Brad Warthen's Blog

Syria and WMD

Just when you think you have time to worry about what Michael Phelps is smoking, there's always somebody out there coming up with something more pressing, something you hadn't even thought about lately.

Like Syria and Weapons of Mass Destruction. So you thought the Israelis had taken care of that with the strike on the nuke facility? Well, think again, according to Jane's, which sent me a release today about the following:

Syria Appears to be Developing its Chemical Weapons Capability

IHS Jane’s examines satellite imagery

London (18th February 2009) – Jane’s Intelligence Review used satellite images from commercial sources gathered between 2005 and 2008 to examine activity at the chemical weapons facility identified as Al Safir in northwest Syria.  Imagery from DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-1 satellite and GeoEye’s IKONOS satellite shows that the site contains not only a number of the defining features of a chemical weapons facility, but also that significant levels of construction have taken place at the facility’s production plant and adjacent missile base. This does not suggest that Syria is arming itself for an offensive, but it could have regional security implications given Syria’s tension with its neighbour, Israel.

One of the clearest indicators that Al Safir is a military facility as opposed to a civilian industrial complex is the level of defences protecting the site.  The facility is accessed only through a military checkpoint and each element within the facility has an additional security point.

Christian Le Mière, editor of Jane’s Intelligence Review, explained: “Construction at the Al Safir facility appears to be the most significant chemical weapons production, storage and weaponisation site in Syria.  Its presence indicates Syria’s desire to develop unconventional weapons either to act as a deterrent to conflict with Israel or as a force enhancer should any conflict ensue. The satellite imagery that IHS Jane’s has examined suggests that Damascus has sought to expand and develop Al Safir and its chemical weapons arsenal.”

LeMière concluded: “Further expansion of Al Safir is likely to antagonise Israel and highlight mutual mistrust, even as peace talks between the two neighbours progress intermittently.  Although an Israeli air strike on the facility may not yet be likely, such developments only serve to underline and exacerbate regional tensions.”

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Actually, I'd tell you more but you have to subscribe to Jane's to get more. And I've got enough to worry about... They even offered me a contact number in case I wanted to see the satellite image. But I just don't have time to spend half a day shaking off surveillance, doubling back on my tracks, to meet a guy in Lisbon with a magazine in his left hand who will say, "Do you like good curry?," to which I have to remember the right thing to say or he'll garrote me.

Even if I went to the trouble, bud still wouldn't believe me that the WMD exists...

WashPost: CIA helps Pakistan, India work together on Mumbai case

Today I got a release from The Washington Post touting a good-news story that for me explained a lot:

The Washington Post today reports that in the aftermath of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, the CIA orchestrated back-channel intelligence exchanges between India and Pakistan, allowing the two former enemies to quietly share highly sensitive evidence while the Americans served as neutral arbiters.
 
The exchanges, which began days after the deadly assault in late November, gradually helped the two sides overcome mutual suspicions and paved the way for Islamabad's announcement last week acknowledging that some of the planning for the attack had occurred on Pakistani soil, report Joby Warrick and Karen DeYoung.
 
The intelligence went well beyond the public revelations about the 10 Mumbai terrorists, and included sophisticated communications intercepts and an array of physical evidence detailing how the gunmen and their supporters planned and executed their three-day killing spree in the Indian port city.
 
Indian and Pakistani intelligence agencies separately shared their findings with the CIA, which relayed the details while also vetting the intelligence and filling in blanks with gleanings from its networks, the sources said. The U.S. role was described in interviews with Pakistani officials and confirmed by U.S. sources with detailed knowledge of the arrangement. The arrangement is ongoing, and it is unknown whether it will continue after the Mumbai case is settled.

As I've read reports in recent weeks about Pakistan making arrests and acknowledging the involvement of its nationals, I've sort of wondered at the back of my mind why this case has proceeded without a lot more tension -- and maybe actions that went beyond tension -- between these too long-time adversaries. Think about it -- we could have had a nuclear war in the region by now. Then I read this.

This is just the kind of thing you HOPE your government is secretly doing, but you fear that too often it is not...

The passing of Yuri Nosenko

Boy, we really have been preoccupied in this country with this presidential election, haven't we? Me included.

Somehow, I had missed the fact that Yuri Nosenko had died, way back on Aug. 23, until I finally saw the obit in LAST week's Economist.

Two things to say about Comrade Nosenko's passing:

1. Did you ever see the 1986 made-for-TV movie about him (I think it was on HBO), starring Tommy Lee Jones? Excellent.
2. I often think of Mr. Nosenko when I hear from the antiwar people who talk about mistaken WMD intel as having been "lies," rather than a case of the administration simply believing the wrong intel.

The Nosenko case is a classic example of the fact that in intelligence, you often have to choose WHICH intel you are going to believe. After we locked up Mr. Nosenko for years, interrogating him under horrific conditions that one might choose to call "torture" without stretching the meaning of the word, believing him to be a KGB plant meant to discredit another defector (and to absolve the Kremlin of the JFK assassination), we finally rehabilitated him, said he was OK, gave him a check and a new identity.

