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Techno Warfare/MACRO-USGOV
Espionage Operations - Page 2
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Techno Warfare/ MACRO-USGOV Espionage Operations - Page 1
 Techno Warfare/MACRO-USGOV Espionage Operations - Page 2
 Techno Warfare/MACRO-USGOV Espionage Operations - Page 3 (Begin Nov. 1999)
Techno Warfare/MACRO-USGOV Espionage Operations - Historicals

October 27, 1999
VWARS- LIST WARS-ILETS WARS

        A very interesting occurrence yesterday and in light of AIM FL getting hacked as well as the owner of IUFO, hints that something is up in the land of VWARS.
       Yesterday I posted a commentary which included a negative reflection on disinfo agents, disrupter professionals and its highly negative impact on the pursuit of Indigenous Peoples Human and Political rights.  Included in the note was naming my personal favorite lying/slanderer's Wickes and Morningstar's operations.  Within three hours of this note going through my list alone and after a month and a half of having been hacker free with no disruptions in list or email service, suddenly I begin to get the infamous 1 ring calls that are an attempt to trigger my modem.
They came in consecutively and I was fortunate in that I had my phone in hand and could catch them
before they triggered my modem.  I used my tracing tools as somehow these calls completely bypassed the Caller ID system.  I don't mean it came up as anonymous, it completely did NOT register as a call even coming in.  However, since the nonsense began in August I've put on some more interesting Hardware that ties into the phone company and we managed to get the phone  number from where it originated.  Surprise!  It came from Florida. After I initiated the Call Trace function which
provides documentation for Law Enforcement, I contacted the phone company.  They were
blown away that someone could by pass the  Caller ID system.  After I hung up, a few
moments later a new call came through and it too was from Florida but this time it registered
in the Caller ID system.  It was a automated sales pitch for a trip to Disney land or something
to that effect.  However, the phone number of this marketing call was not the same the two
Caller ID bypass calls that came in.  Now I know who it is on this list that so willingly
provides the wickes/morningstar reports of our activities here.  What I wonder though is if
they're aware of the fact that the only one in Florida I know is Mr. Wickes who also so freely
provided software to all the AIM offices for "security".  In my case, after the last attempt
to blow my computer up I removed it so they can call all they want, there's no trip wire to set off.

Ellis

**********

EXPOSING THE GLOBAL SURVEILLANCE SYSTEM

October 24, 1999

IN THE LATE 1980S, IN A DECISION IT PROBABLY REGRETS, THE US PROMPTED NEW ZEALAND TO JOIN A NEW AND HIGHLY SECRET GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE SYSTEM. HAGER'S INVESTIGATION INTO IT AND HIS DISCOVERY OF THE ECHELON DICTIONARY HAS REVEALED ONE OF THE WORLD'S BIGGEST, MOST CLOSELY HELD INTELLIGENCE PROJECTS. THE SYSTEM ALLOWS SPY AGENCIES TO MONITOR MOST OF THE WORLD'S TELEPHONE, E-MAIL, AND TELEX COMMUNICATIONS.
by Nicky Hager
from his book SECRET POWER

For 40 years, New Zealand's largest intelligence agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) the nation's equivalent of the US National Security Agency (NSA) had been helping its Western allies to spy on countries throughout the Pacific region, without the knowledge of the New Zealand public or many of its highest elected officials. What the NSA did not know is that by the late 1980s, various intelligence staff had decided these activities had been too secret for too long, and were providing me with interviews
and documents exposing New Zealand's intelligence activities. Eventually, more than 50 people who work or have worked in intelligence and related fields agreed to be interviewed.

The activities they described made it possible to document, from the South Pacific, some alliance-wide systems and projects which have been kept secret elsewhere. Of these, by far the most important is ECHELON.

Designed and coordinated by NSA, the ECHELON system is used to intercept ordinary e-mail, fax, telex, and telephone communications carried over the world's telecommunications networks. Unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed during the Cold War, ECHELON is designed primarily for non-military targets: governments, organizations, businesses, and individuals in virtually every country. It potentially affects every person communicating between (and sometimes within) countries anywhere in the world.

