT, 10.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/10/washington/10cambone.html?_r=1&hp&ex=1147233600&en=b52a9f9aa72db231&ei=5094&partner=homepage&oref=slogin

Republicans Fault a Top Pick to Lead the C.I.A.

May 8, 2006
The New York times
By MARK MAZZETTI and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, May 7 — Senior Republican lawmakers on Sunday criticized the probable choice of Gen. Michael V. Hayden to lead the Central Intelligence Agency, voicing concerns about his ties to a controversial eavesdropping program and about the wisdom of installing a military officer at the civilian spy agency.

In a possible preview of the difficulties that would await General Hayden on Capitol Hill, several Republicans, including some with close ties to the White House, said President Bush should find someone else to run the embattled agency.

"I do believe he is the wrong person, the wrong place, at the wrong time," Representative Peter Hoekstra, a Michigan Republican and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said on "Fox News Sunday."

"We should not have a military person leading a civilian agency at this time," Mr. Hoekstra said.

Several military officers have led the C.I.A., but Mr. Hoekstra said it would be wrong to install one when the agency was fending off efforts by the Pentagon to expand its own spying operations.

Mr. Hoekstra would not directly participate in a debate over General Hayden, because the Senate, not the House, is responsible for confirming the president's nominee.

None of the Republican or Democratic lawmakers who appeared on television on Sunday or who were interviewed separately said directly that they would vote against General Hayden's nomination. He would replace Porter J. Goss, who was forced to resign Friday after repeatedly clashing with John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, over the C.I.A.'s loss of status as the nation's premier spy agency.

But Mr. Hoekstra's remarks, coupled with similar sentiments expressed by leading Senate Republicans, including Pat Roberts, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, suggest that the general might not have an easy ride toward confirmation.

Members of that committee, which will conduct the confirmation hearings, are likely to ask sharp questions, particularly about Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's drive to expand intelligence operations at the Pentagon. By doing that, they could express the concerns of intelligence officials who are constrained by their jobs from speaking out.

The nomination of General Hayden, which is expected to be formally announced by President Bush on Monday, will also almost certainly revive the controversy surrounding the domestic eavesdropping program at the National Security Agency, which he once oversaw.

Critics of the program, including Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, may try to use the nomination to force the White House to provide more information about it.

Some top Republicans, like Senator John McCain of Arizona, praised the choice of General Hayden on Sunday. But others, including two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, echoed Mr. Hoekstra.

Senator Saxby Chambliss, a Georgia Republican and White House ally, said that even if General Hayden were to resign his military commission, he would still face problems being accepted at the spy agency.

"Just resigning commission and moving on, putting on a pin-striped suit versus an Air Force uniform, I don't think makes much difference," Mr. Chambliss said on "This Week" on ABC.

Senator Roberts, of Kansas, praised General Hayden's background but acknowledged that there is "real concern" about a military officer leading the agency.

"I'm not in a position to say that I am for General Hayden and will vote for him," Mr. Roberts said on "Late Edition" on CNN.

One senior administration official, who was granted anonymity because the nomination had not been announced, said it had yet to be determined whether General Hayden would retire from the Air Force.

At the same time, the official echoed Mr. Chambliss's view that the decision was unlikely to affect how General Hayden, now a deputy to Mr. Negroponte, would be received at the agency.

If General Hayden does not retire and earns confirmation, military officers would be in charge of all of the major spy agencies, including the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The choice of General Hayden to lead the C.I.A. means that another military officer, Vice Adm. Albert M. Calland III, now the agency's deputy director, would probably step down, current and former intelligence officials said.

The officials said Admiral Calland's successor was likely to be a veteran of the Directorate of Operations, the agency's clandestine service. General Hayden's background is in satellite intelligence, not human spying, and the officials said it would make sense to install a former clandestine officer as his deputy.

Election-year politics will undoubtedly play a part in the confirmation process. With President Bush's low approval ratings, Republicans may try to distance themselves from the White House and demonstrate their independence by subjecting General Hayden to tougher questioning than past nominees.

Democrats, for their part, will try to use the hearings, which have not been scheduled and will be held in open and closed sessions, to emphasize what they regard as failed intelligence policies.

One Democrat, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, vowed in an interview that General Hayden would not "get a pass" on the eavesdropping issue. He said he intended to use the hearings to try to force the release of a report by the C.I.A. inspector general on the agency's performance before the Sept. 11 attacks.

"These hearings on Hayden are going to be some of the most important that have been held in a long time, because the Congress has been kept in the dark on a handful of issues," said Mr. Wyden, who is on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

"He cannot expect to come to the witness table before our committee and repeat the empty statements the administration has made" about the N.S.A. program, Mr. Wyden said.

Senator Specter, who has spoken out repeatedly against the domestic surveillance program, said he was considering whether to call General Hayden as a witness during a future round of hearings about it.

"I'm going to give some consideration to whether we might be able to bring him before the Judiciary Committee, but it would not be the customary practice," Mr. Specter said in an interview.

Because the committee does not have jurisdiction over General Hayden's confirmation, Mr. Specter said, summoning him as a witness could create difficulty because nominees are typically loath to speak in public outside of their confirmation hearings. "That would require his willingness to come forward, and the administration's willingness to come forward," Mr. Specter said.

The senior Bush administration official said the White House welcomed a public discussion about the N.S.A. program during General Hayden's confirmation hearings.

"We are very comfortable having a debate on that issue," the official said. "We feel that there is no more qualified person to defend this program."

David E. Sanger contributed reporting for this article.

    Republicans Fault a Top Pick to Lead the C.I.A., NYT, 8.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/08/washington/08cia.html?hp&ex=1147147200&en=280b24c1d7f4c737&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Dodging Perils on Way to Top of Spy Game

May 8, 2006
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

Since joining the ranks of America's top spies seven years ago, Gen. Michael V. Hayden has weathered intelligence catastrophes and controversies that might easily have ended his career: the Sept. 11 attacks, erroneous reporting on Iraqi weapons and domestic surveillance without court warrants — all on his watch at the National Security Agency.

Instead, General Hayden's brainy command of facts and just-folks style of delivering them have made him not just a survivor, but the man the Bush administration turns to for solutions to its most difficult problems at the intelligence agencies.

General Hayden, 61, of the Air Force, whom President Bush is expected to nominate today as the next director of the battered Central Intelligence Agency, has won such trust in part through his mastery of an intimate Washington institution: the intelligence briefing.

As director of the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2005 and top deputy for the past year to John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, General Hayden has again and again been called on to explain to top administration officials and members of Congress just what American wiretaps, spies and satellites show about the threats afoot in the world.

"Here we have a man who everybody says is one of the best briefers that they've ever had on intelligence," Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said yesterday on CNN, "a man who has been described by people on both sides of the aisle as probably knowing more about intelligence than anybody else."

General Hayden is also widely credited with wrestling the N.S.A., which intercepts foreign communications and is the largest American spy agency, from its cold war focus on the Soviet threat to the contemporary menace of terrorism.

He won generally high marks at the N.S.A., though he has acknowledged that the agency deserves some blame for the Sept. 11 and Iraq weapons failures. He also admitted to Congress last year the failings of his ambitious program to upgrade the N.S.A.'s technology, known as Trailblazer, which by all accounts has cost billions for meager results.

"He had to get past a lot of dinosaurs at N.S.A., and he did it," said Chuck Boyd, a retired Air Force general and onetime mentor to General Hayden, now president of a Washington nonprofit group, Business Executives for National Security. "If you want to repair the health of the C.I.A., you need an extraordinary individual. There's simply no one else who's remotely as qualified."

Yet some believe that the very trust that General Hayden has won from Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney raises a cautionary note about him as head of the C.I.A.

"You need someone who will stand up to pressure from the president," said James Bamford, author of two books on the N.S.A., whose once-admiring view of General Hayden has been darkened since the revelation in December that he authorized eavesdropping in the United States without court warrants.

"Instead, he's shown he's willing to throw out his own principles on civil liberties to please the president," said Mr. Bamford, who has joined an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against the N.S.A. program.

General Hayden has aggressively defended the N.S.A. program, saying on Fox News in February, "This isn't a drift net over Lackawanna or Fremont or Dearborn," he said, referring to American cities with large Muslim populations. "This is focused on Al Qaeda."

If General Hayden survives what could be a grueling confirmation hearing, he would arrive as a distinct outsider at a C.I.A. badly bruised by major intelligence failures, drained of many experienced officers and shaken by internal investigations.

During a varied career, General Hayden served in senior intelligence jobs in Germany during the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, in South Korea and at the Pentagon. He worked on the National Security Council with Condoleezza Rice, now the secretary of state, under the first President Bush.

Yet General Hayden would start the job with almost no direct experience at the C.I.A.'s central task of recruiting and running foreign agents, the closest analogy being his two years in the 1980's trolling for military insights into the Warsaw Pact as air attaché in the American Embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria.

As a military officer, he would have to convince the civilian spies that he was not part of a Pentagon plot to take over their agency. And as the principal deputy director of national intelligence, he would very likely be viewed as representing the new central bureaucracy that is resented at the C.I.A. for downgrading the agency's importance.

That is a remarkable irony of General Hayden's expected nomination to succeed Porter J. Goss, who announced his resignation on Friday, said Mark M. Lowenthal, an assistant director of the C.I.A. from 2002 to 2005. He said Mr. Negroponte had discovered that he could not perform his dual role of advising the president on intelligence and overseeing all 16 intelligence agencies without more direct control of the formidable assets of the C.I.A. — precisely the advantage enjoyed by the old director of central intelligence, the title abolished when the director of national intelligence job was created last year.

Mr. Lowenthal called General Hayden "immensely talented" and said he thought he would win over C.I.A. employees with the strength of his ideas. One that he called "breathtaking," from General Hayden's years at the N.S.A., was the creation of GeoCell, a program in which the agency's eavesdroppers work side by side with the satellite imagery experts of the National Geospatial-Imagery Agency, so that, for example, a terrorist making a phone call can be instantly located in a building halfway around the world.

"In the war on terrorism, that is really critical," Mr. Lowenthal said. "GeoCell is a tremendous innovation."

Mr. Boyd, the retired Air Force general, said C.I.A. civilians would be mistaken if they took General Hayden for an agent of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. On the contrary, he said, General Hayden defied Mr. Rumsfeld in 2004 by telling Congress he thought the N.S.A. director should report to the director of national intelligence and not to the defense secretary.

"Rumsfeld put a lot of pressure on him, and he did not succumb," Mr. Boyd said.

Mr. Boyd said he first noticed General Hayden, then a lieutenant colonel, in 1988. Mr. Boyd was director of plans for the Air Force and "read a lot of staff papers."

"I kept seeing papers from one officer that seemed to have real clarity of thought and persuasive arguments that I thought were extraordinary," he recalled. "I said, 'Bring this guy to me. I want to meet him.' "

Mr. Boyd said he later attributed General Hayden's writing and reasoning ability to his Roman Catholic education in Pittsburgh parochial schools and at Duquesne University.

The son of a welder and brother of a truck driver, General Hayden returns often to Pittsburgh. His no-nonsense, working-class roots seem reflected in a personable manner and knack for bringing arcane subjects down to earth.

In a February speech to an Air Force audience, General Hayden reflected on the epochal shift in intelligence targets from the big, powerful military targets of the cold war to the more elusive quarry of Al Qaeda.

He spoke almost nostalgically of old adversaries like Soviet forces in Germany.

"Remember those?" he said. "I miss those days. Those enemies were easy to find, hard to finish."

He continued, "Now, look at the targets of today, whether it's some idiot in a cave in Waziristan or rather small W.M.D. production facilities. They're easy to finish. They're just damn hard to find."

    Dodging Perils on Way to Top of Spy Game, NYT, 8.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/08/washington/08hayden.html

Exit of C.I.A. Chief Viewed as Move to Recast Agency

May 7, 2006
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, May 6 — The choice of Gen. Michael V. Hayden of the Air Force as the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency is only a first step in a planned overhaul to permanently change the mission and functions of the legendary spy agency, intelligence officials said Saturday.

Porter J. Goss, who was forced to resign Friday, was seen as an obstacle to an effort by John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, to focus the agency on its core mission of fighting terrorism and stealing secrets abroad. General Hayden, who will be nominated to the post on Monday, is currently Mr. Negroponte's deputy, and he is regarded as an enthusiastic champion of the agency's adoption of that narrower role.

A senior intelligence official said that General Hayden, in a recent presentation to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, had sharply criticized Mr. Goss for resisting the transformation. Mr. Goss was seen as trying to protect the C.I.A.'s longtime role as the government's premier center for intelligence analysis, but under General Hayden, much of that function would probably move elsewhere.

"There will be a serious change to the structure of the agency," one intelligence official said. That person and others from intelligence agencies and the Bush administration were granted anonymity for this article because they are not allowed to speak publicly about intelligence matters.

Even as it turns its focus to intelligence collection, through the spying operations overseas that are run by the C.I.A.'s new national clandestine service, the C.I.A. faces a challenge from the Defense Department, which is expanding its own spying operations abroad.

General Hayden has spent his career in the military, but his relationship with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has never been close. A Bush administration official said on Saturday that General Hayden was selected, in part, because he had demonstrated an ability to set aside a parochial military mind-set and look at the broader picture.

Mr. Negroponte himself has had a difficult year trying to bring the Pentagon's vast intelligence operations under his control. Historically, the Pentagon has controlled more than 80 percent of the nation's intelligence budget.

The administration official said that President Bush had also chosen General Hayden, a former director of the National Security Agency, in part because of his success in running a large, complex organization. The official said Mr. Bush also believed that General Hayden would improve morale at the C.I.A., which has plummeted under Mr. Goss, who was regarded within the White House and the agency as an ineffectual leader.

As he leaves the agency, Mr. Goss is widely expected to be joined by other members of his inner circle, many of whom he took with him to the C.I.A. from Capitol Hill. Kyle Foggo, a longtime agency officer whom Mr. Goss elevated to the agency's No. 3 job, plans to resign in the coming days, a senior intelligence official said Saturday.

Mr. Foggo is a longtime friend of Brent R. Wilkes, one of the military contractors mentioned in the indictment of Randy Cunningham, a former Republican congressman from California. Mr. Foggo's ties to Mr. Wilkes have been investigated by the C.I.A.'s inspector general.

Besides the personnel changes, General Hayden will inherit an agency in some disarray if he is confirmed, a process likely to involve a public review of his role in domestic electronic surveillance as the N.S.A. director.

General Hayden would bring political influence that might be welcomed by the battered managers of the C.I.A., but some officers might resent him as an outsider, a military man and a representative of Mr. Negroponte, according to former agency officials. General Hayden would face the aftermath of a long list of problems that marked Mr. Goss's brief tenure.

Mr. Goss's team of brash former Congressional staffers stirred bitter resentment, and the C.I.A. director found himself cast as second fiddle to Mr. Negroponte. The Valerie Wilson leak investigation strained relations with the White House.

The agency's role in the secret detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists led to charges of misconduct. Leaks prompted Mr. Goss to start an internal campaign of polygraph examinations that resulted in the dismissal of a senior agency official.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Goss, Jennifer Dyck, defended his performance. "Director Goss is going to leave an agency that has bigger graduation classes of new officers than any other time in history," Ms. Dyck said. "There are more résumés coming to C.I.A., better recruiting and better training of operatives."

When Mr. Goss took charge of the C.I.A. in the fall of 2004, he himself talked about focusing the agency's work on its core mission of spying. Mr. Goss is a clandestine officer, and intelligence officials said he had used his tenure to strengthen the agency's operations abroad, partly by opening new stations and bases.

More recently, however, Mr. Goss has defended the agency's analytical work against what some at the C.I.A. saw as encroachment by Mr. Negroponte's staff, including the National Intelligence Council, and by the new National Counterterrorism Center, which is the government's lead agency in assessing the terrorist threat.

In recent months, intelligence officials said on Saturday, Mr. Goss fought an effort by Mr. Negroponte to transfer analysts from the agency's Counter Terrorism Center to the new organization. Mr. Goss said in a speech last September to C.I.A. employees that "analysis is the engine that drives the C.I.A."

The clashes over the agency's priorities were among the reasons that Mr. Goss finally lost the support of Mr. Negroponte and the White House, the officials said.

A spokesman for General Hayden, Carl Kropf, declined to comment about reports of his criticism of Mr. Goss, in the recent presentation to the president's intelligence advisory board.

Under General Hayden, the C.I.A. is expected to maintain a large staff of intelligence analysts, the officials said. But their role is likely to be diminished, with the primary task of supporting the agency's spying operations rather than producing broad intelligence assessments for policymakers.

Scott Shane and Elisabeth Bumiller contributed reporting for this article.

    Exit of C.I.A. Chief Viewed as Move to Recast Agency, NYT, 7.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/washington/07goss.html?hp&ex=1147060800&en=9753e8d7ab86d2c8&ei=5094&partner=homepage

A Long Legacy of Frustration at C.I.A. Helm

May 7, 2006
The New York Times
By TIM WEINER

When Porter J. Goss resigned on Friday as director of the C.I.A., he found himself in good company. In one way or another, the job of C.I.A. chief has confounded nearly every man who has held it.

With few exceptions, each of the previous 18 directors of central intelligence has resigned in frustration, been given his walking papers by the president or been pressured out of the agency's headquarters seven miles up the Potomac from the White House.

"Here is one of the most peculiar types of operation any government can have," President Dwight D. Eisenhower once said. "It probably takes a strange kind of genius to run it."