But to this day, one can probably get a fierce debate going among folks with high security clearances as to which set of assumptions about Mr. Nosenko was the one based on lies.

In fact, the only reason we say he is dead is because the authorities TELL US he's dead. We don't even know what name he was living under "somewhere in the Southern United States." As the NYT reported:

Claire George, a former C.I.A. deputy director of operations, told The Washington Post, which first reported Mr. Nosenko’s death on Wednesday, that Mr. Nosenko’s treatment “was a terrible mistake.” But, he added, “you can’t be in the spy business without making mistakes.”

Not up to KGB standards

Waiting for Palin -- Huckabee's talking now -- I got to thinking about the other side of the world. Have you read about the Russians' lame attempt to pin the Georgian conflict on this guy Michael Lee White, who they claim is some sort of CIA master spy?

They base this on a passport White lost in 2005, and had replaced. They claim they found it at an outpost used by Georgian special forces.

From what I've read, if this guy's a spy, he's SO good, and so successful at NOT looking like a spy, that it seems unlikely he'd leave his passport lying around.

Look, if Putin wants to pin it on this guy, at the very least he could live up to the KGB tradition and make it look GOOD. They would have CAUGHT the guy, and turned him up at a press conference.

Why back in the day, the Rooskies could shoot down an ACTUAL U2 pilot, complete with a frickin' poison needle hidden in a frickin' silver dollar, and catch Ike lying about it.

Those were the days. Whatever happened to standards?

Colombians now have their own Entebbe

    "We have an amazing military. I think only the Israelis can possibly pull off something like this."

            -- Ingrid Betancourt

Just a week or two back, I read a front-page story in the WSJ about Ingrid Betancourt. The thrust of the story ("A Hostage to Fame") was that she was such a cause celebre around the world that she had too much value to the FARC, and therefore would probably never be traded. This caused me to think, "And this story isn't helping with that, is it?"

But what wonderful news yesterday! Just goes to show good things can happen, even when they seem impossible.

And good for the Colombian military -- they now have their own Entebbe, and that's saying something. Nobody but the Israelis can say that, and the Israelis have gone through a good, long dry spell without one. Sure, there was the Syrian/North Korean nuke plant, but that's nothing like putting boots on the ground way into the interior of Africa, complete with major-league deception and an impossible rescue.

One of my colleagues said this was better than Entebbe -- it was, after all, cleaner. No hostages or rescuers killed, the deception complete from start to finish. Absolutely. Of course, the rescuers in this case had a lot more time to plan, months in which to infiltrate and gain the guerrillas' trust. In the end, different kinds of operations. Entebbe was a brilliantly executed military coup de main. This latest caper was more of a perfect intelligence operation, involving no actual combat between armed antagonists. No, that's not a perfect distinction -- the military operation involved great intel, and the intelligence operation required military skills and discipline -- but it serves.

Anyway, it was a great job, and the Colombians deserve a big Way to Go! from civilized folk everywhere.

Somebody's Big, Stupid Second Cousin

There was an intriguing piece today in the WSJ applying the principles of The Wisdom of Crowds to predicting the outcome of the 2008 presidential election. The logic of it was persuasive when it invoked Wikipedia, which I find to be far more useful and reliable than detractors claim (when people say it's inaccurate, I want to know, Compared to what source of such breadth and depth?)

It was less persuasive in the preceding sentence, when it said,

This collective intelligence also accounts for why Google results, determined by an algorithm reflecting the popularity of Web results matching a search, are so relevant....

Today, wearing my vice president hat, I heard a presentation on new vistas of user-specific smart online advertising that the presenter described more than once in "Big Brother" terms -- not as a bad thing, but in terms of Big Brother's storied effectiveness and, I suppose, intrusiveness into private thinking patterns.

But you know what? So far, I've been hugely unimpressed by the effectiveness of software that is supposed to get to know me well enough that it can predict what I want. Take Netflix, for instance. I have freely given Netflix more than its share of info on my preferences. I have, for instance -- and I'm embarrassed to admit this -- rated 1,872 movies on the one-through-five-star system. Yes, that's one thousand, eight hundred and seventy-two. Any time Netflix has said I need to "rate more movies" -- and it seems to have an insatiable appetite in this regard -- I have taken a few moments (in the evenings, of course) to oblige.

I have done this in a vain attempt to give Netflix enough info to at least make a wild guess as to what sort of movies I like. It still doesn't seem any deeper or more intuitive than what a clerk at an '80s-style video store might have guess after less than a dozen rentals. Or so it seems to me.

For instance, Netflix is convinced I've got a fierce hankering to watch "Classics" -- you know, movies with Clark Gable or Myrna Loy or whatever. Apparently, this is based on the fact that I've given high ratings to, for instance, "It Happened One Night" and "The Thin Man." But of course I give those high ratings! Any literate movie fan would! That doesn't mean I want to see them again, or that I want to see lesser films with the same actors in them! I don't have a black-and-white jones here, people. I just acknowledge quality, and I think my judgments along those lines are fairly conventional, really. What I need you to do is extrapolate what I might like among films I haven't seen or heard about...