It is, of course, not a new idea that intelligence organizations tap into e-mail and other public telecommunications networks. What was new in the material leaked by the New Zealand intelligence staff was precise information on where the spying is done, how the system works, its capabilities and shortcomings, and many details such as the codenames.

The ECHELON system is not designed to eavesdrop on a particular individual's e-mail or fax link. Rather, the system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications and using computers to identify and extract messages of interest from the mass of unwanted ones. A chain of secret interception facilities has been established around the world to tap into all the major components of the international telecommunications networks. Some monitor communications satellites, others land-based communications networks, and others radio communications. ECHELON links together all these facilities, providing the US and its allies with the ability to intercept a large proportion of the communications on the planet.

The computers at each station in the ECHELON network automatically search through the millions of messages intercepted for ones containing pre-programmed keywords. Keywords include all the names, localities, subjects, and so on that might be mentioned. Every word of every message intercepted at each station gets automatically searched whether or not a specific telephone number or e-mail address is on the list. The thousands of simultaneous messages are read in "real time" as they pour into the station, hour after hour, day after day, as the computer finds intelligence needles in telecommunications haystacks.

SOMEONE IS LISTENING
The computers in stations around the globe are known, within the network, as the ECHELON Dictionaries. Computers that can automatically search through traffic for keywords have existed since at least the 1970s, but the ECHELON system was designed by NSA to interconnect all these computers and allow the stations to function as components of an integrated whole. The NSA and GCSB are bound together under the five-nation UKUSA signals intelligence agreement. The other three partners all with equally obscure names are the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Britain, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) in Canada, and the Defense Signals Directorate (DSD) in Australia. The alliance, which grew from cooperative efforts during World War II to intercept radio transmissions, was formalized into the UKUSA agreement in 1948 and aimed primarily against the USSR. The five UKUSA agencies are today the largest intelligence organizations in their respective countries. With much of the world's business occurring by fax, e-mail, and phone, spying on these communications receives the bulk of intelligence resources. For decades before the introduction of the ECHELON system, the UKUSA allies did intelligence collection operations for each other, but each agency usually processed and analyzed the intercept from its own stations.

Under ECHELON, a particular station's Dictionary computer contains not only its parent agency's chosen keywords, but also has lists entered in for other agencies. In New Zealand's satellite interception station at Waihopai (in the South Island), for example, the computer has separate search lists for the NSA, GCHQ, DSD, and CSE in addition to its own. Whenever the Dictionary encounters a message containing one of the agencies' keywords, it automatically picks it and sends it directly to the headquarters of the agency concerned. No one in New Zealand screens, or even sees, the intelligence collected by the New Zealand station for the foreign agencies. Thus, the stations of the junior UKUSA allies function for the NSA no differently than if they were overtly NSA-run bases located on their soil.

The first component of the ECHELON network are stations specifically targeted on the international telecommunications satellites (Intelsats) used by the telephone companies of most countries. A ring of Intelsats is positioned around the world, stationary above the equator, each serving as a relay station for tens of thousands of simultaneous phone calls, fax, and e-mail. Five UKUSA stations have been established to intercept the communications carried by the Intelsats. The British GCHQ station is located at the top of high cliffs above the sea at Morwenstow in Cornwall. Satellite dishes beside sprawling operations buildings point toward Intelsats above the Atlantic Europe, and, inclined almost to the horizon, the Indian Ocean. An NSA station at Sugar Grove, located 250 kilometers southwest of Washington, DC, in the mountains of West Virginia, covers Atlantic Intelsats transmitting down toward North and South America. Another NSA station is in Washington State, 200 kilometers southwest of Seattle, inside the Army's Yakima Firing Center. Its satellite dishes point out toward the Pacific Intelsats and to the east.

The job of intercepting Pacific Intelsat communications that cannot be intercepted at Yakima went to New Zealand and Australia. Their South Pacific location helps to ensure global interception. New Zealand provides the station at Waihopai and Australia supplies the Geraldton station in West Australia (which targets both Pacific and Indian Ocean Intelsats).