The post was created more than 60 years ago, before the Central Intelligence Agency itself, before the cold war began. The mission was to prevent a second Pearl Harbor. The director would pull together all the military and diplomatic information the United States could gather overseas. He was to be the president's chief intelligence officer. Together they would protect the nation from surprise attack from afar.

Things did not always work out as planned.

The threat of the Soviet Union quickly gave rise to the C.I.A. Its espionage operations tried to pierce the Iron Curtain. Its covert operations tried to change the world.

From the start, the director was supposed to serve as the editor of a secret news service and the general of a secret army, chief executive of the C.I.A. and the chairman of the board of the ever-expanding empire of American military intelligence.

Running the "intelligence community," a chimerical construct now made up of 16 agencies and more than 100,000 people, proved almost impossible. "The job had become, frankly, too big for one person," Mr. Goss said last year.

The first three directors of central intelligence are viewed in the agency's own in-house histories by many as mediocrities. The fourth, Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, was aghast when his agents failed to foresee the course of the Korean War.

He was succeeded by Allen W. Dulles, who at the end of his tenure was attacked by his own commander-in-chief, President Eisenhower, who said he had "suffered an eight-year defeat" in his fight to make the C.I.A. deliver trustworthy intelligence.

Dulles led the C.I.A. into its disastrous invasion at the Bay of Pigs; President John F. Kennedy dismissed him after a decent interval.

The next director, John McCone, was tuned out by President Lyndon B. Johnson when he tried to report the downward course of the Vietnam War. A successor, Richard Helms, was turned out by President Richard M. Nixon after he refused to conceal the crimes of Watergate.

Mr. Helms, admired by his successors as the greatest director of all, remarked on the deep disconnect between the C.I.A. and the White House in a posthumously published 2002 memoir: Except for the first President George Bush, who served for 11 months as director of central intelligence in 1976, Mr. Helms noted, no American president has had more than a slight idea how clandestine operations are conceived and run.

His critique was underscored when President Ronald Reagan authorized his director of central intelligence, William J. Casey, to sell American arms to Iran as a ransom for American hostages. The uproar paralyzed the agency at the close of the cold war. Mr. Casey's top deputy and eventual successor, Bob Gates, was asked by a photographer at his 1987 nomination hearings what he thought of the post. He replied with the title of a country-and-western hit: "Take This Job and Shove It."

In an interview on the occasion of the C.I.A.'s 50th anniversary, in 1997, Mr. Helms warned that the end of the cold war had unmoored the C.I.A. "The only remaining superpower doesn't have enough interest in what's going on in the world to organize and run an espionage service," he said. "We've drifted away from that as a country."

President Bill Clinton's first director, R. James Woolsey, was hired after the briefest possible conversation and saw the president in private precisely twice in the next two years. His successor, John M. Deutch, was scorned by many of the spies who worked for him. For a while, the turnover at the top was head-spinning — directors came and went almost annually. When Mr. Goss's predecessor, George J. Tenet, took office in 1997, he was the fifth man in charge in six years.

"It is impossible to overstate the turbulence and disruption that that much change at the top caused in this organization," said Fred Hitz, the C.I.A.'s inspector general in the 1990's.

Mr. Tenet stayed on after the C.I.A.'s false conclusions that Iraq had unconventional weapons convinced millions of Americans that something was deeply flawed at C.I.A. headquarters. The flaw, two national commissions concluded, lay in the post of director itself. American intelligence was not an orchestra but a cacophony.

"We lurch from near disaster to near disaster," said James Monnier Simon Jr., the assistant director of central intelligence for administration from 1999 to 2003. John MacGaffin, a 31-year C.I.A. veteran and a senior White House counterterrorism consultant, warned recently that "the national counterterrorism effort more closely resembles kids' soccer than professional football."

When Mr. Goss took over in September 2004, he addressed C.I.A. officers in a state of exhilaration. His powers, he announced, would be "enhanced by executive orders" from the president. He proclaimed he would be the president's intelligence briefer, the head of the C.I.A., the director of central intelligence, the national intelligence director, and the chief of a new National Counterterrorism Center.

But within months, all those roles and missions but one were taken away. The job of director of central intelligence was dissolved a year ago in favor of a new national intelligence czar, John D. Negroponte, who has taken over the tasks of briefing the president and controlling American liaison with foreign intelligence services. Mr. Goss had become, literally, the last director.

And with his resignation, it may be that the Central Intelligence Agency is no longer central in the American government.

"In the wake of the Iraq war, it has become clear that official intelligence analysis was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions," Paul R. Pillar, a senior C.I.A. analyst who retired last year, wrote in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs.

"Our intelligence is now devoid of credibility," in the words of David Kay, who as the special adviser to the director of central intelligence led the search for unconventional weapons in Iraq in 2003 and 2004. "We as a nation must address that, or Iraq is prologue to a much more dangerous time than anything we have ever seen."

    A Long Legacy of Frustration at C.I.A. Helm, NYT, 7.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/washington/07cia.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

C.I.A. Chief Will Face Critical Gaps in Iran Data

May 7, 2006
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, May 6 — As the Central Intelligence Agency undergoes its latest round of turmoil, legislators and former intelligence officials say that serious gaps in the United States' knowledge of Iran are among the most critical problems facing a new director of the spy agency.

A year after a presidential commission gave a scathing assessment of intelligence on Iran, they say, American spy agencies remain severely handicapped in their efforts to assess its weapons programs and its leaders' intentions. Whoever takes the helm of the C.I.A., after the resignation on Friday of Porter J. Goss, will confront a crucial target with few, if any, American spies on the ground, sketchy communications intercepts and ambiguous satellite images, the experts say.

When Mr. Goss took the job 19 months ago, part of his mandate was to make certain that the wildly mistaken prewar assessments about Iraq's weapons would not repeated. But as Mr. Goss leaves the agency, intelligence watchers say huge uncertainty remains in estimates of Iran's weapons, complicating the task of persuading the United Nations Security Council to impose sanctions or take other measures.

"How many years are they away from having a nuclear weapon?" asked Senator Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican and chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, in an interview this week. "We don't know, and the people providing the answers don't know."

Representative Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said a classified briefing in early March on Iran's missiles and their ability to carry warheads "raised as many questions as it answered." She and other representatives sent a classified letter posing additional questions on March 9 to John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, but they have received no reply, she said.

"I continue to believe that our sources are stale and our case is thin," Ms. Harman said.

Some experts say they have confidence in official American estimates that Iran is unlikely to have a nuclear weapon until the next decade. But an array of former intelligence officials have doubts about that estimation.

"Whenever the C.I.A. says 5 to 10 years, that means they don't know," said Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Iran specialist in the clandestine service of the C.I.A. He said French and Israeli experts believe that an Iranian bomb may be as little as one to three years away.

Jon Wolfsthal of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said American uncertainty extends to the relationship of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the firebrand president since August, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, and their respective goals.

"We not only don't know who makes the decisions," said Mr. Wolfsthal, who traveled to Iran last month, "we don't even know who's in the room when decisions are made."

A senior American intelligence official, authorized to speak only on condition of anonymity, did not argue that assessment. "It is a hard target, but we are not complacent," the official said. "On a daily basis we're trying to recruit new sources."

Such intelligence shortcomings date at least to the period before the Islamist revolution that overthrew the shah in 1979. With no American embassy in Tehran, C.I.A. officers cannot operate under diplomatic cover inside Iran. Because American sanctions ban most business and academic ties, infiltrating spies under what is known as nonofficial cover is difficult.

C.I.A. officers based in Frankfurt managed to build a network of agents inside Iran. But Iranian counterintelligence broke up the ring in 1989, former intelligence officers say. The Frankfurt base was disbanded in the early 1990's, and operations have since been directed from C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., focusing on areas where there are large numbers of Iranian immigrants, including Los Angeles.

The National Security Agency's efforts to intercept Iranian government communications were hampered in the last two years because Iran learned that the United States had broken its codes and then changed them. Satellite photography has provided detailed images of suspected nuclear facilities, but such photographs leave many unanswered questions, officials said.

Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting for this article.

    C.I.A. Chief Will Face Critical Gaps in Iran Data, NYT, 7.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/washington/07iran.html

Director of C.I.A. Is Stepping Down Under Pressure

May 6, 2006
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI and SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, May 5 — Porter J. Goss resigned under pressure on Friday as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, ending a stormy 19-month tenure marked by plummeting morale inside the agency's ranks and turf battles within government.

Administration officials said that President Bush was to name a successor on Monday, and that the leading candidate was Gen. Michael V. Hayden of the Air Force. General Hayden is the top deputy to John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence.

As Mr. Negroponte has fought to reshape the intelligence operations, his office has repeatedly clashed with Mr. Goss and his staff at the C.I.A.

A decision to nominate General Hayden as C.I.A. director would mean that his role in overseeing the eavesdropping could be a focus of Senate confirmation hearings. He has ardently defended it.

"Look, N.S.A. intercepts communications," he said to the National Press Club in January. "And it does so for only one purpose, to protect the lives, the liberties and the well-being of the citizens of the United States from those who would do us harm."

Agency lawyers, he said, had said the program was strictly legal.

Mr. Goss, 67, a former Republican congressman who was an intelligence agency officer overseas in the 60's, took over at the agency as it was still reeling from major failures, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the inaccurate prewar assessments of Iraqi weapons.

In his brief time at the helm, the agency was wracked by the departure of many veterans who bristled under what they described as Mr. Goss's overly political leadership.

Appearing with Mr. Goss in the Oval Office, President Bush called his tenure a period of transition, one that saw the agency lose its status as the nation's premier spy agency.

Former intelligence officials said the departure was hastened because a recent inquiry by the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board had found that current and former agency officers were sharply critical of Mr. Goss's leadership. In particular, the board found that Mr. Goss was resisting efforts to make recruiting of spies overseas the agency's main focus, the officials said.

Mr. Goss's departure also occurs amid an investigation into the activities of the executive director of the agency, Kyle Foggo, a longtime agency official whom Mr. Goss elevated to the senior post. The inspector general of the agency is examining Mr. Foggo's connection to Brent R. Wilkes, an old friend and a military contractor who has become embroiled in the widening scandal surrounding former Representative Randy Cunningham, Republican of California.

A White House official said that Mr. Goss's departure had been discussed for several weeks between Mr. Goss and Mr. Negroponte and that Mr. Bush had full knowledge of the discussions.

The president "has been pleased" with Mr. Goss's leadership, the official said, adding that the agency had "gone through a tumultuous period of change, and he's been the figure who's had to implement that change, and that makes you a divisive figure."

The high-profile resignation is the latest to buffet the administration, which faces low approval ratings and is in the midst of a staff shake-up ordered by Joshua B. Bolten, the new White House chief of staff.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Goss sat side by side on Friday in the Oval Office to announce the departure. Each offered praise for the other. Mr. Goss said the agency he had led was "on a very even keel, sailing well."

"I honestly believe that we have improved dramatically," he said.

Mr. Bush described Mr. Goss as having "led ably," adding, "He has got a five-year plan to increase the number of analysts and operatives, which is going to help make this country a safer place and help us win the war on terror."

In a statement to agency employees, Mr. Goss called the agency the "gold standard" of the intelligence community and said he was proud of what his management team had accomplished.

"When I came to C.I.A. in September of 2004, I wanted to accomplish some very specific things, and we have made great strides on all fronts," the statement read.

It cited large increases in recruiting and new technologies to help analysts decipher raw intelligence.

Mr. Goss said on Friday he would stay at the agency a few weeks.

A friend and former colleague of Mr. Goss said the position and the constant criticism that came with it had taken a toll.

"It was like watching a friend in pain," the friend said, insisting on anonymity. "I think he got in over his head."

Among the officials who left soon after Mr. Goss's arrival, after clashing with him and his staff, were John E. McLaughlin, who had been acting director; A. B. Krongard, who had been executive director, the No. 3 post; and Stephen R. Kappes and Michael Sulick, who held the top two posts in the directorate of operations, which runs human spying.

On Friday, senior lawmakers gave tepid reviews of Mr. Goss's record. "Director Goss took the helm of the intelligence community at a very difficult time in the wake of the intelligence failures associated with 9/11 and Iraq W.M.D.," Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement. "Porter made some significant improvements at the C.I.A., but I think even he would say they still have some way to go."

Some top Democrats were far more critical, accusing Mr. Goss of driving out some of the most experienced veterans at the agency and destroying morale.

"In the last year and a half, more than 300 years of experience has either been pushed out or walked out the door in frustration," Representative Jane Harman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said. "This has left the agency in freefall."

The people interviewed for this article included critics and supporters of Mr. Goss, including some directly involved in intelligence management and oversight. Some were given anonymity to let them speak freely about Mr. Goss's resignation.

A former agency official said Mr. Goss had hoped to preserve the agency's traditional role as the government's main source of intelligence analysis as well as its center of human spying, even though the lead analytical role is now played by Mr. Negroponte's office. The prestige of the C.I.A. has suffered multiple blows in recent years, beginning with the failure to detect the Sept. 11 attacks followed by the faulty assessments about the status of Saddam Hussein's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

It was those failures that in part led to the resignation in 2004 of Mr. Goss's predecessor, George J. Tenet.

Mr. Goss started at the agency just as it was about to lose its status as the premier spy agency. The bipartisan panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks had recommended creating a cabinet-level post to take control over the disparate intelligence agencies and replace the C.I.A. director as the president's principal adviser on intelligence.

Congress accepted the recommendation, and last April Mr. Negroponte was installed as the first director of national intelligence. Mr. Negroponte, not the C.I.A. director, now gives the president his morning intelligence briefing and sits at the table in cabinet meetings.

Mr. Goss, a longtime congressman from Florida, had been considering retirement in late 2004 when Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney pressed him to run the agency after Mr. Tenet's recommendation.

The agency was widely viewed as being at odds with the administration over the Iraq war, and the White House gave Mr. Goss marching orders to end what it saw as a campaign of leaks to the news media by agency insiders who opposed administration policies.

Yet the leaks have continued, and in recent months Mr. Goss began an intense effort to find out who was responsible for news reports that disclosed details about highly classified programs.

The crackdown, which included rare "single issue" polygraph tests of senior officials, led to the firing last month of Mary O. McCarthy, a veteran who was working in the inspector general's office at the agency.

Elisabeth Bumiller, David S. Cloud and James Risen contributed reporting for this article.

    Director of C.I.A. Is Stepping Down Under Pressure, NYT, 6.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/06/washington/06intel.html?hp&ex=1146974400&en=dcba382ead8f3fae&ei=5094&partner=homepage

U.S. Steps Into Wiretap Suit Against AT&T

April 29, 2006
The New York Times
By JOHN MARKOFF

SAN FRANCISCO, April 28 — The government asked a federal judge here Friday to dismiss a civil liberties lawsuit against the AT&T Corporation because of a possibility that military and state secrets would otherwise be disclosed.

The lawsuit, accusing the company of illegally collaborating with the National Security Agency in a vast surveillance program, was filed in February by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group.

The class-action suit, which seeks an end to the collaboration it alleges, is based in part on the testimony of Mark Klein, a retired technician for the company who says Internet data passing through an AT&T switching center in San Francisco is being diverted to a secret room. There, Mr. Klein says, the security agency has installed powerful computers to eavesdrop without warrants on the digital data and forward the information to an undisclosed place.

The foundation has filed documents obtained by Mr. Klein that ostensibly show detailed technical information on N.S.A. technology used to divert Internet data. He has also said in a deposition that employees of the agency went to the switching center to oversee special projects.

The company has declined to address the suit publicly, saying it will have no comment on matters of national security or customer privacy.

In its action Friday, the government filed a statement of interest asserting military and state secret privilege in asking the judge, Vaughn R. Walker, to dismiss the suit. Separately on Friday, AT&T also filed two motions to dismiss.

The government's filing said the authorities "cannot disclose any national security information that may be at issue in this case." The document went on to say that the filing should not be construed as either a confirmation or a denial of any of the claims made by the civil liberties group about government surveillance activities.

Elsewhere in the document, however, the government said President Bush had explained that after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he authorized the security agency to intercept communications into and out of the United States by people linked to Al Qaeda and related organizations. The agency is ordinarily prohibited from intercepting the telephone and digital communications of American citizens without a warrant from a special intelligence court.

Responding to the filing, Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said, "We think the government's right to conduct this program should be considered separately from the issue of whether a telecommunications firm has the right to break the law."

The government's interest, Ms. Cohn said, is an indication that the lawsuit is not frivolous.

The court plans to hear the various motions on May 17.

Earlier this year, the foundation asked the government to examine the documents that the group was preparing to submit to the court related to Mr. Klein's testimony. At the time, the government chose not to intervene, and the documents were filed under seal.

The documents, which include affidavits, lists of equipment and technical specifications related to tapping fiber-optic network links, have been obtained independently by a number of news organizations. They refer to a similar installation in an AT&T facility in Atlanta, and Mr. Klein has said he believes there are related eavesdropping facilities attached to AT&T centers in San Jose, Los Angeles, San Diego and Seattle.

    U.S. Steps Into Wiretap Suit Against AT&T, NYT, 29.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/29/us/29nsa.html

National Archives Says Records Were Wrongly Classified

April 27, 2006
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, April 26 — An audit by the National Archives of more than 25,000 historical documents withdrawn from public access since 1999 found that more than a third did not contain sensitive information justifying classification, archives officials announced Wednesday.