Whatever. Anyway, this sort of software hasn't figured me out, even when I've wanted it to. It's more like somebody's stupid second cousin than Big Brother.

We'd KILL a guy for passing intel to Israel?

Somehow I just caught up with this news, and I've got to ask, We're talking about killing a guy for passing intel to the Israelis?

That's what the NYT reported this morning:

On Wednesday, one day after Mr. Kadish, 84, was charged with slipping secret military documents to the Israeli government during the 1980s, they were trying to square the gruff, kindly man they knew as so honorable as never to cheat at cards with a criminal suspect who could face the death penalty if convicted.

You're kidding, right?

I mean, look at the sweet old guy (above): So this is James Bond all of a sudden? Or perhaps I should say, Kim Philby (whom we didn't kill, by the way, even though he was working for the real bad guys)?

For one thing, what secrets do we think we could possibly have that the Mossad didn't know already?

Second, we're talking the Israelis here, people! Don't we tell them stuff anyway? And don't they tell us stuff? I mean, am I expected to believe that George W. Bush and the boys figured out the whole North Korea-Syria nuke thing all by their lonesome?

Sure, there are certain lines one doesn't cross (unless invited to) even with your best friends, but come on -- this would be like whacking a guy for passing info to the Brits (speaking of Mr. Philby).

And when's the last time we did that? Major André? Speaking of which -- and I hope this isn't going to get me into a lot of trouble -- I recently crossed paths with Major André. Really.

You know that column I had Sunday about my conversation with the Pennsylvania waitress? Immediately after that conversation, I walked up the street and ran into the historical marker at right (which tells you which diner, if you're really, really good at central PA geography).

In fact, I took the picture on my phone -- and then promptly forgot about it, until I happened to read about Mr. Kadish, and got to thinking about executing spies, and the Israelis, and the British, which led to Major André, which led to "Hey, I think I shot a picture of that."

And now that I think further about it, it occurs to me that the compact device I used to capture that image would probably have been described as a "spy camera" back in the early '80s, which is when Mr. Kadish was allegedly letting an Israeli "diplomat" take pictures in his basement of stuff he brought home from work. Makes ya think, huh?

Danger is my middle name.

1962 NIE: No Cuban Missiles

FYI,  the WSJ notes today that the NIE of Sept. 19, 1962 said:

    The USSR could derive considerable military advantage from the establishment of Soviet medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba, or from the establishment of a submarine base there. . . . Either development, however, would be incompatible with Soviet practice to date and with Soviet policy as we presently estimate it.

That's 25 days before the start of what we call the Cuban Missile Crisis.

So do you think the CIA is better at that stuff now, or then? And is it better than it was in 2005, when it concluded the opposite of what the latest NIE concluded? And is it better than the Israelis, or the Brits?

Someone on this post raises the yellowcake case to discredit MI6. First, like the NIE, that whole thing was a lot more complicated than either side's shorthand version. Second, the British are historically seen as better at human intelligence than we are. The Americans do satellites, the Brits do people. And the latest NIE was based, in part, on humint.

Brits say our spooks did their sums wrong

This last post reminds me of something that was brought to my attention this morning: The Mossad aren't the only intelligence source saying our latest NIE on Iran got it wrong (at least, the headline part that everyone seems to be talking about, anyway). This was in The Daily Telegraph today:

Iran 'hoodwinked' CIA over nuclear plans
    British spy chiefs have grave doubts that Iran has mothballed its nuclear weapons programme, as a US intelligence report claimed last week, and believe the CIA has been hoodwinked by Teheran.   
    The timing of the CIA report has also provoked fury in the British Government, where officials believe it has undermined efforts to impose tough new sanctions on Iran and made an Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities more likely.
    The security services in London want concrete evidence to allay concerns that the Islamic state has fed disinformation to the CIA...

Remember when secret agents were secretive?

Something that strikes me about some of the recent news -- the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, the NIE before that one, and the news about the CIA destroying recordings of interrogations...

Remember back when spy stuff was actually classified, which means, NOT in the newspapers? Remember the Patrick McGoohan series, or for that matter the Joseph Conrad novel -- or the Johnny Rivers song? "Secret Agent Man," remember?

Seems like, not so very long ago, it was a bad thing that Bob "Prince of Darkness" Novak blew Valerie Plame's cover. Some folks thought so, anyway. I mean, before she wrote her memoir.

Didn't NIEs used to be secret? And what was the CIA doing taping interrogations anyway? Isn't it sort of part of the etiquette of intrigue that the rubber-hose business isn't on YouTube?

I can think of only one practical reason why spies would record an interrogation -- for use on the subject, to extract more information. It's one of the classic ploys -- actually, it's sort of the classic ploy -- for the brutish business of intelligence gathering: You get a guy to spill a little, then you say, What if we told your pals on the other side what you've already told us? If you don't want that to happen, tell us more...

But that was back when secret agent stuff was secret.