Each of the five stations' Dictionary computers has a codename to distinguish it from others in the network. The Yakima station, for instance, located in desert country between the Saddle Mountains and Rattlesnake Hills, has the COWBOY Dictionary, while the Waihopai station has the FLINTLOCK Dictionary. These codenames are recorded at the beginning of every intercepted message, before it is transmitted around the ECHELON network, allowing analysts to recognize at which station the interception occurred.

New Zealand intelligence staff has been closely involved with the NSA's Yakima station since 1981, when NSA pushed the GCSB to contribute to a project targeting Japanese embassy communications. Since then, all five UKUSA agencies have been responsible for monitoring diplomatic cables from all Japanese posts within the same segments of the globe they are assigned for general UKUSA monitoring. Until New Zealand's integration into ECHELON with the opening of the Waihopai station in 1989, its share of the Japanese communications was intercepted at Yakima and sent unprocessed to the GCSB headquarters in Wellington for decryption, translation, and writing into UKUSA-format intelligence reports (the NSA provides the codebreaking programs).

See also:
Crypto AG: The NSA's Trojan Whore?
about the compromise of trusted ecryption hardware
Networking with Spooks
about control over the internet domain name system
Big Brother Goes Hi Tech
about loss of privacy in the information age
The Secret FISA Court:
Rubberstamping on Rights
about the loss of legal protections from covert surveillance.

**********

VWARS-U.S. Electronic Espionage: A Memoir

October 24, 1999
From one of our illustrious subscribers, an interesting reference and good read.

ellis

http://jya.com/nsa-elint.htm
10 June 1998: Link to dissent
14 April 1998: Add Duncan Campbell message
13 April 1998
Source: Columbia University Library, Microfilm
Thanks to Peter Sommer for the reference.
Additional information on NSA electronic interception

Note: The article begins with commentary on information provided by an anonymous former analyst of the National Security Agency followed by the full interview. The analyst was later named as Perry Fellwock, at the time using the pseudonym Winslow Peck.

Ramparts, Vol. 11, No. 2, August, 1972, pp. 35-50

U.S. Electronic Espionage:
A Memoir

About thirty miles northeast of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, right off the Baltimore-Washington expressway overlooking the flat Maryland countryside, stands a large three story building known informally as the "cookie factory." It's officially known as Ft. George G. Meade, headquarters of the National Security Agency.

Three fences surround the headquarters. The inner and outer barriers are topped with barbed wire, the middle one is a five-strand electrified wire. Four gatehouses spanning the complex at regular intervals house specially-trained marine guards. Those allowed access all wear iridescent I.D. badges -- green for "top secret crypto," red for "secret crypto." Even the janitors are cleared for secret codeword material. Once inside, you enter the world's longest "corridor" -- 980 feet long by 560 feet wide. And all along the corridor are more marine guards, protecting the doors of key NSA offices. At 1,400,000 square feet, it is larger than CIA headquarters, 1,135,000 square feet. Only the State Department  and the Pentagon, and the new headquarters planned for the FBI are more spacious. But the DIRNSA (Director, National Security Agency) can be further distinguished from the headquarters buildings of these three other giant bureaucracies -- it has no windows. Another palace of paranoia? No. For DIRNSA is the command center for the largest, most sensitive and far-flung intelligence gathering apparatus in the world's history. Here, and in the nine-story Operations Building Annex, upwards of 15,000 employees work to break the military, diplomatic and commercial codes of every nation in the world, analyze the de-crypted messages, and send the results to the rest of the U.S. intelligence community.

Far less widely known than the CIA, whose Director Richard Helms will occasionally grant public interviews, NSA silently provides an estimated 80 percent of all valid U.S. intelligence. So secret, so sensitive is the NSA mission and so highly indoctrinated are its personnel, that the Agency, twenty years after its creation, remains virtually unknown to those employees outside the intelligence community. The few times its men have been involved in international incidents, NSA's name has been kept out of the papers.

Nevertheless, the first American killed in Vietnam, near what became the main NSA base at Phu Bai, was an NSA operative. And the fact that Phu Bai remains the most heavily guarded of all U.S. bases suggests that an NSA man may well be the last.