They said the removal of the remaining two-thirds was technically justified, though many had already been published or contained old secrets with little practical import.

Even withdrawing those documents that included truly significant secrets may have done more harm than good by calling new attention to the sensitivity of records that researchers had read and photocopied for years, the officials said.

"The irony is that some of these reviews have actually exacerbated any possible damage to national security," said J. William Leonard, head of the archives' Information Security Oversight Office and the government's overseer of classification of records.

Calling the exposure of the hidden effort to reclassify records a "turning-point moment," Allen Weinstein, the head of the National Archives, announced a new effort to set consistent standards for deciding what records should be protected.

The pilot National Declassification Initiative, overseen by the archives, will seek to reduce what Mr. Weinstein called an "unconscionable backlog" of historical records not yet released and to avoid unnecessary classification in the future.

"We're in the access business, not the classification business," Mr. Weinstein said. He said all the agencies that had withdrawn records, including the Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency, had agreed to drop the practice of secretly reclassifying documents and to operate under new standards of transparency.

Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, said the reclassification of documents had been necessary because other agencies had released C.I.A. intelligence without allowing the spy agency to review it.

"Once classified material is made accessible to the public, there are few good options to protect that information," Mr. Gimigliano said Wednesday. "That said, the C.I.A. has worked very closely with the archives to improve the process and ensure that the public has maximum access to properly declassified records."

In announcing the results of the audit, both Mr. Weinstein and Mr. Leonard said it raised unsettling questions about the overall quality of decisions by the three million Americans who hold security clearances about what should be secret. "To be effective, the classification process is a tool that must be wielded with precision," Mr. Leonard said.

The audit found that 25,315 documents were withdrawn from public access, far more than the 9,000 they estimated in February, and that 64 percent met the minimal criteria for classification. The Air Force was responsible for the largest share — 17,702 — followed by the C.I.A., the Department of Energy, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the presidential libraries, which are part of the National Archives system.

The auditors discovered that C.I.A. reviewers deliberately classified some "purely unclassified" documents simply to obscure the removal of other documents they judged to be genuinely sensitive. In addition, the audit showed, some records that had always been unclassified were classified by C.I.A. reviewers — "often 50 years later" — because they contained a name of a C.I.A. official who had received a copy.

At the same time, the audit noted that more than one billion pages of previously secret government documents have been declassified since 1995, four times more than in the 15 years before that. It praised the C.I.A. for placing millions of pages of documents into a searchable computer system that is accessible to researchers at the archives.

The reclassification of documents began after some agencies found that their records had been improperly declassified in the mid-1990's in a process the audit admitted was "replete with errors." The review took place largely hidden from public view, and researchers found entire boxes of records missing from the shelves with only vague notations about "restricted status" as an explanation.

A few months ago, a number of historians led by Matthew M. Aid, a Washington writer on intelligence, discovered that documents they had copied at the archives long ago had been removed. In February, they confronted archives officials, who suspended all reclassifications and ordered the audit.

The withdrawal of documents was governed in part by secret agreements the National Archives signed with the C.I.A., in 2001, and the Air Force, in 2002, before Mr. Weinstein's tenure. Mr. Weinstein said Wednesday that such agreements were improper and should never have been signed.

Reaction to the audit and the planned overhaul of declassification from the affected government agencies, as well as from historians who had complained about the reclassification, was generally positive.

Mr. Aid, the historian who first uncovered the reclassifications, said he found the audit professional and its results "shocking."

"The various reclassification programs were, in my opinion, a massive waste of time and the taxpayers' money in a time of war, and did not enhance or improve U.S. national security at all," Mr. Aid said.

An Air Force spokeswoman, First Lt. Christy A. Stravolo, said: "This audit was a good thing. In the long run, it will improve the consistency of declassification processes across the board."

    National Archives Says Records Were Wrongly Classified, NYT, 27.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/washington/27archives.html

3.45pm

EU report condemns secret CIA flights

Wednesday April 26, 2006
James Sturcke and agencies
Guardian Unlimited

The CIA has carried out more than 1,000 undeclared flights over European territory since 2001, European parliament investigators said today.
Politicians scrutinising illegal CIA activities in Europe also said incidents in which terror suspects were handed over to US agents did not appear to be isolated, and suspects were often transported in the same planes and by the same groups of people.

The preliminary report was compiled using data provided by the EU's air safety agency, Eurocontrol. It also used information gathered during three months of hearings and more than 50 hours of testimony by human rights groups and people who said they had been kidnapped and tortured by US agents.

Data showed CIA planes made numerous undeclared stopovers on European territory, violating an international air treaty requiring airlines to declare the routes and stopovers for planes on police missions, the Italian politician Giovanni Claudio Fava, who drafted the report, said.

"The routes for some of these flights seem to be quite suspect ... they are rather strange routes for flights to take. It is hard to imagine ... those stopovers were simply for providing fuel," he added.

Mr Fava referred to the alleged secret transfer of an Egyptian cleric abducted from a Milan street in 2003, a German who claimed he was transferred from Macedonia to Afghanistan, and the transfer of a Canadian citizen from New York to Syria among other suspect flights.

He said documents provided by Eurocontrol showed the plane transferring suspect Khalid al-Masri, a Kuwaiti-born German national, from Macedonia to Afghanistan in 2004 flew from Algeria to Palma de Mallorca, Spain, on January 22; from Palma de Mallorca to Skopje, Macedonia, on January 23, and from Skopje to Kabul via Baghdad overnight on January 24.

Earlier this year, Mr al-Masri told the European parliament committee he had been arrested by US intelligence agents on the Macedonian border while on holiday in December 2003.

He said he was taken to a hotel in Skopje and held there for several weeks before being flown to Kabul and put in prison for five months. He was then flown back to Europe in May 2004 and released in Albania.

Mr Fava said that, according to his investigations, the groups of agents on the flights were often the same, and it was unlikely that at least some EU governments - including those of Italy and Bosnia - would not have any information about the CIA operations investigated by the EU assembly.

The US has not made any public comments on allegations of secret renditions, and the official line by EU governments and senior EU officials is that there has been no irrefutable proof of such renditions.

The parliament inquiry began in January following media reports that US intelligence officers had interrogated al-Qaida suspects at secret prisons in eastern Europe following the September 11 2001 attacks on New York and Washington and transported some on secret flights that passed through Europe.

Clandestine detention centres, secret flights to or from Europe to countries in which suspects could face torture, or extraordinary renditions would all breach the continent's human rights treaties.

The focus of the inquiry soon changed from secret prisons in Europe to rendition flights as people who said they were abducted by US agents gave detailed accounts of their transfers to what they said were secret detention centres in the Middle East, Asia and northern Africa.

The British government has admitted that aircraft suspected of being used by the CIA for "extraordinary rendition" had passed through British airports on 73 occasions since 2001.

They included an aircraft that left the Afghan capital, Kabul, in November 2002 and landed in Edinburgh before continuing its journey to Washington.

Earlier this month, the human rights group Amnesty International released a report detailing almost 1,000 flights directly linked to the CIA through "front" companies, most of which it said had used European air space.

A further 600 CIA flights were made by planes hired from US aviation companies.

The report carried details of more than 200 alleged CIA flights passing through British airports, and called for an independent public inquiry into all aspects of UK involvement in extraordinary rendition flights.

It claimed the US made efforts to ensure conditions and locations in which detainees were held were kept secret.

Four of the CIA's 26 planes have landed and taken off from British airports more than 200 times over the past five years, Amnesty said. The airports included Stansted, Gatwick, Luton, Glasgow, Prestwick, Edinburgh, Londonderry and Belfast.

RAF Brize Norton, in Oxfordshire, Biggin Hill, in Kent, and RAF Leuchars, in Scotland, were among others used along with the Turks and Caicos islands, a British overseas territory in the Caribbean.

    EU report condemns secret CIA flights, G, 26.4.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/eu/story/0,,1761891,00.html

Rove to Testify Again in C.I.A. Leak Case

April 26, 2006
By ANNE E. KORNBLUT
The New York Times

WASHINGTON, April 26 — Karl Rove, the senior counselor to President Bush, is expected to appear this afternoon before a federal grand jury investigating the leak of a Central Intelligence Agency officer's identity.

The appearance in federal court comes at a politically sensitive time for Mr. Rove, who was relieved of his policy portfolio at the White House in a staff reshuffling earlier this month and now faces the challenge of helping Republicans maintain their primacy in the midterm elections this fall.

Mr. Rove, once considered a key figure in the case, has not testified since last October. Although he has said he is innocent — and has kept a relatively low profile on the matter in recent months, even as his former colleague, I. Lewis Libby, has proceeded to trial in the case — Mr. Rove's appearance at the courthouse was sure to revive questions about his legal status and whether he will ultimately be charged.

It was not immediately clear what questions Mr. Rove would be brought in to address. Over the last few months, the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, has sought to establish whether a Time magazine reporter, Viveca Novak, played a role in alerting Mr. Rove, through his lawyer, about his possible involvement in the investigation after it had already begun.

In his initial testimony to the grand jury, in February 2004, Mr. Rove failed to disclose that he had ever discussed the issue of Valerie Wilson, a C.I.A. operative, with any reporters. Mr. Rove came forward months later to change his story, acknowledging that he had a phone conversation with Matt Cooper of Time Magazine in the summer of 2003 that eventually turned to the subject of Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, Ms. Wilson's husband.

Mr. Rove said he had forgotten the call, one of hundreds he participates in each day. Lawyers for Mr. Rove say he will be exonerated in the case, in part because he volunteered details of his conversation with Mr. Cooper.

Since then, however, another Time magazine reporter, Ms. Novak, has said that she told Mr. Rove's lawyer, in several conversations in early 2004, that she believed his client had been a source for Mr. Cooper.

Ms. Novak said the lawyer, Robert Luskin, appeared surprised to hear of Mr. Rove's involvement, raising questions about whether Ms. Novak effectively tipped off Mr. Rove to come forward with evidence about himself.

So far, only I. Lewis Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, has been indicted in the leak inquiry. He faces five counts of obstruction, lying and making misleading statements to prosecutors and the grand jury.

No one has been charged with the underlying crime of revealing classified material. Mr. Fitzgerald is seeking to establish whether any crimes were committed with the disclosure of Mrs. Wilson's identity, which first appeared in a column by Robert Novak, who is not related to Ms. Novak, in July 2003.

Even before Mr. Rove arrived at the courthouse, Democrats began to pounce on the issue, one of several controversies they hope to capitalize on in the fall elections.

"This additional Rove visit clearly shows that the Plame investigation is far from over and that Patrick Fitzgerald is living up to his reputation as an impartial, dedicated prosecutor determined to turn over every stone," Senator Charles E. Schumer said in a statement.

    Rove to Testify Again in C.I.A. Leak Case, NYT, 26.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/26/washington/26cnd-rove.html?hp&ex=1146110400&en=b473c68207b12f2d&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Friend: CIA officer not source on prisons

Posted 4/24/2006 8:17 PM ET
USA Today

WASHINGTON (AP) — The CIA officer fired last week for unauthorized contacts with the media denies allegations that she provided information leading to The Washington Post's award-winning story on secret CIA detention centers, according to a friend speaking on her behalf.
"She was not the source for that story," said Rand Beers, who has talked with his former colleague, Mary McCarthy, a veteran intelligence analyst.

Beers headed intelligence programs at the National Security Council during the Clinton administration. He said McCarthy authorized him to make the brief statement, but he declined to discuss the issue further.

In a message distributed to the agency workforce Thursday afternoon, CIA Director Porter Goss expressed his deep concern over the "critical damage being suffered" from media leaks and informed his staff of the firing of an unidentified official.

"A CIA officer has acknowledged having unauthorized discussions with the media, in which the officer knowingly and willfully shared classified intelligence, including operational information. I terminated that officer's employment with the CIA," Goss said, adding that he took no pleasure in reporting the action.

In January, Goss directed the CIA's security office to conduct polygraph examinations on officers involved in certain sensitive intelligence programs. He said criminal reports were also filed with the Justice Department on "the most egregious media leaks that contained classified intelligence and national security information."

McCarthy was days away from retirement. Her statement, through Beers, was first reported by Newsweek magazine

    Friend: CIA officer not source on prisons, UT, 24.4.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-04-24-cia-firing_x.htm

Moves Signal Tighter Secrecy Within C.I.A.

April 24, 2006
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, April 23 — The crackdown on leaks at the Central Intelligence Agency that led to the dismissal of a veteran intelligence officer last week included a highly unusual polygraph examination for the agency's independent watchdog, Inspector General John L. Helgerson, intelligence officials with knowledge of the investigation said Sunday.

The special polygraphs, which have been given to dozens of employees since January, are part of a broader effort by Porter J. Goss, the director of the C.I.A., to re-emphasize a culture of secrecy that has included a marked tightening of the review process for books and articles by former agency employees.

As the inspector general, Mr. Helgerson was the supervisor of Mary O. McCarthy, who was fired Thursday after admitting she had leaked classified information to reporters about secret C.I.A. detention centers and other subjects, agency officials said.

Mr. Goss and the C.I.A.'s deputy director, Vice Adm. Albert M. Calland III, voluntarily submitted to polygraph tests during the leak investigation to show they were willing to experience the same scrutiny they were asking other employees to undergo, agency officials said. Mr. Helgerson likewise submitted to the lie-detector test, they said.

But Mr. Helgerson's status as the independent inspector general — a post to which he was appointed by the president and from which only the president can remove him — makes his submission to a polygraph even more unusual.

L. Britt Snider, who served as inspector general from 1998 to 2001, said in an interview on Sunday night that he had not been given a polygraph in that position, though he said he was given an initial polygraph when he arrived at the agency in 1997 as special counsel to the director.

"I've never heard of it, and it's certainly unusual," Mr. Snider said. He called it "awkward" for the inspector general to be, in effect, investigated by the agency he ordinarily investigates.

But Mr. Snider and another former senior intelligence official said that it would not be improper if Mr. Helgerson had volunteered for the polygraph to set an example for others.

Reached by telephone on Sunday, Mr. Helgerson declined to comment and referred a reporter to a C.I.A. spokesman, who said he could not comment on any aspect of the leak investigation.

Further details about the inspector general's polygraph test could not be determined.

Mr. Goss has repeatedly expressed unhappiness with what he sees as the laxity of C.I.A. employees and retirees in discussing agency matters. He has taken up the cause of tightening information controls across the board, partly in response to calls from the White House, the Congressional intelligence committees and the presidential commission on weapons of mass destruction.

Mr. Helgerson's office, which investigates accusations of lapses in the ethics or performance of agency employees, has investigated some of the most serious controversies of recent years, including cases involving accusations of detainee abuse.

Since a 1989 change following the Iran-contra scandal, the C.I.A.'s internal watchdog has been confirmed by the Senate and has reported to the Congressional intelligence committees as well as to the C.I.A. director, a shift intended to assure the position's independence.

Among the subjects handled by Mr. Helgerson's office was a report completed last year that faulted senior C.I.A. officials for lapses in the failure to prevent the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But Mr. Goss kept the report classified and did not punish any of those named.

Former officials say the inspector general's office has also referred more than half a dozen cases of detainee abuse to the Department of Justice, but officials there have taken no action, except for a pending prosecution of one agency contract employee charged with beating an Afghan prisoner who later died.

The "single-issue" polygraphs, which are distinct from the routine polygraphs given to agency employees at least every five years, have been conducted by the C.I.A. Security Center but with close supervision from Mr. Goss's office, one official said. Like other current and former intelligence officials, he was granted anonymity to discuss classified events at the agency without fear of retribution.

For tightly "compartmented" programs like the secret detention centers, the C.I.A.'s computer system automatically limits access to the few officers who have the proper clearance to learn details of the program. The computer keeps an audit trail of which officer has looked at which documents and when they have done it, a record that would aid investigators hunting for a leaker, officials say.

The renewed emphasis on the culture of secrecy has included a tightening of the review process for books and articles by former agency employees, said Mark S. Zaid, a lawyer who represents many authors who once worked for the C.I.A.

Authors say the agency's Publications Review Board has been removing material that would easily have been approved before. While the board in the past has generally worked with retirees to make manuscripts publishable, it now more often appears to be trying to block publication, the authors say. And reprimands for violations have become more stern, including letters warning of possible Justice Department investigations.

A C.I.A. spokeswoman, Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, denied that the Publications Review Board's standards had changed.

"The only rule is that they are not allowed to have classified information in their manuscripts," Ms. Millerwise Dyck said.

But Mr. Zaid said: "There's been a fundamental shift in practice at the Publications Review Board. There's literally been a reinstitution of the 1950's attitude that what happens at C.I.A. stays at C.I.A."

Mr. Zaid said the shift in the agency's approach to publications under Mr. Goss was most clearly illustrated by its handling of a book by Thomas Waters Jr., who wrote about his experiences as a recent agency recruit.

He said the manuscript of Mr. Waters's book, titled "Class 11: Inside the CIA's First Post-9/11 Spy Class," was approved by the Publications Review Board in September 2004 with several modest changes. Mr. Waters then sold the book to Dutton, made the changes and submitted the galleys for a final review.

In February, Mr. Zaid said, the board returned the galleys with nearly half their contents marked as classified and not approved for publication. Mr. Waters, who left the agency after two years for family reasons, has sued the agency to permit publication, and the case is pending.

"What's ironic is that it's a very positive book," Mr. Zaid said. "He had a great experience and he thought this book would be a great recruiting tool."

In other cases, Mr. Zaid said, an acquaintance was recently refused permission to publish an op-ed article that drew on material from the agency's Web site. Another client's book was turned down because, the author was told, even though no single chapter was classified, the whole manuscript revealed enough information that it had to be classified. This so-called mosaic theory of classification, Mr. Zaid said, is being used more often to prevent publication.

Another former employee with long experience having publications approved agreed that reviews had become tougher. "It takes longer and there's a much more conservative approach," the former employee said, adding that he believed that some of the deletions had crossed the admittedly fuzzy boundary between protecting classified information and censoring personal opinions.

Another retiree agreed, saying he believed the agency had begun pressing authors to excise some unclassified material from manuscripts. "It's a more complex process than it used to be," he said. "Now, they question a lot more things."

Yet another agency retiree, who has in the past received warning letters from the C.I.A. after occasionally publishing articles without seeking approval, said he had recently gotten a far more strongly worded letter. This one informed him that a file had been opened to document his transgressions that could be forwarded to the Justice Department, he said.

Mr. Goss's effort to lower the profile of the agency has apparently been extended to the Web site of its Center for the Study of Intelligence, which for years has carried unclassified articles about the history and practice of spying from the in-house journal Studies in Intelligence.

Max Holland, who has written two articles for the C.I.A. journal, recently reported in The American Spectator that the online posting of unclassified excerpts from an agency review of the failure to assess Iraq's unconventional weapons accurately had been delayed for seven months. The last issue represented on the C.I.A. Web site is from mid-2005.

    Moves Signal Tighter Secrecy Within C.I.A., NYT, 24.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/24/washington/24leak.html

Colleagues Say C.I.A. Analyst Played by the Rules

April 23, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID S. CLOUD

WASHINGTON, April 22 — In 1998, when President Bill Clinton ordered military strikes against a suspected chemical weapons factory in Sudan, Mary O. McCarthy, a senior intelligence officer assigned to the White House, warned the president that the plan relied on inconclusive intelligence, two former government officials say.

Ms. McCarthy's reservations did not stop the attack on the factory, which was carried out in retaliation for Al Qaeda's bombing of two American embassies in East Africa. But they illustrated her willingness to challenge intelligence data and methods endorsed by her bosses at the Central Intelligence Agency.

On Thursday, the C.I.A. fired Ms. McCarthy, 61, accusing her of leaking information to reporters about overseas prisons operated by the agency in the years since the Sept. 11 attacks. But despite Ms. McCarthy's independent streak, some colleagues who worked with her at the White House and other offices during her intelligence career say they cannot imagine her as a leaker of classified information.

As a senior National Security Council aide for intelligence from 1996 to 2001, she was responsible for guarding some of the nation's most important secrets.

"We're talking about a person with great integrity who played by the book and, as far as I know, never deviated from the rules," said Steven Simon, a security council aide in the Clinton administration who worked closely with Ms. McCarthy.

Others said it was possible that Ms. McCarthy — who made a contribution to Senator John Kerry's presidential campaign in 2004 — had grown increasingly disenchanted with the methods adopted by the Bush administration for handling Qaeda prisoners.

Ms. McCarthy, who began attending law school at night several years ago and was preparing to retire from the C.I.A., may have felt she had no alternative but to go to the press.

If in fact Ms. McCarthy was the leaker, Richard J. Kerr, a former C.I.A. deputy director, said, "I have no idea what her motive was, but there is a lot of dissension within the agency, and it seems to be a rather unhappy place." Mr. Kerr called Ms. McCarthy "quite a good, substantive person on the issues I dealt with her on."

Larry Johnson, a former C.I.A. officer who worked for Ms. McCarthy in the agency's Latin America section, said, "It looks to me like Mary is being used as a sacrificial lamb."

Ms. McCarthy did not respond Saturday to e-mail and telephone messages seeking comment.

During her time at the White House, she was known as a low-key professional who paid special attention to preventing leaks of classified information and covert operations, several current and former government officials said. When she disagreed with decisions on intelligence operations, they said, she registered her complaints through internal government channels.

Some former intelligence officials who worked with Ms. McCarthy saw her as a persistent obstacle to aggressive antiterrorism efforts.

"She was always of the view that she would rather not get her hands dirty with covert action," said Michael Scheuer, a former C.I.A. official, who said he had been in meetings with Ms. McCarthy where she voiced doubts about reports that the factory had ties to Al Qaeda and was secretly producing substances for chemical weapons.

In the case of the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, her concerns may have been well-founded. Sudanese officials and the plant's owner denied any connection to Al Qaeda.

In the aftermath of the attack, the internal White House debate over whether the intelligence reports about the plant were accurate spilled into the press. Eventually, Clinton administration officials conceded that the hardest evidence used to justify striking the plant was a single soil sample that seemed to indicate the presence of a chemical used in making VX gas.

Ms. McCarthy was concerned enough about the episode that she wrote a formal letter of dissent to President Clinton, two former officials said.

Over the last decade, Ms. McCarthy gradually came to have one foot in the secret world of intelligence and another in the public world of policy.

She went from lower-level analyst working in obscurity at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., to someone at home "downtown," as Washington is called by agency veterans, where policy is more openly fought over and leaks are far more common.

Though she was a C.I.A. employee for more than 20 years, associates said, her early professional experience was not in the world of spying and covert operations.

After a previous career that one former colleague said included time as a flight attendant, she earned a doctorate in history from the University of Minnesota.

She worked for a Swiss company "conducting risk assessments for international businesses and banks," Ms. McCarthy wrote in a brief biography she provided to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also called the 9/11 Commission. She testified before the commission in 2003. The biography notes that she once wrote "a book on the social history of Ghana."

Even after joining the C.I.A. in 1984, Ms. McCarthy, who was hired as an intelligence analyst for Africa, was far from a covert operative. In the late 1980's, she was promoted to management, taking over as chief of the Central America and Caribbean section, though she had no previous experience in the region, said a former officer who worked with her.

By 1991, she was working as deputy to one of the agency's most senior analysts, Charles E. Allen, whose job as "national intelligence officer for warning" was to anticipate major national security threats. Ms. McCarthy took over the job from Mr. Allen in 1994 and moved to the Clinton White House two years later.

Rand Beers, who at the time was Mr. Clinton's senior intelligence aide on the National Security Council, said he had hired Ms. McCarthy to be his deputy.

"Anybody who works for Charlie Allen and then replaces him has got to be good," said Mr. Beers, who went on to serve as an adviser to Mr. Kerry's campaign in 2004. Ms. McCarthy took over from Mr. Beers as the senior director for intelligence programs in 1998.

Though she was not among the C.I.A. officials who briefed Mr. Clinton every morning on the latest intelligence, she "worked on some of the most sensitive programs," a former White House aide said, and was responsible for notifying Congress when covert action was being undertaken.

The aide and the other unnamed officials were granted anonymity because they did not want to be identified as discussing her official duties because she may be under criminal investigation.

When President Bush took office in 2001, Ms. McCarthy's career seemed to stall. A former Bush administration official who worked with her said that although Ms. McCarthy was a career C.I.A. employee, as a holdover from the Clinton administration she was regarded with suspicion and was gradually eased out of her job as senior director for intelligence programs. She left several months into Mr. Bush's first term.

But she did not return immediately to a new assignment at C.I.A. headquarters. She took an extended sabbatical at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington research organization. In late 2003, she testified publicly before the 9/11 Commission about ways to reorganize the intelligence agencies to prevent another major terrorism attack.

She served on a Markle Foundation group, the Task Force on National Security in the Information Age, working with academics as well as current and former government officials on recommendations for sharing classified information more widely within the government, according to a report issued by the group. The report identifies Ms. McCarthy as a "nongovernment" expert.

H. Andrew Schwartz, a spokesman for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that Ms. McCarthy's relationship with the organization lasted from 2001 to 2003.

Several associates of Ms. McCarthy said she returned to the C.I.A. in 2004, taking a job in the inspector general's office. That year, public records show, she contributed $2,000 to Mr. Kerry's presidential campaign, identifying herself as a "government analyst."

Married with one child, she also began attending law school at night, two former co-workers said, and talked about switching to a career in public interest law.

After an article last November in The Washington Post reported that the C.I.A. was sending terror suspects to clandestine detention centers in several countries, including some in Eastern Europe, Porter J. Goss, the agency's director, ordered polygraphs for intelligence officers who knew about certain "compartmented" programs, including the secret detention centers for terrorism suspects.

Polygraphs are routinely given to agency employees at least every five years, but special ones can be ordered when a security breach is suspected.

Government officials said that after Ms. McCarthy's polygraph examination showed the possibility of deception, the examiner confronted her and she disclosed having had conversations with reporters.

But some former C.I.A. employees who know Ms. McCarthy remain unconvinced, arguing that the pressure from Mr. Goss and others in the Bush administration to plug leaks may have led the agency to focus on an employee on the verge of retirement, whose work at the White House during the Clinton administration had long raised suspicions within the current administration.

    Colleagues Say C.I.A. Analyst Played by the Rules, NYT, 23.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/washington/23mccarthy.html?hp&ex=1145851200&en=7264dc11069df891&ei=5094&partner=homepage

C.I.A. Director Has Made Plugging Leaks a Top Priority

April 23, 2006
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI and SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, April 22 — The firing of a veteran Central Intelligence Agency officer who has been accused of leaking classified information is a rare and dramatic move, yet C.I.A. officials say it is only the beginning of a campaign to stanch the unauthorized flow of information from the spy agency.

Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director, has for three months carried out one of the most intensive leak investigations in the agency's history, using polygraph tests to determine who at the agency may be behind what Mr. Goss says is an explosion of damaging leaks to the news media.

According to C.I.A. officials, staff members have been summoned by the agency's Security Center to undergo polygraph tests in an effort to find out who revealed to reporters information about classified programs, including the agency's secret overseas detention jails for high-level Qaeda detainees.

It is uncommon for C.I.A. directors to make leak crackdowns a priority of their tenure. Mr. Goss's use of "single issue" polygraphs in a leak investigation — which led to the firing on Thursday of the C.I.A. officer, Mary O. McCarthy — is a sign of how serious he is about enforcing discipline in the agency's ranks.

When Mr. Goss took the helm at the C.I.A. in September 2004, he inherited an agency that was widely viewed in Washington as being at war with the Bush administration.

Mr. Goss, a longtime Republican congressman, was mulling retirement when President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney pressed him to take the C.I.A. job, in part to rein in what they viewed as a coordinated campaign of leaks to the news media from C.I.A. insiders hostile to the administration.

But some believe that the problem has grown under Mr. Goss's leadership, and many see Ms. McCarthy's firing as an effort by Mr. Goss to send a message to the agency's rank and file.

"I think it's a recognition that there has been a loosening of discipline" at the agency, said Richard Kerr, a former C.I.A deputy director.

Some in the intelligence community deny the charge that C.I.A. officials are a primary source of leaks. Unlike members of Congress or civilian policy makers at the Pentagon, the State Department and elsewhere, C.I.A. operatives and analysts are given routine polygraph tests at least every five years, in which they are asked whether they have disclosed classified information.

Mr. Goss, who spent a decade as a C.I.A. officer early in his career, has railed against leaks to the news media in private meetings and public testimony, arguing that they help America's enemies and undermine the C.I.A.'s relationships with foreign intelligence agencies.

"Such leaks also cause our intelligence partners around the globe to question our professionalism and credibility," Mr. Goss wrote in an Op-Ed article for The New York Times on Feb. 10. "Too many of my counterparts from other countries have told me, 'You Americans can't keep a secret.' "

A former intelligence official who remains in contact with many current C.I.A. officers said Mr. Goss was still viewed as an outsider. "There's a great sense among C.I.A. folks that the administration regards them as the enemy," the former official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he said his current employer did not want him to comment publicly on controversial issues. But he said most intelligence officers were "horrified" at leaks and would support the dismissal of leakers.

The current round of polygraph tests is aimed at specific leaks, including information published in The Washington Post late last year about C.I.A. detention centers. The articles won a Pulitzer Prize for Dana Priest, a Post reporter.

"This was one program that they really did try to protect," said one recently retired C.I.A. operative, who was granted anonymity because he was discussing classified information. But he said Ms. McCarthy most likely had knowledge of the detention program and other "compartmented" programs because she worked in the inspector general's office, which is investigating the detention and interrogation of C.I.A. prisoners.

Ms. McCarthy's dismissal has touched off a partisan fight in Washington.

Democrats noted that Mr. Bush himself was recently revealed to have approved a leak of Iraqi weapons information in 2003, and one former intelligence officer praised Ms. McCarthy as a hero.

"There is absolutely no question that Mary acted in the finest traditions of the republic, helping reveal and reduce terrible violations of international law and human rights by the C.I.A.," said Robert D. Steele, a former C.I.A. officer who now runs a private intelligence company.

Congressional Republicans said Ms. McCarthy's dismissal was a decisive step toward tightening the handling of secrets about classified intelligence operations. Senator Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican and chairman of the intelligence committee, praised the move and called for leakers to be prosecuted "to the fullest extent of the law."

    C.I.A. Director Has Made Plugging Leaks a Top Priority, NYT, 23.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/us/23leak.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

C.I.A. Fires Senior Officer Over Leaks

April 22, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID JOHNSTON and SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, April 21 — The Central Intelligence Agency has dismissed a senior career officer for disclosing classified information to reporters, including material for Pulitzer Prize-winning articles in The Washington Post about the agency's secret overseas prisons for terror suspects, intelligence officials said Friday.

The C.I.A. would not identify the officer, but several government officials said it was Mary O. McCarthy, a veteran intelligence analyst who until 2001 was senior director for intelligence programs at the National Security Council, where she served under President Bill Clinton and into the Bush administration.

At the time of her dismissal, Ms. McCarthy was working in the agency's inspector general's office, after a stint at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an organization in Washington that examines global security issues.

The dismissal of Ms. McCarthy provided fresh evidence of the Bush administration's determined efforts to stanch leaks of classified information. The Justice Department has separately opened preliminary investigations into the disclosure of information to The Post, for its articles about secret prisons, as well as to The New York Times, for articles last fall that disclosed the existence of a program of domestic eavesdropping without warrants supervised by the National Security Agency. Those articles were also recognized this week with a Pulitzer Prize.

Several former veteran C.I.A. officials said the dismissal of an agency employee over a leak was rare and perhaps unprecedented. One official recalled the firing of a small number of agency contractors, including retirees, for leaking several years ago.

The dismissal was announced Thursday at the C.I.A. in an e-mail message sent by Porter J. Goss, the agency's director, who has made the effort to stop unauthorized disclosure of secrets a priority. News of the dismissal was first reported Friday by MSNBC.

Ms. McCarthy's departure followed an internal investigation by the C.I.A.'s Security Center, as part of an intensified effort that began in January to scrutinize employees who had access to particularly classified information. She was given a polygraph examination, confronted about answers given to the polygraph examiner and confessed, the government officials said. On Thursday, she was stripped of her security clearance and escorted out of C.I.A. headquarters. Ms. McCarthy did not reply Friday evening to messages left by e-mail and telephone.

"A C.I.A. officer has been fired for unauthorized contact with the media and for the unauthorized disclosure of classified information," said a C.I.A. spokesman, Paul Gimigliano. "This is a violation of the secrecy agreement that is the condition of employment with C.I.A. The officer has acknowledged the contact and the disclosures."

Mr. Gimigliano said the Privacy Act prohibited him from identifying the employee.

Intelligence officials speaking on the condition of anonymity said that the dismissal resulted from "a pattern of conduct" and not from a single leak, but that the case involved in part information about secret C.I.A. detention centers that was given to The Washington Post.

Ms. McCarthy's departure was another unsettling jolt for the C.I.A., battered in recent years over faulty prewar intelligence in Iraq, waves of senior echelon departures after the appointment of Mr. Goss as director and the diminished standing of the agency under the reorganization of the country's intelligence agencies.

The C.I.A.'s inquiry focused in part on identifying Ms. McCarthy's role in supplying information for a Nov. 2, 2005, article in The Post by Dana Priest, a national security reporter. The article reported that the intelligence agency was sending terror suspects to clandestine detention centers in several countries, including sites in Eastern Europe.

Leonard Downie Jr., The Post's executive editor, said on its Web site that he could not comment on the firing because he did not know the details. "As a general principle," he said, "obviously I am opposed to criminalizing the dissemination of government information to the press."

Eric C. Grant, a spokesman for the newspaper, would not address whether any C.I.A. employee was a source for the secret prison articles, but said, "No Post reporter has been subpoenaed or talked to investigators in connection with this matter."

The disclosures about the prisons provoked an outcry among European allies and set off protests among Democrats in Congress. The leak prompted the C.I.A. to send a criminal referral to the Justice Department. Lawyers at the Justice Department were notified of Ms. McCarthy's dismissal, but no new referral was issued, law enforcement officials said. They said that they would review the case, but that her termination could mean she would be spared criminal prosecution.

In January, current and former government officials said, Mr. Goss ordered polygraphs for intelligence officers who knew about certain "compartmented" programs, including the secret detention centers for terrorist suspects. Polygraphs are routinely given to agency employees at least every five years, but special polygraphs can be ordered when a security breach is suspected.

The results of such exams are regarded as important indicators of deception among some intelligence officials. But they are not admissible as evidence in court — and the C.I.A.'s reliance on the polygraph in Ms. McCarthy's case could make it more difficult for the government to prosecute her.