The scope of the NSA's global mission has been shrouded in secrecy since the inception of the Agency. Only the haziest outlines have been known, and then only on the basis of surmise. However, Ramparts has recently been able to conduct a series of lengthy interviews with a former NSA analyst willing to talk about his experiences. He worked for the Agency for three and a half years -- in the cold war of Europe and the hot one in Southeast Asia. The story he tells of NSA's structure and history is not the whole story, but it is a significant and often chilling portion of it.

Our informant served as a senior NSA analyst in the Istanbul listening post for over two years. He was a participant in the deadly international fencing match that goes on daily with the Soviet Union, plotting their air and ground forces and penetrating their defenses. He watched the Six Day War unfold and learned of the intentions of the major powers -- Israel, the Soviet Union, the United States, France, Egypt -- by reading their military and diplomatic radio traffic, all of it duly intercepted, de-coded and translated by NSA on the spot. As an expert on NSA missions directed against the Soviet Union and the so-called "Forward Countries" -- Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Rumania and Yugoslavia -- he briefed such visiting dignitaries as Vice President Humphrey. In Indochina he was a senior analyst, military consultant and U.S. Air Force intelligence operations director for North Vietnam, Laos, the northern-most provinces of South Vietnam and China. He is a veteran of over one hundred Airborne Radio Direction Finding missions in Indochina -- making him thoroughly familiar with the "enemy" military structure and its order of battle.

With the benefit of the testimony he provides, we can see that the reason for the relative obscurity of NSA of less to do with its importance within the intelligence community than with the limits of its mission and the way it gets its results. Unlike the CIA, whose basic functions are clearly outlined in the 1947 law that created it, NSA, created in 1952, simply gathers intelligence. It does not formulate policy or carry out operations. Most of the people working for NSA are not "agents," but ordinary servicemen attached to one of  three semi-autonomous military cryptologic agencies -- the Air Force Security Service, the largest; the Naval Security Group; and the Army Security Agency, the oldest. But while it is true that the Agency runs no spies as in the popular myth, its systematic Signal Intelligence intercept mission is clearly prohibited by the Geneva Code. What we are dealing with is a highly bureaucratized, highly technological intelligence mission whose breadth and technological sophistication appear remarkable even in an age of imperial responsibilities and electronic wizardry.

So that not a sparrow or a government falls without NSA's instantaneous knowledge, over two thousand Agency field stations dot the five continents and the seven seas. In Vietnam, NSA's airborne flying platforms carrying out top-secret Radar Detection Finding missions, supply U.S. commanders with their most reliable information on the location of communist radio transmitters, and thus on the location of NLF units themselves. Other methods, the use of sensors and seismic detectors, either don't work or are used merely to supplement NSA's results. But the Agency's tactical mission in Indochina, intelligence support for U.S. commanders in the field, however vital to the U.S. war effort, is subsidiary in terms of men, time and material to its main strategic mission.

The following interview tells us a great deal about both sides of the NSA mission -- everything from how Agency people feel about themselves and the communist "enemy" to the NSA electronic breakthroughs that threaten the Soviet-American balance of terror. We learn for example that NSA knows the call signs for every Soviet airplane, the numbers on the side of each plane, the name of the pilot in command; the precise longitude and latitude of every nuclear submarine; the whereabouts of nearly every Soviet VIP; the location of every Soviet missile base; every army division, battalion and company -- its weaponry, commander and deployment. Routinely the NSA monitors all Soviet military, diplomatic and commercial radio traffic, including Soviet Air Defense, Tactical Air and KGB forces. (It was the NSA that found Che Guevara in Bolivia through radio communications intercept and analysis.) NSA cryptologic experts seek to break every Soviet code and do so with remarkable success, Soviet scrambler and computer-generated signals being nearly as vulnerable as ordinary voice and manual morse radio transmissions. Interception of Soviet radar signals enables NSA to gauge quite precisely the effectiveness of Soviet Air Defense units. Methods have even been devised to "fingerprint" every human voice used in radio transmissions and distinguish them from the voice of every other operator. The Agency's Electronic Intelligence Teams (ELINT) are capable of intercepting any electronic signal transmitted anywhere in the world and, from an analysis of the intercepted signal, identify the transmitter and physically reconstruct it. Finally, after having shown the size and sensitivity of the Agency's big ears, it is almost superfluous to point out that NSA monitors and records every trans-Atlantic telephone call.