"This was a very aggressive internal investigation," said one former C.I.A. officer with more than 20 years' experience. "Goss was determined to find the source of the secret-jails story."

With the encouragement of the White House and some Republicans in Congress, Mr. Goss has repeatedly spoken out against leaks, saying foreign intelligence officials had asked him whether his agency was incapable of keeping secrets.

In February, Mr. Goss told the Senate Intelligence Committee that "the damage has been very severe to our capabilities to carry out our mission." He said it was his hope "that we will witness a grand jury investigation with reporters present being asked to reveal who is leaking this information."

"I believe the safety of this nation and the people of this country deserves nothing less," he said.

Ms. McCarthy has been a well-known figure in intelligence circles. She began her career at the agency as an analyst and then was a manager in the intelligence directorate, working at the African and Latin America desks, according to a biography by the strategic studies center. With an advanced degree from the University of Minnesota, she has taught, written a book on the Gold Coast and was director of the social science data archive at Yale University.

Public records show that Ms. McCarthy contributed $2,000 in 2004 to the presidential campaign of John Kerry, the Democratic nominee.

Republican lawmakers praised the C.I.A. effort. Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said, "I am pleased that the Central Intelligence Agency has identified the source of certain unauthorized disclosures, and I hope that the agency, and the community as a whole, will continue to vigorously investigate other outstanding leak cases."

Several former intelligence officials — who were granted anonymity after requesting it for what they said were obvious reasons under the circumstances — were divided over the likely effect of the dismissal on morale. One veteran said the firing would not be well-received coming so soon after the disclosure of grand jury testimony by Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff that President Bush in 2003 approved the leak of portions of a secret national intelligence estimate on Iraqi weapons.

"It's a terrible situation when the president approves the leak of a highly classified N.I.E., and people at the agency see management as so disastrous that they feel compelled to talk to the press," said one former C.I.A. officer with extensive overseas experience.

But another official, whose experience was at headquarters, said most employees would approve Mr. Goss's action. "I think for the vast majority of people this will be good for morale," the official said. "People didn't like some of their colleagues deciding for themselves what secrets should be in The Washington Post or The New York Times."

Paul R. Pillar, who was the agency's senior analyst for the Middle East until he retired late last year, said: "Classified information is classified information. It's not to be leaked. It's not to be divulged." He has recently criticized the Bush administration's handling of prewar intelligence about Saddam Hussein's unconventional weapons programs.

Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting for this article.

    C.I.A. Fires Senior Officer Over Leaks, NYT, 22.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/22/washington/22leak.html?hp&ex=1145764800&en=81940dc876d7a464&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Prewar Intelligence Ignored, Former C.I.A. Official Says

April 22, 2006
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, April 21 — A former top official of the Central Intelligence Agency has accused the Bush administration of ignoring intelligence assessments about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programs in the months leading up to the Iraq war.

Tyler Drumheller, the former head of the C.I.A.'s European operations, is the second C.I.A. veteran in recent weeks to attack the White House's handling of prewar intelligence. The criticism comes as the administration is already facing complaints from retired generals who have criticized the decision to go to war in Iraq and charged that civilian policy makers at the Pentagon ignored the advice of uniformed officers.

In an interview on the CBS News television program "60 Minutes" that will be broadcast Sunday evening, Mr. Drumheller said that White House officials had repeatedly ignored the intelligence community's assessments about the state of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs. Mr. Drumheller declined an interview request on Friday, citing an agreement with CBS that he not make public comments until the television interview is shown. A CBS news release issued on Friday included excerpts from the interview.

According to the release, Mr. Drumheller cited one instance in which George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, told President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that a paid agent in Saddam Hussein's inner circle, Foreign Minister Naji Sabri, had reported that Iraq had no active programs for weapons of mass destruction.

Three days later, according to Mr. Drumheller's account, the White House told C.I.A. officials that it was proceeding with plans to go to war.

"And we said, 'Well, what about the intel?' And they said, 'Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change.' "

A CBS spokesman, Kevin Tedesco, said Mr. Drumheller's account was that the exchange took place in September 2002, six months before the American invasion of Iraq.

Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, did not address Mr. Drumheller's accusations.

"Tyler Drumheller is a former employee expressing his personal opinions," Mr. Gimigliano said. "They are not the official views of the Central Intelligence Agency."

Mr. Drumheller's accusations are striking because it is rare for intelligence officers, even in retirement, to criticize openly an administration they served.

But Paul R. Pillar, who until last October oversaw American intelligence assessments about the Middle East, wrote in the March-April issue of Foreign Affairs that the Bush administration had selectively ignored crucial intelligence assessments about Iraq's unconventional weapons and about the likelihood of postwar chaos in Iraq.

In an interview on Friday, Mr. Pillar said many people still serving in the intelligence community were angry about what they deem the manipulation of prewar intelligence.

"Are there people still wearing the badge inside the intelligence community who share these concerns?" said Mr. Pillar, who is now a visiting professor at Georgetown University. "Absolutely. There's no question about it."

    Prewar Intelligence Ignored, Former C.I.A. Official Says, NYT, 22.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/22/washington/22intel.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

A Break for Code Breakers on a C.I.A. Mystery

April 22, 2006
The New York Times
By KENNETH CHANG

For nearly 16 years, puzzle enthusiasts have labored to decipher an 865-character coded message stenciled into a sculpture on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters in Langley, Va. This week, the sculptor gave them an unsettling but hopeful surprise: part of the message they thought they had deciphered years ago actually says something else.

The sculpture, titled "Kryptos," the Greek word for "hidden," includes an undulating sheet of copper with a message devised by the sculptor, Jim Sanborn, and Edward M. Scheidt, a retired chairman of the C.I.A.'s cryptographic center.

The message is broken into four sections, and in 1999, a computer programmer named Jim Gillogly announced he had figured out the first three, which include poetic ramblings by the sculptor and an account of the opening of King Tut's tomb. The C.I.A. then announced that one of its physicists, David Stein, had also deciphered the first three sections a year earlier.

On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Sanborn left a phone message for Elonka Dunin, a computer game developer who also runs an e-mail list for enthusiasts trying to solve the "Kryptos" puzzle. For the first time, Mr. Sanborn had done a line-by-line analysis of his text with what Mr. Gillogly and Mr. Stein had offered as the solution and discovered that part of the solved text was incorrect.

Within minutes, Ms. Dunin called back, and Mr. Sanborn told her that in the second section, one of the X's he had used as a separator between sentences had been omitted, altering the solution. "He was concerned that it had been widely published incorrectly," Ms. Dunin said.

Mr. Sanborn's admission was first reported Thursday by Wired News.

Ms. Dunin excitedly started sending instant messages online to Chris Hanson, the co-moderator of the "Kryptos" e-mail group. Within an hour, Ms. Dunin figured out what was wrong. The last eight characters of the second section, which describes something possibly hidden on C.I.A. grounds, had been decoded as "IDBYROWS" which people read as "I.D. by rows" or "I.D. by Row S."

In an interview yesterday, Mr. Sanborn said he had never meant that at all. To give himself flexibility as he carved the letters into the copper sheet, he had marked certain letters that could be left out. In the second passage, he left out an X separator before these eight letters.

"It was purely an act of aesthetics on my part," he said.

He said he expected that the encryption method, which relies on the position of the letters, would transform that part of the message into gibberish, and that the solvers would know to go back and reinsert the missing separator. But "remarkably, when you used the same system, it said something that was intelligible," Mr. Sanborn said. He decided to let the code breakers know about the error because "they weren't getting the whole story," he said.

When Ms. Dunin reinserted the X, the eight characters became "LAYERTWO." She called Mr. Sanborn again, who confirmed that was the intended message. "It's a surprise, and it's exciting," Ms. Dunin said. That is the first real progress on "Kryptos" in more than six years. Now to figure out what it means.

In an e-mail interview, Mr. Gillogly said that the corrected text, "layer two," is "intriguing but scarcely definitive." He added, "Like much of the sculpture, it can be taken in many ways." Mr. Gillogly, who has not worked much on the puzzle in recent years, said he would go back to see if the answer was now apparent.

One possibility is that "layer two" is the crucial key for solving the rest of the puzzle. Or it could be a hint that the letters need to be layered atop one another. Mr. Sanborn and Mr. Scheidt have said that even when all of the text is unraveled, other puzzles will remain in "Kryptos."

"This new discovery could possibly make it easier to crack and possibly not make it easier to crack," Mr. Sanborn offered unhelpfully. "It may be a dead-end diversion I like to send people on, a primrose lane to nowhere."

Mr. Scheidt said it had taken only three or four months to devise a puzzle that has lasted nearly 16 years, adding that only he, Mr. Sanborn and "probably someone at C.I.A." know the answer.

For everyone else, the remaining 97 letters of the fourth section remain baffling (the slashes indicate line breaks):

?OBKR/UOXOGHULBSOLIFBBWFLRVQQPRNGKSSO/TWTQSJQSSEKZZWATJKLUDIAWINFBNYP/VTTMZFPKWGDKZXTJCDIGKUHUAUEKCAR

    A Break for Code Breakers on a C.I.A. Mystery, NYT, 22.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/22/us/22puzzle.html

No Proof of Secret C.I.A. Prisons, European Antiterror Chief Says

April 21, 2006
The New York Times
By DAN BILEFSKY

BRUSSELS, April 20 — The European Union's antiterrorism chief told a hearing on Thursday that he had not been able to prove that secret C.I.A. prisons existed in Europe.

"We've heard all kinds of allegations," the official, Gijs de Vries, said before a committee of the European Parliament. "It does not appear to be proven beyond reasonable doubt."

But Mr. de Vries came under criticism from some legislators who called the hearing a whitewash. Kathalijne Buitenweg, a Dutch member of Parliament from the Green Party, said that even without definitive proof, "the circumstantial evidence is stunning."

"I'm appalled that we keep calling to uphold human rights while pretending that these rendition centers don't exist and doing nothing about it," she said.

Many European nations were outraged after an article in The Washington Post in November cited unidentified intelligence officials as saying that the C.I.A. had maintained detention centers for terrorism suspects in eight countries, including some in Eastern Europe. A later report by the advocacy group Human Rights Watch cited Poland and Romania as two of the countries.

Both countries, as well as others in Europe, have denied the allegations. But the issue has inflamed trans-Atlantic tensions.

Mr. de Vries said the European Parliament investigation had not uncovered rights abuses despite more than 50 hours of testimony by rights advocates and people who say they were abducted by C.I.A. agents. A similar investigation by the Council of Europe, the European human rights agency, came to the same conclusion in January — though the leader of that inquiry, Dick Marty, a Swiss senator, said then that there were enough "indications" to justify continuing the investigation.

A number of legislators on Thursday challenged Mr. de Vries for not taking seriously earlier testimony before the committee of a German and a Canadian who gave accounts of being kidnapped and kept imprisoned by foreign agents.

The committee also heard Thursday from a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, who said: "I can attest to the willingness of the U.S. and the U.K. to obtain intelligence that was got under torture in Uzbekistan. If they were not willing, then rendition prisons could not have existed." But Mr. Murray, who was recalled from his job in 2004 after condemning the Uzbek authorities and criticizing the British and American governments, told the committee that he had no proof that detention centers existed within Europe.

He said he had witnessed such rendition programs in Uzbekistan, but he seemed to back up Mr. de Vries's assertion when he said he was not aware of anyone being taken to Uzbekistan from Europe. "As far as I know, that never happened," he said.

While he was ambassador, Mr. Murray made many public statements condemning the government of President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan for its poor human rights record.

At the time, the Bush administration was using Uzbekistan as a base for military operations in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Murray, who has remained an outspoken critic of American and British policy toward Uzbekistan, has since been criticized by Foreign Secretary Jack Straw of Britain for breaching diplomatic protocol.

    No Proof of Secret C.I.A. Prisons, European Antiterror Chief Says, NYT, 21.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/21/world/europe/21rendition.html

In New Job, Spymaster Draws Bipartisan Criticism

April 20, 2006
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, April 19 — The top Republican and the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee have disagreed publicly about many things, but on one issue they have recently come together. Both are disquieted by the first-year performance of John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence.

The fear expressed by the two lawmakers, Representatives Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan, and Jane Harman, Democrat of California, is that Mr. Negroponte, the nation's overseer of spy agencies, is creating just another blanket of bureaucracy, muffling rather than clarifying the dangers lurking in the world.

In an April 6 report, the Intelligence Committee warned that Mr. Negroponte's office could end up not as a streamlined coordinator but as "another layer of large, unintended and unnecessary bureaucracy." The committee went so far as to withhold part of Mr. Negroponte's budget request until he convinced members he had a workable plan.

The creation of Mr. Negroponte's post was Congress's answer to the failure to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks and to the bungled prewar reports on Iraqi weapons. The overhaul, the most sweeping reorganization of intelligence in a half-century, was intended to establish a primary intelligence adviser to the president, to ensure that 16 turf-conscious agencies share information and to see that dissenting views are not squelched.

Intelligence officials say there has been progress in information-sharing, particularly at the National Counterterrorism Center, the new hub for reports on terrorist threats. Aides to Mr. Negroponte insist that analysts are encouraged to offer divergent views to avoid the "groupthink" blamed for past failures.

In a telephone interview on Wednesday night, Mr. Negroponte strongly defended his record.

"If there's one watchword for what we've been about, it's integration," he said, noting that all agencies are supposed to feed threat information to the counterterrorism center and participate in three daily video conferences.

"I don't see us as another bureaucratic layer at all," he said. "What's changed is that for the first time, there's a high-ranking official in charge of managing the intelligence community."

Mr. Negroponte said that between the intelligence reform law and the recommendations of a presidential commission on weapons intelligence, his office had been given "about 100 tasks to do," and added: "We've just gotten started. A year is not a long time."

But some current and former intelligence officials and members of Congress express disappointment with the progress Mr. Negroponte has made since being sworn in a year ago this week, faulting him as failing to provide forceful direction to the $44-billion-a-year archipelago of intelligence agencies.

"I don't think we have a lot to show yet for the intelligence reform," said Mark M. Lowenthal, a former top C.I.A. official and Congressional intelligence staff member. "What's their vision for running the intelligence community? My sense is there's a huge hunger for leadership that's not being met."

Mr. Lowenthal said he spoke regularly with intelligence officers about Mr. Negroponte's office, and heard little praise.

"At the agencies, officers are telling me, 'All we got is another layer,' " he said.

Ms. Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House committee, said the success of the Intelligence Reform Act, which created Mr. Negroponte's office and was passed in December 2004, would depend "50 percent on leadership."

"I'm not seeing the leadership," she said in an interview, adding that Mr. Negroponte, who had a long career as a diplomat, is now a "commander" and must act like one.

"The title is director, not ambassador," Ms. Harman said. "The skill sets are very different. The goal is not to grow a bureaucracy."

Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, who played a central role in devising the intelligence overhaul, said she was worried about what she said was Mr. Negroponte's failure to confront the Defense Department over an aggressive grab for turf over the past year.

"I remain concerned about the balance of power with the Pentagon," Ms. Collins said Wednesday.

In particular, she said she believed that Mr. Negroponte should have responded more assertively to a Pentagon directive last November that appeared to assert control over the National Security Agency, which does electronic eavesdropping; the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which takes satellite and aerial photos; and the National Reconnaissance Office, which launches and operates spy satellites. All are part of the Defense Department.

"While those agencies are hosted in the Pentagon, they report to the D.N.I.," Ms. Collins said. "I think the directive confused the relationship and weakened the D.N.I."

But Ms. Collins praised the National Counterterrorism Center and said it was far too early to pass judgment on Mr. Negroponte. "We need to give him some time and cut him some slack," she said.

Mr. Negroponte said the Defense Department had not cut into his power. "I flatly reject the notion that somehow control of civilian intelligence is being gobbled up by the Pentagon," he said, adding that "there's a clear division of labor" and that his office works closely with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his under secretary for intelligence, Stephen A. Cambone.

Even the most outspoken critics acknowledge that Mr. Negroponte's job is dauntingly complex, requiring that he brief President Bush each morning while overseeing disparate agencies and creating his own office from scratch.

At a session with reporters last week, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, Mr. Negroponte's principal deputy, said intelligence tradecraft "has benefited from the introspection the community has undergone over the last couple of years."

General Hayden, who was director of the N.S.A. for six years, said he "didn't understand" the criticism from Representatives Hoekstra and Harman about excessive bureaucracy, "because in the same press briefing they said we need to do more."

He and other officials said Mr. Negroponte's office had requested money for 1,539 positions, but two-thirds of them were inherited from offices that already existed. The law permits the agency to create up to 500 new jobs, and plans call for stopping at 450, General Hayden said.

But reports from the agencies, especially the C.I.A., suggest they do not yet feel liberated. Officers complain about constant demands for information from Mr. Negroponte's office.

Senator Collins said Mr. Negroponte was under enormous pressure.

"All of us in Congress who are appalled at the intelligence failure that preceded the invasion of Iraq want to make sure the intelligence we get on Iran, for instance, is much better," she said. "He can't afford to fail, because the threats are too dire and the consequences are too great."

    In New Job, Spymaster Draws Bipartisan Criticism, NYT, 20.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/20/washington/20intel.html?hp&ex=1145592000&en=07b00dcb24004a01&ei=5094&partner=homepage

National Archives Pact Let C.I.A. Withdraw Public Documents

April 18, 2006
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, April 17 — The National Archives signed a secret agreement in 2001 with the Central Intelligence Agency permitting the spy agency to withdraw from public access records it considered to have been improperly declassified, the head of the archives, Allen Weinstein, disclosed on Monday.

Mr. Weinstein, who began work as archivist of the United States last year, said he learned of the agreement with the C.I.A. on Thursday and was putting a stop to such secret reclassification arrangements, which he described as incompatible with the mission of the archives.

Like a similar 2002 agreement with the Air Force that was made public last week, the C.I.A. arrangement required that archives employees not reveal to researchers why documents they requested were being withheld.

The disclosure of the secret agreements provides at least a partial explanation for the removal since 1999 of more than 55,000 pages of historical documents from access to researchers at the archives. The removal of documents, including many dating to the 1950's, was discovered by a group of historians this year and reported by The New York Times in February.

The reclassification program has drawn protests from many historians and several members of Congress, notably Representative Christopher Shays, the Connecticut Republican who held a hearing on the program last month.

The National Archives, with facilities in College Park, Md., at the presidential libraries and in other locations, are the repository of most official government documents and a major resource for historians.

"Classified agreements are the antithesis of our reason for being," Mr. Weinstein said in a statement. "Our focus is on the preservation of records and ensuring their availability to the American public, while at the same time fulfilling the people's expectation that we will properly safeguard the classified records entrusted to our custody."

In a brief interview, Mr. Weinstein said he was particularly disturbed that the archives had agreed not to tell researchers why documents were unavailable. The C.I.A. agreement said archives employees would "not attribute to C.I.A. any part of the review or the withholding of documents." In the agreement with the Air Force, archives officials said they would "not disclose the true reason for the presence" of Air Force personnel at the archives.

Mr. Weinstein said he would not permit such agreements in the future. If the withdrawal of previously declassified documents becomes necessary, he said, it will be conducted "with transparency," including disclosure of the number of documents removed.

Asked about Mr. Weinstein's statement, Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, said, "Working very closely over the years with the National Archives, C.I.A.'s goal has been to ensure the greatest possible public access to material that has been properly declassified."

C.I.A. officials have said the reclassification work was necessary because other agencies, including the State Department, released material about intelligence activities without giving the agency a chance to review it.

First Lt. Christy A. Stravolo, an Air Force spokeswoman, said that any decisions on documents that had been "put back into protective custody" complied with federal guidelines. "The Air Force Declassification Office has a very thorough process for review, and there are no shortcuts so as to protect national security," Lieutenant Stravolo said.

Thomas S. Blanton, director of the private National Security Archive at George Washington University, praised Mr. Weinstein's actions.

"He's doing the right thing, no more secret agreements to classify open files," said Mr. Blanton, whose group helped uncover the reclassification program. "The National Archives aided and abetted a covert operation to lie to researchers and white-out history."

Matthew M. Aid, a Washington historian who discovered in December that documents he obtained years ago had been removed from open shelves, said he was "saddened" by the revelation that archives officials had agreed to hide the reclassification program. "I still don't understand why this all had to be done in secret," Mr. Aid said.

John W. Carlin, Mr. Weinstein's predecessor as head of the archives from 1995 to 2005, said in a statement that he knew nothing about the reclassification program and was "shocked" to learn the contents of the secret agreements signed when he was in office.

Michael J. Kurtz, the assistant archivist, who signed both agreements, could not be reached for comment last night. Mr. Weinstein said Mr. Kurtz had told him that he briefed Mr. Carlin about the agreements, but that he understood if Mr. Carlin did not recall being told of the reclassification effort.

    National Archives Pact Let C.I.A. Withdraw Public Documents, NYT, 18.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/18/washington/18archives.html

Citing Security, C.I.A. Seeks Suit's Dismissal

April 18, 2006
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

State secrets are involved in a lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency brought by the wife of a former covert operative, lawyers for the agency said yesterday in a New York federal court, arguing that national security will be at risk if the case is allowed to proceed.

At a hearing in Federal District Court in Manhattan, the lawyers asked Judge Laura Taylor Swain to dismiss the case, saying that all of the vital information in the suit was highly classified and could not be disclosed to the woman or her lawyers.

The agency has already combed the documents presented to date in the suit, which was filed last September. Among the information the C.I.A. classified and blacked out were the names of the woman bringing the suit and of her husband, most of the events in dispute, and the name of a second government agency that the woman is suing.

In a declaration presented in court, the director of the C.I.A., Porter J. Goss, said he had determined that classified information about the woman and her husband was "so integral" to the suit that any further court action would require secrets to be disclosed. Publishing any details of the case would cause "serious damage" to national security, Mr. Goss said.

Invoking an unusual state secrets privilege, lawyers for the agency asked Judge Swain to dismiss the case immediately.

The lawyer for the woman who is suing, Mark S. Zaid, said that he had the necessary clearances to see classified information, but that he could not communicate with the woman, who was overseas in a country whose name was blacked out in the court papers. Mr. Zaid charged that the C.I.A. was blocking him from having a legal conversation with the woman.

The original suit Mr. Zaid filed, now extensively edited with the agency's blackouts, said the woman's husband was in the securities business, with a New York Stock Exchange license, when he became an undercover agent for the C.I.A. The agency sent him to several foreign countries, then brought him back to the United States in 1999. Sometime later he was "summarily separated" from the C.I.A.

Both the woman and her husband became ill and depressed as a result of his firing, the suit states. The man's depression was compounded, the suit says, after he was in "close physical proximity" to the Sept. 11 attacks in New York. The C.I.A. refused to provide medical or psychological care for the couple, so they moved to a foreign country in search of treatment.

For reasons that are classified, the woman and the couple's three children have not been able to return to the United States. She remains "a virtual prisoner" in her home there, the suit says, "constantly fearful of eventual detection," with her mental health deteriorating.

Mr. Zaid said he was barred by secrecy regulations from talking to the woman on a regular, nonsecure telephone line. He could not meet with her in the foreign country because he would break the rules by bringing classified information back into the United States, he said.

"What they are trying to do is strangle my ability to represent these clients," Mr. Zaid told Judge Swain. He asked the judge to order the agency to provide secure channels for him to talk with the woman and her husband.

Judge Swain did not rule on whether to dismiss the case. She set another hearing, probably in early June, to decide Mr. Zaid's request for more access to his client.

    Citing Security, C.I.A. Seeks Suit's Dismissal, NYT, 18.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/18/us/nationalspecial3/18hearing.html

Critics: National intelligence office not doing much

Posted 4/12/2006 12:49 AM ET
USA TODAY
By John Diamond

WASHINGTON — A year after John Negroponte became the first director of national intelligence, key lawmakers worry that the spy agency they created is not fulfilling its vital mission.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is "not adding any value" by enlarging the bureaucracy, said Rep. Pete Hoekstra, a Michigan Republican who leads the House Intelligence Committee. "They're lengthening the time to make things happen. ... We want them to be lean and mean."

The agency does some tasks well, Hoekstra said in an interview Tuesday, but is only slowly improving the quality of intelligence. Negroponte was sworn into office last April 21.

Congress created the agency in December 2004 to streamline and centralize control over the nation's intelligence community. Last month, a bipartisan majority of Hoekstra's committee asked Congress to freeze part of the agency's budget until it answers lawmakers' concerns, including worries that new employees are being hired too quickly.

Once a bureaucracy takes root, Hoekstra said, "It's awfully hard to get rid of."

Gen. Michael Hayden, Negroponte's deputy, said the agency is within the limit set by Congress of 500 new positions. About 400 intelligence jobs from other agencies also have moved under Negroponte's control, Hayden said, along with about 400 staffers at new centers focused on issues such as nuclear proliferation and terrorism.

The agency's staff must have enough power to know what's happening in the intelligence community, Hayden said. "I'm confident we can do that (without) another layer of bureaucracy."

Rep. Jane Harman of California, the committee's ranking Democrat, said Negroponte should concentrate on improving the quality of intelligence, not on new hires and office space.

"He needs to focus on capability, not on buildings, billets (budgeted positions) and bureaucracy," Harman said. "What we're lacking is leadership, leadership and leadership."

Improvements are underway, said John Scott Redd, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Redd, who reports to Negroponte, told the House Armed Services Committee last week that his center has developed a list of 200,000 known terrorists in a highly classified database.

Hoekstra acknowledged that communication among agencies — a major flaw in pre-9/11 counterterrorism operations — has improved. He also said Negroponte has largely avoided turf wars with the Pentagon.

Other concerns surround the United States' $44 billion intelligence apparatus:

•Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters earlier this year the Bush administration was surprised by Hamas' victory in January's Palestinian elections. "Nobody saw it coming," she said. She did not single out any one U.S. intelligence agency. Harman called it "a stunning failure."

•After being briefed on the latest U.S. intelligence on Iran, Harman said she found the evidence on Iranian nuclear weapons programs unconvincing and "not where it needs to be."

•The Pentagon still dominates intelligence decision-making, despite Congress' intent to create more civilian control, said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington-based defense think tank. That's because the nation is at war and field commanders demand the most immediate intelligence. Also, the Pentagon has more people, money and power, Pike said.

Negroponte needs a large enough staff to have a hands-on role in controlling large Pentagon-funded agencies such as the National Security Agency and National Reconnaissance Office, Pike said. "You have no influence over a meeting that you didn't attend."

The new agency and Pentagon officers are "working side by side on a daily basis on intelligence issues," said Navy Cmdr. Gregory Hicks, a spokesman for Pentagon intelligence operations.

John Lehman, a member of the 9/11 Commission and Navy secretary under President Reagan, said Negroponte is a prisoner of a Bush administration tendency to address problems by creating large entities such as the Homeland Security Department. "This is really a big-government administration," Lehman said in an interview. "That's not any fault of Negroponte or Hayden."

    Critics: National intelligence office not doing much, UT, 12.4.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-04-12-national-intelligence_x.htm

Judge won't open NSA wiretaps for terror case

Mon Apr 3, 2006 10:19 PM ET
Reuters

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A U.S. judge overseeing a case against a Pakistani-American father and son accused of terrorism-related activity denied on Monday a defense request to review related National Security Agency wiretaps.

The legal request on behalf of Hamid Hayat and his father Umer followed the revelation late last year that the United States had monitored some international communications with people in the United States without court order.

Hamid Hayat is on trial on charges of lying to U.S. law enforcement officials and providing material support to terrorists by attending terror training camps in Pakistan. His father is accused of lying to the FBI about those activities.

In January, defense lawyers asked for "any and all documents, records or recording reflecting the use and information obtained throughout National Security Agency wiretaps related to the defendants."

Judge Garland Burrell Jr. of the U.S. District Court for Eastern California said the government most recently conveyed a classified response to the motion, and then without further comment denied the defense motion.

In a separate order, the judge denied another defense motion to produce evidence, but the document was redacted apparently for security reasons and offered no details.

The government last month rested its case in the trial, with their key witness a paid FBI informant who testified that Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, lived in California in 1998 and 1999.

Experts have said the informant was likely mistaken, potentially hurting his credibility before jurors.

    Judge won't open NSA wiretaps for terror case, R, 3.4.2006, http://today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2006-04-04T021913Z_01_N03319899_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-CALIFORNIA.xml

C.I.A. Fights Effort by Libby's Lawyers for Bush Briefings

March 8, 2006
The Nesw York Times
By DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, March 7 — The Central Intelligence Agency objected to producing presidential briefing documents sought by lawyers for the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, according to an affidavit unsealed Tuesday in the C.I.A. leak case.

A C.I.A. official wrote in the affidavit that turning over copies of the highly classified President's Daily Brief would interfere with the agency's responsibilities to provide the president with crucial and timely intelligence.

The briefing., wrote the agency official, Marilyn A. Dorn, is "the most sensitive report" produced by the agency's Directorate of Intelligence, and it is the basis for a continuous dialogue between the president and the country's intelligence agencies.

Lawyers for I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former top Cheney aide charged in the case, requested 300 to 500 documents, related to presidential briefing material from May 2003 to March 2004, as a crucial part of his defense to perjury and obstruction charges.

In response to the agency's objections, Mr. Libby's lawyers said in a court filing on Tuesday that they needed the material to show that the issues Mr. Libby dealt with in the presidential briefs "dwarfed in importance" the matters related to the exposure of the identity of a covert C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson.

Ms. Dorn, an information review officer at the National Clandestine Service, wrote that it would take the C.I.A. about nine months to prepare the documents sought by Mr. Libby's lawyers, in part because Mr. Libby did not always receive the same briefing material prepared for the president and the vice president.

The presidential brief is prepared each day by a small staff at the C.I.A, Ms. Dorn wrote. "Moreover, the job would divert their precious time and effort away from their primary task: preparing breaking intelligence for the president's immediate attention," she added.

    C.I.A. Fights Effort by Libby's Lawyers for Bush Briefings, NYT, 8.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/08/politics/08libby.html

Archivist Urges U.S. to Reopen Classified Files

March 3, 2006
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, March 2 — After complaints from historians, the National Archives directed intelligence agencies on Thursday to stop removing previously declassified historical documents from public access and urged them to return to the shelves as quickly as possible many of the records they had already pulled.

Allen Weinstein, the nation's chief archivist, announced what he called a "moratorium" on reclassification of documents until an audit can be completed to determine which records should be secret.

A group of historians recently found that decades-old documents that they had photocopied years ago and that appeared to have little sensitivity had disappeared from the open files. They learned that in a program operated in secrecy since 1999, intelligence and security agencies had removed more than 55,000 pages that agency officials believed had been wrongly declassified.

Mr. Weinstein, who became archivist of the United States a year ago, said he knew "precious little" about the seven-year-old reclassification program before it was disclosed in The New York Times on Feb. 21.

He said he did not want to prejudge the results of the audit being conducted by the archives' Information Security Oversight Office, which oversees classification. But he said the archives' goal was to make sure that government records that could safely be released were available. The audit was ordered by J. William Leonard, head of the oversight office, after he met with historians on Jan. 27.

"The idea is to let people get on with their research and not reclassify documents unless it's absolutely necessary," said Mr. Weinstein, who in the mid-1970's successfully sued the Federal Bureau of Investigation to obtain records he used for his book about Alger Hiss, the State Department official found to be a Soviet spy.

The flap over reclassified records takes place at a time when record-setting numbers of documents are being classified, fewer historical records are being released and several criminal leak investigations are under way. Bush administration officials have cited the need to keep sensitive information from terrorist groups and executive privilege in justifying the need for secrecy, and some members of Congress have called for tougher laws against leaks.

Mr. Weinstein met with historians on Thursday to announce the moratorium and plans for a meeting on Monday with representatives of the intelligence and military agencies, which have had teams of reviewers at the archives studying and withdrawing documents.

In a statement, Mr. Weinstein called on those agencies to "commit the necessary resources to restore to the public shelves as quickly as possible the maximum amount of information consistent with the obligation to protect truly sensitive national security information."

The secret agreement governing the reclassification program prohibits the National Archives from naming the agencies involved, but archivists have said they include the C.I.A., the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Air Force.

Judith A. Emmel, a spokeswoman for the director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, said the intelligence agencies would "continue to work with the National Archives to strike a balance between protecting truly sensitive national security information from unauthorized disclosure and ensuring that the public receives maximum access to unclassified archival records."

A C.I.A. spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, said the agency looked forward to discussing the issue. "The C.I.A. has worked hand in glove with the National Archives over the years on declassification and welcomes this initiative," Mr. Gimigliano said.

Historians have found that among the documents removed from open files are intelligence estimates from the Korean War, reports on Communism in Mexico in the 1960's and Treasury Department records from the 60's. The historians argue that there is no justification for keeping such papers secret.

Mr. Leonard has said he was shocked after reviewing a selection of documents presented by the historians, none of which he thought should be secret.

Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian in Washington who first uncovered the reclassification program and who attended the meeting with Mr. Weinstein, said the archivist's actions were "a positive first step." But Mr. Aid said "the real deals are going to get made" only after next week's meeting with the intelligence agencies.

Meredith Fuchs, general counsel of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, which has posted many of the reclassified documents on its Web site, said Mr. Weinstein "took our concerns very positively." She said he did not promise that the reclassifications would stop permanently, but assured the historians that "if it happens, it will be guided by better standards and it will be more transparent."

    Archivist Urges U.S. to Reopen Classified Files, NYT, 3.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/politics/03archives.html?hp&ex=1141448400&en=b9932bb452d6188e&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Year Into Revamped Spying, Troubles and Some Progress

February 28, 2006
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, Feb. 27 — A year after a sweeping government reorganization began, the agencies charged with protecting the United States against terrorist attacks remain troubled by high-level turnover, overlapping responsibilities and bureaucratic rivalry, former and current officials say.

Progress has been made, most of the officials say, toward one critical goal: the sharing of terrorist threat information from all agencies at the National Counterterrorism Center. But many argue that the biggest restructuring of spy agencies in half a century has bloated the bureaucracy, adding boxes to the government organization chart without producing clearly defined roles.

John O. Brennan, the interim director of the center until July, said the Bush administration was "still struggling" with the redesign.

"I still don't see an overarching framework that assigns roles and responsibilities to each agency in counterterrorism," said Mr. Brennan, who spent 23 years at the Central Intelligence Agency. He was replaced as head of the National Counterterrorism Center by John Scott Redd, a retired vice admiral selected by President Bush in June.

Mr. Brennan, now head of an intelligence contractor, said he remained "a strong believer" in the center but feared that it could end up "just another layer on top of everything else."