Somehow, it is understandable, given the size of the stakes in the Cold War, that an agency like NSA would monitor U.S. citizens' trans-Atlantic phone calls. And we are hardly surprised that the U.S. violates the Geneva Code to intercept communist radio transmissions. What is surprising is that the U.S. systematically violates a treaty of its own making, the UKUSA Agreements of 1947. Under this treaty, the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia erected a white-anglo-saxon-protestant nation communications intelligence dictatorship over the "Free World." The agreement distinguishes between three categories of intelligence consumers, First, Second, and Third Party consumers. The First Party is the U.S. intelligence community. The Second party refers to the other white anglo-saxon nations' communications intelligence agencies; i.e. Great Britain's GCHQ, Canada's CBNRC, etc. These agencies exchange information routinely. Non-WASP nations, the so-called Third Party nations, are placed on short intelligence rations. This category includes all NATO allies -- West Germany, France, Italy, as well as South Vietnam, Japan, Thailand and the non-WASP allies in SEATO. But the idea of a closed club of gentlemanly white men gets quickly dispelled when we learn that the U.S. even intercepts the radio communications of its Second Party UKUSA "allies." From the U.S. military base at Chicksands, for example, and from the U.S. Embassy in London, NSA operatives busily intercept and transcribe British diplomatic traffic and send it off for further analysis to DIRNSA.

We feel that the information in this interview -- while not of a "sensitive" nature -- is of critical importance to America for the light it casts on the cold war and the anti-communist myths that perpetuate it. These myths about the aggressive intentions of the Soviet Union and China and about North Vietnam's "invasion of a democratic South Vietnam," can only be sustained by keeping the American people as ignorant as possible about the actual nature of these regimes and the great power relationships that exist in the world. The peace of the world, we are told, revolves shakily on a "balance of terror" between the armed might of the Soviet Union and the United States. So tenuous is this balance that if the U.S. were to let down its guard ever so slightly, if it were, for example, to reduce the ever-escalating billions allocated for "defense," we would immediately face the threat of destruction from the aggressive Soviets, who are relentless in their pursuit of military superiority. Our informant's testimony, based on years of dealing with the hard information about the Soviet military and its highly defensive-oriented deployment, is a powerful and authoritative rebuttal to this mythology.

But perhaps even an more compelling reason requires that this story be told. As we write, the devastating stepped-up bombing of North Vietnam continues. No one can say with certainty what the ultimate consequences of this desperate act are likely to be. Millions of Americans, perhaps a majority, deplore this escalation. But it would be a mistake to ignore the other millions, those who have grown up in fear of an entity known as "world communism." For them Nixon's latest measures have a clear rationale and a plausible purpose. It is precisely this political rationale and this strategic purpose that the testimony of our informant destroys.

We are told by Nixon that South Vietnam has been "invaded" by the North which is trying to impose its will on the people of the South. This latest version of why we continue to fight in Indochina -- the first version stressed the threat of China which allegedly controlled Hanoi, even as Moscow at one time was thought to control Peking -- emphasizes Hanoi's control over the NLF. Our evidence shows that the intelligence community, including NSA, has long determined that the NLF and the DRV are autonomous, independent entities. Even in Military Region I, the northern-most province of South Vietnam, and the key region in the "North Vietnamese" offensive, the command center has always been located not in Hanoi but in somewhere in the Ia Drang valley. This command center, the originating point for all military operations in the region, is politically and militarily under the control of the PRG. Known as Military Region Tri Tin Hue (MRTTH) it integrates both DRV and NLF units under the command. Hanoi has never simply "called the shots," although the DRV and PRG obviously have common reasons for fighting and share common objectives. All of this information NSA has passed on systematically to the political authorities who, equally systematically, have ignored it.

Nixon's military objective -- halting supplies to the South through bombing and mining of North Vietnamese ports -- turns out to be as bogus as his political rationale. Military supplies for the DRV and the NLF are stored along the Ho Chi Minh trail in gigantic underground staging areas know as bamtrams. These are capable of storing supplies for as long as twelve months, at normal levels of hostilities, according to NSA estimates.Even at the highly accelerated pace of the recent offensive, it would take several months (assuming 100 percent effectiveness) before our bombing and mining wold have any impact on the fighting.

Taken together, teh experience of our informant in Europe, in the Middle East, and in Indochina bears witness to the aggressive posture of the United States in the late 1960s. It is hard to see anything defensive about it. Our policy makers are well-informed by the intelligence community of the defensive nature of our antagonists' military operations. The NSA operations here described reflect the drive of a nation to control as much of the world as possible, whose leaders trust no one and are forced to spy on their closet allies in violation of the treaties they initiated themselves; leaders, moreover, for whom all nations are, in teh intelligence idiom, "targets," and who maintain the U.S. imperium around the world in large part through threat of actual physical annihilation.

At home, however, the favored weapon employed is ignorance rather than fear. Like NSA headquarters itself, the United States is surrounded by barriers -- barriers of ignorance that keep its citizens prisoners of the cold war. The first obstacle is formed by the myths propagated about communism and about its aggressive designs on America. The second, and dependent for its rationale on the first, is the incredible barrier of governmental secrecy that keeps most of the questionable U.S. aggressive activities hidden nor from our "enemies," who are the knowledgeable victims, but from the American people themselves. The final barrier is perhaps the highest and is barbe with the sharpest obstacles of all. It is nothing less than our reluctance as Americans to confront what we are doing to the peoples of the world, ourselves included, by organizations like the National Security Agency.

Q. Let's begin by getting a sense of the National Security Agency and the scope of its operations.

A. O.K. At the broadest level, NSA is a part of the United States intelligence community and a member of the USIB, the United States Intelligence Board. It sits on the Board with the CIA, the FBI, the State Department's RCI, and various military intelligence bureaus. Other agencies also have minor intelligence-gathering units, even the Department of the Interior.

All intelligence agencies are tasked with producing a particular product. NSA produces -- that is, collects, analyzes, and disseminates to its consumers -- Signals Intelligence, called SIGINT. It comes from communications or other types of signals intercepted from what we called "targeted entities," and it amounts to about 80 percent of the viable intelligence the U.S. government receives. There is COMSEC, a secondary mission. This is to produce all the communications security equipment, codes and enciphering equipment for the United States and its allies. This function of the NSA involves the monitoring of our own communications to make sure they are secure. But SIGINT is the main responsibility.

As far as NSA's personnel is concerned, they are divided into two groups: those that are totally civilian, and those like me who derived from the military. As far as the collection of data is concerned, the military provides almost all the people. They are recruited through one of the service cryptologic agencies. The three agencies are the U.S. Air Force Security Service (USAFSS), the Army Security Agency (ASA), and the Navy Security Group (NSG). These agencies may control a few intelligence functions that are primarily tactical in nature and directly related to ongoing military operations. But generally, DIRNSA, the Director of the National Security Agency, is completely in control over all NSA's tasks, missions and people.

The NSA, through its sites all over the world, copies -- that is, collects -- intelligence from almost every conceivable source. That means every radio transmission that is of a strategic or tactical nature, or is related to some government, or has some political significance. NSA is powerful, and it has grown since its beginning back in 1947. The only problem it has had has come over the last few years. Originally it had equal power with the CIA on the USIB and the National Security Council. But recently the CIA has gained more of a hegemony in intelligence operations, especially since Richard Helms became director of the entire intelligence community.

Q. Does the NSA have agents in the field?

A. Yes, but probably not in the way you mean. It is different from other intelligence agencies in that it's not a consumer of its own intelligence. That is, it doesn't act on the data it gathers. It just passes it on. Generally, there's a misconception all Americans have about spying. They think it's all cloak and dagger, with hundreds of james Bonds wandering around the world in Aston-Martins, shooting people. It just doesn't happen. It's all either routine or electronic. I got to know a lot of CIA people in my three and a half years with NSA, and it became pretty clear to me that most of them sit around doing mundane stuff. You know, reading magazines, newspapers, technical journals. Like some people say, they do a lot of translating of foreign phone books. Of course I did meet a few who were out in the jungles with guns in their hands too.