His concerns are widely echoed in Washington, where John D. Negroponte is approaching the end of his first year as the first director of national intelligence, a job created by Congress in response to the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Negroponte is scheduled to testify about threats to national security before the Senate Committee on Armed Services on Tuesday.

Among the critics is Steven Simon, a former National Security Council official in the Clinton administration and a co-author of two books on terrorism. "If people weren't fighting each other or scrambling for resources or trying to clarify who does what," Mr. Simon said, "they could be doing more to make us safe."

In the background of the skirmish among agencies new and old is a more fundamental conflict. Like other government veterans, Mr. Brennan said he did not believe that Mr. Negroponte had moved decisively enough to limit efforts by the Pentagon, which controls 80 percent of the intelligence budget, to expand its role in spying.

Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who played a central role in negotiating the intelligence reorganization, said she was "very concerned" about what she viewed as Mr. Negroponte's passivity in the face of assertive moves by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

"I think Director Negroponte has battles to fight within the bureaucracy, and particularly with the Department of Defense," Ms. Collins said. "D.O.D. is refusing to recognize that the director of national intelligence is in charge of the intelligence community."

Asked about Ms. Collins's remarks, a Negroponte spokesman, Carl Kropf, said his office worked closely with the Defense Department.

"We are involved in a full range of information sharing with the D.O.D. that encompasses frequent high-level discussions, meetings and coordination on budget, policy and operational topics," Mr. Kropf said.

Gregory F. Treverton, a former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said turbulence and jostling for turf were unavoidable in the reshuffling of spy agencies.

"I think on the whole we're better off" because of greater sharing of information, Mr. Treverton said, "although it certainly isn't pretty."

Mr. Treverton, now at the RAND Corporation, spoke of a "food fight" between two agencies: the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorist Center, or CTC, and the newer National Counterterrorism Center, or NCTC. He also called relations between federal agencies and state and local law enforcement "a complete mess."

Other former officials described disputes over things like parking spaces and job titles, a continuing incompatibility of computer systems, and battles over who works where.

Such tensions have hastened an exodus of counterterrorism and intelligence veterans, often lured away by lucrative jobs with contractors in the area. In recent weeks, the head of the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorist Center, Robert Grenier, and Mr. Negroponte's chief of information sharing, John Russack, announced they were stepping down.

Amy B. Zegart, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is writing a book on the intelligence reorganization, has interviewed 60 officials representing all of the agencies and has concluded that the overhaul has been superficial.

"The solution so far has been to add more spies and stir," said Dr. Zegart, who worked on the National Security Council in the Clinton administration and advised the Bush campaign in 2000. "Changing the wiring diagram isn't enough."

Though she has studied the topic for months, Dr. Zegart said, "it's hard for me to tell who's in charge."

Some experts counsel patience. James Jay Carafano, who studies domestic security at the Heritage Foundation, said it took about a decade in the 1940's and 50's to settle on the intelligence model that lasted through the cold war.

"With federal agencies, you create them, let them run and see what happens," Dr. Carafano said.

The most profound changes have come from Mr. Bush's appointment of Mr. Negroponte, a veteran diplomat, as the first director of national intelligence, a post created by intelligence overhaul legislation passed in December 2004. The new position, with oversight of all the intelligence agencies, was intended to remove any doubt about who was in charge.

Mr. Negroponte said in a Feb. 17 speech at Georgetown University that his office had "begun reshaping the cultures of United States national intelligence and begun the arduous process of deeply integrating our considerable resources."

Mr. Negroponte's own language emphasized that change had only just begun. He highlighted the role played by the National Counterterrorism Center, which is intended to prevent the hoarding of leads on Al Qaeda by different agencies.

Even outspoken critics like Dr. Zegart describe the NCTC as a valuable addition. Based in a Washington suburb, it oversees three video teleconferences a day linking main counterterrorism officials and posts intelligence on a classified Web site accessible to some 5,000 government analysts, said Mark Mansfield, the spokesman for the center.

In addition to uniting terrorism analysis, the center does "strategic operational planning" for counterterrorism. In both roles, there is clearly some overlap with the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorist Center, the unit responsible for pursuing Qaeda operatives around the world.

"People don't know where CTC's responsibilities end and NCTC's begin," said Paul R. Pillar, a former C.I.A. official who spent years at the counterterrorism center. "There's confusion about who does what."

Asked about reports of conflict between the two centers, Mr. Mansfield said, "It is fair to say that there are some differences, but given the intelligence reorganization and the new legislation, that is to be expected."

Officials are "working very hard to resolve differences," he said.

The C.I.A. center now has its fourth chief since 2002, as Mr. Grenier was replaced this month by an agency veteran who is still under cover. Turnover has been even more rapid at the F.B.I.'s counterterrorism division, which is on its sixth director since 2001.

Expressing a view widely heard among retired officials, Vincent M. Cannistraro, a top counterterrorism official at the C.I.A. before he retired in 1991, described the high-level turnover as "disastrous."

"Just as soon as someone gets up to snuff on counterterrorism — understands what Hamas and Al Qaeda are — they're moved out," Mr. Cannistraro said.

But Senator Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican who is chairman of the Intelligence Committee, was more sanguine.

Asked about the turnover, Mr. Roberts said that "losing veterans presents some challenges" but that "new blood is often good."

"The fact that we have not been hit again on our home soil speaks volumes on how we are doing in the war on terror," he said.

    Year Into Revamped Spying, Troubles and Some Progress, NYT, 28.2.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/28/politics/28terror.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Taking Spying to Higher Level, Agencies Look for More Ways to Mine Data

February 25, 2006
The New York Times
By JOHN MARKOFF

PALO ALTO, Calif., Feb. 23 — A small group of National Security Agency officials slipped into Silicon Valley on one of the agency's periodic technology shopping expeditions this month.

On the wish list, according to several venture capitalists who met with the officials, were an array of technologies that underlie the fierce debate over the Bush administration's anti-terrorist eavesdropping program: computerized systems that reveal connections between seemingly innocuous and unrelated pieces of information.

The tools they were looking for are new, but their application would fall under the well-established practice of data mining: using mathematical and statistical techniques to scan for hidden relationships in streams of digital data or large databases.

Supercomputer companies looking for commercial markets have used the practice for decades. Now intelligence agencies, hardly newcomers to data mining, are using new technologies to take the practice to another level.

But by fundamentally changing the nature of surveillance, high-tech data mining raises privacy concerns that are only beginning to be debated widely. That is because to find illicit activities it is necessary to turn loose software sentinels to examine all digital behavior whether it is innocent or not.

"The theory is that the automated tool that is conducting the search is not violating the law," said Mark D. Rasch, the former head of computer-crime investigations for the Justice Department and now the senior vice president of Solutionary, a computer security company. But "anytime a tool or a human is looking at the content of your communication, it invades your privacy."

When asked for comment about the meetings in Silicon Valley, Jane Hudgins, a National Security Agency spokeswoman, said, "We have no information to provide."

Data mining is already being used in a diverse array of commercial applications — whether by credit card companies detecting and stopping fraud as it happens, or by insurance companies that predict health risks. As a result, millions of Americans have become enmeshed in a vast and growing data web that is constantly being examined by a legion of Internet-era software snoops.

Technology industry executives and government officials said that the intelligence agency systems take such techniques further, applying software analysis tools now routinely used by law enforcement agencies to identify criminal activities and political terrorist organizations that would otherwise be missed by human eavesdroppers.

One such tool is Analyst's Notebook, a crime investigation "spreadsheet" and visualization tool developed by i2 Inc., a software firm based in McLean, Va.

The software, which ranges in price from as little as $3,000 for a sheriff's department to millions of dollars for a large government agency like the Federal Bureau of Investigation, allows investigators to organize and view telephone and financial transaction records. It was used in 2001 by Joyce Knowlton, an investigator at the Stillwater State Correctional Facility in Minnesota, to detect a prison drug-smuggling ring that ultimately implicated 30 offenders who were linked to Supreme White Power, a gang active in the prison.

Ms. Knowlton began her investigation by importing telephone call records into her software and was immediately led to a pattern of calls between prisoners and a recent parolee. She overlaid the calling data with records of prisoners' financial accounts, and based on patterns that emerged, she began monitoring phone calls of particular inmates. That led her to coded messages being exchanged in the calls that revealed that seemingly innocuous wood blocks were being used to smuggle drugs into the prison.

"Once we added the money and saw how it was flowing from addresses that were connected to phone numbers, it created a very clear picture of the smuggling ring," she said.

Privacy, of course, is hardly an expectation for prisoners. And credit card customers and insurance policyholders give up a certain amount of privacy to the issuers and carriers. It is the power of such software tools applied to broad, covert governmental uses that has led to the deepening controversy over data mining.

In the wake of 9/11, the potential for mining immense databases of digital information gave rise to a program called Total Information Awareness, developed by Adm. John M. Poindexter, the former national security adviser, while he was a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Although Congress abruptly canceled the program in October 2003, the legislation provided a specific exemption for "processing, analysis and collaboration tools for counterterrorism foreign intelligence."

At the time, Admiral Poindexter, who declined to be interviewed for this article because he said he had knowledge of current classified intelligence activities, argued that his program had achieved a tenfold increase in the speed of the searching databases for foreign threats.

While agreeing that data mining has a tremendous power for fighting a new kind of warfare, John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., said that intelligence agencies had missed an opportunity by misapplying the technologies.

"In many respects, we're fighting the last intelligence war," Mr. Arquilla said. "We have not pursued data mining in the way we should."

Mr. Arquilla, who was a consultant on Admiral Poindexter's Total Information Awareness project, said that the $40 billion spent each year by intelligence agencies had failed to exploit the power of data mining in correlating information readily available from public sources, like monitoring Internet chat rooms used by Al Qaeda. Instead, he said, the government has been investing huge sums in surveillance of phone calls of American citizens.

"Checking every phone call ever made is an example of old think," he said.

He was alluding to databases maintained at an AT&T data center in Kansas, which now contain electronic records of 1.92 trillion telephone calls, going back decades. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights advocacy group, has asserted in a lawsuit that the AT&T Daytona system, a giant storehouse of calling records and Internet message routing information, was the foundation of the N.S.A.'s effort to mine telephone records without a warrant.

An AT&T spokeswoman said the company would not comment on the claim, or generally on matters of national security or customer privacy.

But the mining of the databases in other law enforcement investigations is well established, with documented results. One application of the database technology, called Security Call Analysis and Monitoring Platform, or Scamp, offers access to about nine weeks of calling information. It currently handles about 70,000 queries a month from fraud and law enforcement investigators, according to AT&T documents.

A former AT&T official who had detailed knowledge of the call-record database said the Daytona system takes great care to make certain that anyone using the database — whether AT&T employee or law enforcement official with a subpoena — sees only information he or she is authorized to see, and that an audit trail keeps track of all users. Such information is frequently used to build models of suspects' social networks.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was discussing sensitive corporate matters, said every telephone call generated a record: number called, time of call, duration of call, billing category and other details. While the database does not contain such billing data as names, addresses and credit card numbers, those records are in a linked database that can be tapped by authorized users.

New calls are entered into the database immediately after they end, the official said, adding, "I would characterize it as near real time."

According to a current AT&T employee, whose identity is being withheld to avoid jeopardizing his job, the mining of the AT&T databases had a notable success in helping investigators find the perpetrators of what was known as the Moldovan porn scam.

In 1997 a shadowy group in Moldova, a former Soviet republic, was tricking Internet users by enticing them to a pornography Web site that would download a piece of software that disconnected the computer user from his local telephone line and redialed a costly 900 number in Moldova.

While another long-distance carrier simply cut off the entire nation of Moldova from its network, AT&T and the Moldovan authorities were able to mine the database to track the culprits.

Much of the recent work on data mining has been aimed at even more sophisticated applications. The National Security Agency has invested billions in computerized tools for monitoring phone calls around the world — not only logging them, but also determining content — and more recently in trying to design digital vacuum cleaners to sweep up information from the Internet.

Last September, the N.S.A. was granted a patent for a technique that could be used to determine the physical location of an Internet address — another potential category of data to be mined. The technique, which exploits the tiny time delays in the transmission of Internet data, suggests the agency's interest in sophisticated surveillance tasks like trying to determine where a message sent from an Internet address in a cybercafe might have originated.

An earlier N.S.A. patent, in 1999, focused on a software solution for generating a list of topics from computer-generated text. Such a capacity hints at the ability to extract the content of telephone conversations automatically. That might permit the agency to mine millions of phone conversations and then select a handful for human inspection.

As the N.S.A. visit to the Silicon Valley venture capitalists this month indicates, the actual development of such technologies often comes from private companies.

In 2003, Virage, a Silicon Valley company, began supplying a voice transcription product that recognized and logged the text of television programming for government and commercial customers. Under perfect conditions, the system could be 95 percent accurate in capturing spoken text. Such technology has potential applications in monitoring phone conversations as well.

And several Silicon Valley executives say one side effect of the 2003 decision to cancel the Total Information Awareness project was that it killed funds for a research project at the Palo Alto Research Center, a subsidiary of Xerox, exploring technologies that could protect privacy while permitting data mining.

The aim was to allow an intelligence analyst to conduct extensive data mining without getting access to identifying information about individuals. If the results suggested that, for instance, someone might be a terrorist, the intelligence agency could seek a court warrant authorizing it to penetrate the privacy technology and identify the person involved.

With Xerox funds, the Palo Alto researchers are continuing to explore the technology.

Scott Shane contributed reporting from Washington for this article.

    Taking Spying to Higher Level, Agencies Look for More Ways to Mine Data, NYT, 25.2.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/25/technology/25data.html?incamp=article_popular

U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review

February 21, 2006
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 — In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.

The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 previously declassified pages began in 1999, when the Central Intelligence Agency and five other agencies objected to what they saw as a hasty release of sensitive information after a 1995 declassification order signed by President Bill Clinton. It accelerated after the Bush administration took office and especially after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to archives records.

But because the reclassification program is itself shrouded in secrecy — governed by a still-classified memorandum that prohibits the National Archives even from saying which agencies are involved — it continued virtually without outside notice until December. That was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives' open shelves.

Mr. Aid was struck by what seemed to him the innocuous contents of the documents — mostly decades-old State Department reports from the Korean War and the early cold war. He found that eight reclassified documents had been previously published in the State Department's history series, "Foreign Relations of the United States."

"The stuff they pulled should never have been removed," he said. "Some of it is mundane, and some of it is outright ridiculous."

After Mr. Aid and other historians complained, the archives' Information Security Oversight Office, which oversees government classification, began an audit of the reclassification program, said J. William Leonard, director of the office.

Mr. Leonard said he ordered the audit after reviewing 16 withdrawn documents and concluding that none should be secret.

"If those sample records were removed because somebody thought they were classified, I'm shocked and disappointed," Mr. Leonard said in an interview. "It just boggles the mind."

If Mr. Leonard finds that documents are being wrongly reclassified, his office could not unilaterally release them. But as the chief adviser to the White House on classification, he could urge a reversal or a revision of the reclassification program.

A group of historians, including representatives of the National Coalition for History and the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, wrote to Mr. Leonard on Friday to express concern about the reclassification program, which they believe has blocked access to some material at the presidential libraries as well as at the archives.

Among the 50 withdrawn documents that Mr. Aid found in his own files is a 1948 memorandum on a C.I.A. scheme to float balloons over countries behind the Iron Curtain and drop propaganda leaflets. It was reclassified in 2001 even though it had been published by the State Department in 1996.

Another historian, William Burr, found a dozen documents he had copied years ago whose reclassification he considers "silly," including a 1962 telegram from George F. Kennan, then ambassador to Yugoslavia, containing an English translation of a Belgrade newspaper article on China's nuclear weapons program.

Under existing guidelines, government documents are supposed to be declassified after 25 years unless there is particular reason to keep them secret. While some of the choices made by the security reviewers at the archives are baffling, others seem guided by an old bureaucratic reflex: to cover up embarrassments, even if they occurred a half-century ago.

One reclassified document in Mr. Aid's files, for instance, gives the C.I.A.'s assessment on Oct. 12, 1950, that Chinese intervention in the Korean War was "not probable in 1950." Just two weeks later, on Oct. 27, some 300,000 Chinese troops crossed into Korea.

Mr. Aid said he believed that because of the reclassification program, some of the contents of his 22 file cabinets might technically place him in violation of the Espionage Act, a circumstance that could be shared by scores of other historians. But no effort has been made to retrieve copies of reclassified documents, and it is not clear how they all could even be located.

"It doesn't make sense to create a category of documents that are classified but that everyone already has," said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel of the National Security Archive, a research group at George Washington University. "These documents were on open shelves for years."

The group plans to post Mr. Aid's reclassified documents and his account of the secret program on its Web site, www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv, on Tuesday.

The program's critics do not question the notion that wrongly declassified material should be withdrawn. Mr. Aid said he had been dismayed to see "scary" documents in open files at the National Archives, including detailed instructions on the use of high explosives.

But the historians say the program is removing material that can do no conceivable harm to national security. They say it is part of a marked trend toward greater secrecy under the Bush administration, which has increased the pace of classifying documents, slowed declassification and discouraged the release of some material under the Freedom of Information Act.

Experts on government secrecy believe the C.I.A. and other spy agencies, not the White House, are the driving force behind the reclassification program.

"I think it's driven by the individual agencies, which have bureaucratic sensitivities to protect," said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, editor of the online weekly Secrecy News. "But it was clearly encouraged by the administration's overall embrace of secrecy."