But as far as the NSA is concerned, it is completely technological. Like I said, at least 80 percent of all viable intelligence that this country receives and acts on comes from the NSA, and it is all from signals intelligence, strategic and tactical. I saw it from both angles -- first strategic in working against the Soviet Union in Turkey and then tactical flying missions against the VC in Nam. Information gathering by NSA is complete. It covers what foreign governments are doing, planning to do, have done in the past: what armies are moving where and against whom; what air forces are moving where, and what heir capabilities are. There really aren't any limits on NSA. Its mission goes all the way from calling in the B-52s in Vietnam to monitoring every aspect of the Soviet space program.

Q. In practical terms, what sort of data are collected by NSA?

A. Before going into that, I should get into the types of signals NSA collects. There are three basic area. First is what we called ELINT, electronics intelligence. This involves the interception and analysis of any electronics signal. There isn't necessarily any message on that signal. It's just the signal, and it's mainly used by technicians. The only time I ever remember using ELINT was when we were tracking a Russian fighter. Some of them has a particular type of radar system. As I remember, we called this system MANDRAKE. Anyhow, every time this system signalled, a particular type of electronic emission would occur. Our ELINT people would be looking for it, and whenever it came up, it would let them positively identify this type of fighter.

The second type of signal is related to this. It is intelligence from radar, called RADINT. This also involves the technicians. Let me give you an example. There is a particular type of Soviet radar system known in NSA by a code name which we'll call SWAMP. SWAMP is used by the Soviet technical air forces, by their air defense, by the KGB and some civilian forces. It is their way of locating any flying entity while it is in the air. It had a visual read-out display, so that, whenever a radar technician in the Soviet Union wanted to plot something on his map, he could do it by shooting a beam of light on a scope and then send it to whoever wanted to find out information about that airplane. Our RADINT people intercepted SWAMP signals in our European listening posts. From the data they got, NSA analysts were able to go back to the headquarters at Fort meade and in less than eight weeks completely reconstruct SWAMP. We duplicated it. This meant that we were able to see exactly what the Soviet operators were seeing when they used SWAMP. So, as far as this radar was concerned, the upshot was that they were doing our tracking for us. We knew everything they knew, and we knew what they were able to track over their airspace, and what they weren't.

Q. Does this mean that we can jam their radar?

A. Yes, part of the function of ELINT and RADINT is to develop electronic counter measures. There's a counter measure for every type of Soviet radar.

Q. You said there were three areas. You've gone over ELINT and RADINT. What's the third?

A. This is by far the most important. It's communications intelligence. COMINT. It involves the collection of radio communications of a targeted entity. NSA intercepts them, reproduces them in its equipment and breaks down any code used to encipher the signal. I should say that what I call a "targeted entity" could mean any country -- NSA gathers data on them all -- but in practical terms it's almost synonymous with the Soviet Union.

COMINT is the important function. It's what I was in, and it represents probably 95 percent of relevant SIGINT intelligence. As a matter of fact, the entire intelligence community is also known as the COMINT community.

Q. It would probably be good to backpedal for a moment before we go into your experiences in NSA and get into the way you joined the organization.

A. Well, I'd been in college, was bored, and wanted to do something different. I come from the Midwest, and we still believed those ads about joining the military and seeing the world. I enlisted in the Air Force. Like everybody else, I was shocked by basic training, but after that, when it came time to choose what I'd be doing for the rest of my time, it wasn't too bad. I tried for linguist's training, but there weren't any openings in the schools. I was then approached by three people I later found were a part of the National Security Agency. They interviewed me along with four other guys and asked us if we'd like to do intelligence work. We took a battery of tests, I.Q. and achievement tests, and had some interviews to determine our political and emotional stability. They really didn't go into our politics very much, I guess because were all so obviously apathetic. Their main concern was our sex life. They wanted to know if we were homosexual.