National Archives officials said the program had revoked access to 9,500 documents, more than 8,000 of them since President Bush took office. About 30 reviewers — employees and contractors of the intelligence and defense agencies — are at work each weekday at the archives complex in College Park, Md., the officials said.

Archives officials could not provide a cost for the program but said it was certainly in the millions of dollars, including more than $1 million to build and equip a secure room where the reviewers work.

Michael J. Kurtz, assistant archivist for record services, said the National Archives sought to expand public access to documents whenever possible but had no power over the reclassifications. "The decisions agencies make are those agencies' decisions," Mr. Kurtz said.

Though the National Archives are not allowed to reveal which agencies are involved in the reclassification, one archivist said on condition of anonymity that the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency were major participants.

A spokesman for the C.I.A., Paul Gimigliano, said that the agency had released 26 million pages of documents to the National Archives since 1998 and that it was "committed to the highest quality process" for deciding what should be secret.

"Though the process typically works well, there will always be the anomaly, given the tremendous amount of material and multiple players involved," Mr. Gimigliano said.

A spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency said he was unable to comment on whether his agency was involved in the program.

Anna K. Nelson, a foreign policy historian at American University, said she and other researchers had been puzzled in recent years by the number of documents pulled from the archives with little explanation.

"I think this is a travesty," said Dr. Nelson, who said she believed that some reclassified material was in her files. "I think the public is being deprived of what history is really about: facts."

The document removals have not been reported to the Information Security Oversight Office, as the law has required for formal reclassifications since 2003.

The explanation, said Mr. Leonard, the head of the office, is a bureaucratic quirk. The intelligence agencies take the position that the reclassified documents were never properly declassified, even though they were reviewed, stamped "declassified," freely given to researchers and even published, he said.

Thus, the agencies argue, the documents remain classified — and pulling them from public access is not really reclassification.

Mr. Leonard said he believed that while that logic might seem strained, the agencies were technically correct. But he said the complaints about the secret program, which prompted his decision to conduct an audit, showed that the government's system for deciding what should be secret is deeply flawed.

"This is not a very efficient way of doing business," Mr. Leonard said. "There's got to be a better way."

    U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review, NYT, 21.2.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/politics/21reclassify.html?hp&ex=1140498000&en=1490d91764a11aea&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Op-Ed Contributor

Loose Lips Sink Spies

February 10, 2006
The New York Times
By PORTER GOSS
Washington

AT the Central Intelligence Agency, we are more than holding our own in the global war on terrorism, but we are at risk of losing a key battle: the battle to protect our classified information.

Judge Laurence Silberman, a chairman of President Bush's commission on weapons of mass destruction, said he was "stunned" by the damage done to our critical intelligence assets by leaked information. The commission reported last March that in monetary terms, unauthorized disclosures have cost America hundreds of millions of dollars; in security terms, of course, the cost has been much higher. Part of the problem is that the term "whistleblower" has been misappropriated. The sharp distinction between a whistleblower and someone who breaks the law by willfully compromising classified information has been muddied.

As a member of Congress in 1998, I sponsored the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act to ensure that current or former employees could petition Congress, after raising concerns within their respective agency, consistent with the need to protect classified information.

Exercising one's rights under this act is an appropriate and responsible way to bring questionable practices to the attention of those in Congress charged with oversight of intelligence agencies. And it works. Government employees have used statutory procedures — including internal channels at their agencies — on countless occasions to correct abuses without risk of retribution and while protecting information critical to our national defense.

On the other hand, those who choose to bypass the law and go straight to the press are not noble, honorable or patriotic. Nor are they whistleblowers. Instead they are committing a criminal act that potentially places American lives at risk. It is unconscionable to compromise national security information and then seek protection as a whistleblower to forestall punishment.

Today America is confronting an enemy intent on brutal murder. Without the capacity to gain intelligence on terrorist organizations through clandestine sources and methods, we and our allies are left vulnerable to the horrors of homicidal fanaticism.

The C.I.A. has put many terrorists out of action since 9/11. In our pursuit of the enemy, we accept the unique responsibility we bear as officers of a clandestine service serving an open, constitutional society. But we also know that unauthorized disclosure of classified intelligence inhibits our ability to carry out our mission and protect the nation.

Revelations of intelligence successes or failures, whether accurate or not, can aid Al Qaeda and its global affiliates in many ways. A leak is invaluable to them, even if it only, say, prematurely confirms whether one of their associates is dead or alive. They can gain much more: these disclosures can tip the terrorists to new technologies we use, our operational tactics, and the identities of brave men and women who risk their lives to assist us.

Such leaks also cause our intelligence partners around the globe to question our professionalism and credibility. Too many of my counterparts from other countries have told me, "You Americans can't keep a secret." And because of the number of recent news reports discussing our relationships with other intelligence services, some of these critical partners have even informed the C.I.A. that they are reconsidering their participation in some of our most important antiterrorism ventures. They fear that exposure of their cooperation could subject their citizens to terrorist retaliation.

Last month, a news article in this newspaper described a "secret meeting" to discuss "highly classified" techniques to detect efforts by other countries to build nuclear weapons. This information was attributed to unnamed intelligence officials who "spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the effort's secrecy." Whether accurate or not, this is a direct acknowledgment that these unnamed officials apparently know the importance of secrecy.

Recently, I noticed renewed debate in the news media over press reports in 1998 that Osama bin Laden's satellite phone was being tracked by United States intelligence officials. In the recent debate, it was taken for granted that the original reports did not hurt our national security efforts, and any suggestions that they did cause damage were dismissed as urban myth. But the reality is that the revelation of the phone tracking was, without question, one of the most egregious examples of an unauthorized criminal disclosure of classified national defense information in recent years. It served no public interest. Ultimately, the bin Laden phone went silent.

I take seriously my agency's responsibility to protect our national security. Unauthorized disclosures undermine our efforts and abuse the trust of the people we are sworn to protect. Since becoming director, I have filed criminal reports with the Department of Justice because of such compromises. That department is committed to working with us to investigate these cases aggressively. In addition, I have instituted measures within the agency to further safeguard the integrity of classified data.

Our enemies cannot match the creativity, expertise, technical genius and tradecraft that the C.I.A. brings to bear in this war. Criminal disclosures of national security information, however, can erase much of that advantage. The terrorists gain an edge when they keep their secrets and we don't keep ours.

Porter Goss is the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

    Loose Lips Sink Spies, NYT, 10.2.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/10/opinion/10goss.html?ex=1145851200&en=580ef1d812343e39&ei=5070

New Details Revealed on C.I.A. Leak Case

February 4, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, Feb. 3 — Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff told prosecutors that Mr. Cheney had informed him "in an off sort of curiosity sort of fashion" in mid-June 2003 about the identity of the C.I.A. officer at the heart of the leak case, according to a formerly secret legal opinion, parts of which were made public on Friday.

The newly released pages were part of a legal opinion written in February 2005 by Judge David S. Tatel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. His opinion disclosed that the former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., acknowledged to prosecutors that he had heard directly from Mr. Cheney about the Central Intelligence Agency officer, Valerie Wilson, more than a month before her identity was first publicly disclosed on July 14, 2003, by a newspaper columnist.

"Nevertheless," Judge Tatel wrote, "Libby maintains that he was learning about Wilson's wife's identity for the first time when he spoke with NBC Washington Bureau Chief Tim Russert on July 10 or 11." Mr. Russert denied Mr. Libby's account. Ms. Wilson is married to Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador who has criticized the Bush administration's Iraq policy.

Over all, the new material amplified and provided new details on charges outlined in the October 2005 indictment against Mr. Libby. The indictment accused Mr. Libby of falsely telling investigators that he had first learned about Ms. Wilson from reporters, when he had, according to the charging document, learned of it from other government officials like Mr. Cheney.

Mr. Libby appeared in federal court in Washington on Friday for the first time in several months. A federal trial judge, Reggie B. Walton, set a calendar that means Mr. Libby's trial will not begin for at least 11 months, with jury selection to begin on Jan. 8, 2007.

Judge Walton had hoped to start the trial in the fall of 2006 but Mr. Libby's chief lawyer, Theodore V. Wells Jr., said he would be involved in another trial at that time.

Judge Tatel's comments in the formerly secret legal opinion were largely drawn from affidavits supplied by the special counsel in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, that were written nearly two years ago, in August 2004. At that time, Mr. Fitzgerald was seeking to compel grand jury testimony from two reporters, Judith Miller, then a reporter for The New York Times, and Matthew Cooper, a reporter for Time magazine.

By that point, the newly disclosed pages showed, Mr. Fitzgerald had centered his inquiry on possible perjury charges against Mr. Libby, although that was not publicly known at the time. Mr. Fitzgerald had abandoned a prosecution based on a federal law that makes it a crime to disclose the identity of a covert officer at the C.I.A. Such charges, Judge Tatel wrote, were "currently off the table for lack of evidence."

Judge Tatel wrote his opinion as part of a unanimous decision by the three-judge panel which ruled on Feb. 15, 2005, that Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper had potentially vital evidentiary information and could not refuse to testify to the grand jury in the leak case on First Amendment grounds.

In a separate affidavit filed by Mr. Fitzgerald and disclosed Friday, the prosecutor wrote that Mr. Libby had testified that he had forgotten the conversation with Mr. Cheney when he talked to Mr. Russert. "Further according to Mr. Libby, he did not recall his conversation with the Vice President even when Russert allegedly told him about Wilson's wife's employment."

About eight pages of Judge Tatel's concurring opinion were deleted from the opinion released in 2005. After Mr. Libby's indictment, lawyers for The Wall Street Journal went to court and succeeded in obtaining the material released Friday by order of the same three-judge panel.

Not all of the previously withheld material was released. Several pages, which apparently contained information about Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation of Karl Rove, the senior White House adviser, remained under seal. Mr. Rove has not been charged, but remains under investigation although his lawyer has expressed confidence that Mr. Rove will be cleared.

The release of new material represented an important First Amendment ruling for the right of public access to court records, said Theodore J. Boutros Jr., a lawyer for The Journal. "We're pleased that the court recognized that grand jury secrecy is not absolute and that there's an important public interest in the public being able to scrutinize the basis for a judicial decision."

The newly disclosed information provides new details about other events, like a previously reported lunch on July 7, 2003, in which Mr. Libby told Ari Fleischer, then the White House press secretary, about Ms. Wilson.

In his opinion, Judge Tatel said that Mr. Fleischer said that Mr. Libby had told him that Ms. Wilson sent had her husband on a trip to Africa to examine intelligence reports indicating that Iraq had sought to buy uranium ore from Niger.

Judge Tatel wrote that Mr. Fleischer had described the lunch to prosecutors as having been "kind of weird" and had noted that Mr. Libby typically "operated in a very closed-lip fashion." Judge Tatel added: "Fleischer recalled that Libby 'added something along the lines of, you know, this is hush hush, nobody knows about this. This is on the q.t.' "

Neil A. Lewis contributed reporting for this article.

    New Details Revealed on C.I.A. Leak Case, NYT, 4.2.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/04/politics/04leak.html

Europe's C.I.A. Inquiry Finds No Evidence of Secret Prisons

January 25, 2006
The New York Times
By CRAIG S. SMITH

STRASBOURG, France, Jan. 24 - An inquiry by the Council of Europe into allegations that the C.I.A. has operated secret detention centers in Eastern Europe has turned up no evidence that such centers ever existed, though the leader of the inquiry, Dick Marty, said there are enough "indications" to justify continuing the investigation.

The report added, however, that it was "highly unlikely" that European governments were unaware of the American program of renditions, in which terrorism suspects were either seized in or transferred through Europe to third countries where they may have been tortured. Drawing from news reports, Mr. Marty contended that "more than a hundred" detainees have been moved anonymously and illegally through Europe under the program.

The findings, delivered to the Council on Tuesday, drew scornful reactions from some representatives of the Council's 46 member states, particularly from the British, who called the interim report "as full of holes as Swiss cheese" and "clouded in myth and motivated by a desire to kick America."

Mr. Marty, a Swiss senator and chairman of Council's Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, was charged with the inquiry after an article in The Washington Post in November cited unidentified intelligence officials as saying that the C.I.A. had maintained detention centers in eight countries, including some in Eastern European democracies.

A subsequent report by Human Rights Watch cited Poland and Romania as two of those countries. Both countries, as well as others in Europe, have denied the allegations.

Mr. Marty's findings to date amount to little more than a compendium of press clippings.

"It would seem from confidential contacts that the information revealed by The Washington Post, Human Rights Watch and ABC came from different sources, probably all well-informed official sources," a passage in the report reads. "This is clearly a factor that adds to the credibility of the allegations, since the media concerned have not simply taken information from one another."

Part of the reason Mr. Marty finds the allegations credible are other well-documented cases of America's rendition of terrorism suspects on European soil, including the 2003 C.I.A. abduction of an Egyptian cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, who was sent to Egypt.

Mr. Marty said he was equally wary of Romanian and Polish denials of the detention center allegations, noting that both countries are part of the American-led coalition fighting in Iraq and "escaped long dictatorships thanks largely to the American intelligence services."

He has requested data on aircraft movements from the Eurocontrol, the European air traffic control agency, and satellite images from the European Union's Satellite Center. It is not clear what he hopes to find in the data or photographs. His assertion that more than a hundred detainees have been moved through Europe - a number he took from an article in the German newspaper Die Zeit - is not of a scale that would show in satellite images.

The debate over renditions and secret prisons reflects the deep mistrust that has developed in Europe toward the Bush administration and its Eastern European coalition partners since the invasion of Iraq.

Both Mr. Marty and the Council of Europe's secretary general, Terry Davies, are convinced that the American press knows more about the alleged detention centers, but are under government pressure to keep the information secret.

"I know of a television company that has information that they are not willing to broadcast out of concern for their employees," Mr. Davies said. He declined to identify the broadcaster or the source of the allegation.

Mr. Davies is scheduled to issue a report in February on what the Council's member states have done to ensure that such breaches of the Council's European Convention on Human Rights do not occur. Mr. Marty is expected to issue a final report on his inquiry in March or April.

"This is no easy task," said John Swift, terrorism researcher for Human Rights Watch. "The information doesn't fall out of the sky."

For now, though, there is nothing concrete to the allegations of secret prisons beneath the chatter.

"At this stage of the investigations, there is no formal, irrefutable evidence of the existence of secret C.I.A. detention centers in Romania, Poland or any other country," Mr. Marty's report said.

Doreen Carvajal contributed reporting from Paris for this article.

    Europe's C.I.A. Inquiry Finds No Evidence of Secret Prisons, NYT, 25.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/25/international/europe/25cia.html

European investigator says US "outsourced" torture

Tue Jan 24, 2006 11:20 AM ET
Reuters
By Jon Boyle

STRASBOURG, France (Reuters) - The United States flew detainees to countries where they would be tortured and European governments probably knew about it, the head of a European human rights investigation said on Tuesday.

But Swiss senator Dick Marty said in a preliminary report for the Council of Europe human rights watchdog that he had found no irrefutable evidence to confirm allegations that the CIA operated secret detention centers in Europe.

His report kept pressure on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency over the allegations that it flew prisoners through European airports to jails in third countries, but critics said it was flawed and contained nothing new.

"There is a great deal of coherent, convergent evidence pointing to the existence of a system of 'relocation' or 'outsourcing of torture'," Marty told the 46-nation Council, based in the eastern French city of Strasbourg.

"It is highly unlikely that European governments, or at least their intelligence services, were unaware."

The September 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. landmarks sparked a U.S. global war on terrorism against al Qaeda and led to the invasion of Iraq. Public opinion has hardened in Europe since deadly bomb attacks in London last July and in Madrid in March, 2004.

But the allegations about the CIA, first made by newspapers and human rights groups late last year, have put pressure on the United States and European governments to explain their actions and those of their secret services.

Marty said it had been proved that "individuals have been abducted, deprived of their liberty and transported to different destinations in Europe, to be handed over to countries in which they have suffered degrading treatment and torture."

He estimated that more than 100 people had been involved in "renditions" -- delivering prisoners to jails in third countries, where they may have been mistreated or tortured.

NO "SMOKING GUN" ON SECRET JAILS

Romania, Poland, Ukraine, Kosovo, Macedonia and Bulgaria have faced accusations that the CIA secretly used detention centers on their soil. Marty has accused European states of turning a blind eye to the "dirty work".

But he acknowledged there was no firm evidence that there were any detention centers in Europe similar to the one operated by the United States at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

The United States did not immediately respond. It has not denied or confirmed the existence of secret detention centers, but U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said Washington has done nothing illegal.

Marty said U.S. media had come under government pressure not to publish further accusations, and he expected newly received European satellite and flight data would boost his probe.

The allegations follow widespread anger in Europe about the U.S. treatment of prisoners in Iraq and detainees at Guantanamo Bay, where hundreds of people judged by the U.S. military to be illegal combatants are held without charge.

Denis MacShane, a British member of parliament and former minister for Europe in U.S. ally Britain, told reporters Marty's report "has more holes than a Swiss cheese." A British government spokesman said there seemed to be no new facts.

European Security Commissioner Franco Frattini urged EU members to cooperate fully with Marty's probe but said it was too early to draw conclusions.

Poland said the report left no "basis for thinking such camps or prisons existed on Polish territory".

(Additional reporting by Ingrid Melander in Brussels, Kate Baldwin in London)

    European investigator says US "outsourced" torture, R, 24.1.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=newsOne&storyID=2006-01-24T161921Z_01_BOY377552_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-CIA-PRISONS.xml