At this point, it was 1966, I suppose I had what you would call an analysis of the world situation. But it was primarily based on a belief in maintaining the balance of power. I really didn't see anything wrong with what our government was doing. Also, the few hints about what we might be doing in NSA were pretty exciting: world-wide travel working in the glamorous field of intelligence, being able to wear civilian clothes.

After getting admitted, I was bussed to Goodfellow Air Force Base at San Angelo, Texas. Originally, it was a WAC base or something like that, but now it's entirely an intelligence school for NSA. The whole basis of the training was their attempt to make us feel we were the absolute cream of the military. For most GIs, the first days in the military are awful, but as soon as we arrived at the school we were given a pass to go anywhere we wanted, just as long as were were back in school each morning. We could live off base; there was no hierarchical thing inside the classroom.

Q. What sort of things did you focus on in school?

A. At first it was basic stuff. For about two months we just learned primary analysis techniques, intelligence terms, and a rough schematic of the intelligence community. We learned a few rudimentary things about breaking codes and intercepting messages. A lot of people were dropped out of the program at this time because of inadequate school performance, poor attitude, or because of something in their backgrounds didn't prove out. Actually, of fifteen people with me in this class, only four made it through. We had been given access only to information rated "confidential" all the time, but then we got clearance and a Top Secret cryptologic rating.

The first day of the second phase of school began when we walked into the classroom and saw this giant map on the wall. It was marked "Top Secret," and it was of the Soviet Union. For the next three months, we learned about types of communications in operations throughout the world and also in-depth things about the political and administrative makeup of various countries. The Soviet Union, of course, was our primary focus. And we learned every one of its military functions: the entire bureaucratic structure, including who's who and where departments and headquarters are located; and a long history of its military and political involvements, especially with countries like China and the East European bloc, which we called "the forward area."

We learned in-depth analysis -- how to perform different types of traffic analysis, cryptic analysis, strategic analysis. A lot of the texts we used were from the Soviet Union, and had been translated by the CIA.

I'm not especially proud of it now, but I should tell you that I graduated at the head of the class. We had a little ceremony inside a local movie theater. I was called up with two guys from other classes and given special achievement certificates. We were given our choice of assignments anywhere in the world. I chose Istanbul. It seemed like the most far-out and exotic place available. After that I left San Angelo and went to Monterey to the Army's language school for a month and a half. I learned a bit of very technical Russian -- basically how to recognize the language -- and then to Fort Meade NSA headquarters for a couple of weeks indoctrination about Istanbul, our operation there at Karmasel, and the whole European intelligence community.

Q. When did you get to Istanbul?

A. That was January 1967.

Q. What did you do there?

A. I was assigned to be one of the flight analysts working primarily against the Soviet tactical Air Forces and Soviet long range Air Forces. I had about twenty-five morse operators who were listening to morse signals for me, and about five non-morse and voice operators. It was a pretty boring job for them. A morse operator, for instance, just sits there in front of a radio receiver with headphones, and a typewriter for copying morse signals. They would "roll onto" their target, which means that they would go to the frequency that their target was using. The list of likely frequencies and locations and the call signals that would be used -- all this information was made available by the analyst as technical support to the operator. In return the operator would feed the copy to me: I'd perform analysis on it and correlate with other intelligence collected there in Istanbul, and at the NSA installations in the rest of Europe.

Q. Where were the other NSA installations in Europe?

A. The major ones aside from Karmasel are in Berlinhof and Darmstadt, West Germany; Chicksands, England; Brindisi, Italy; and also at Trabesan and Crete. Some of these sites have gigantic Feranine antennas. This is a circular antenna array, several football fields in diameter, and it's capable of picking up signals from 360 degrees. They're very sensitive. We can pick up hundreds of signals simultaneously. We pick up voices speaking over short-range radio communications thousands of miles away.

The whole Air Force part of NSA, the USAFSS units, is known as the European Security region. It is headquartered at the I.G. Farben building in Berlin. The Army ASA has units attached to every Army installation in Europe. The Naval NSG has its sites aboard carriers in the 6th Fleet. But mainly it was us.

Q. What does this apparatus actually try to do?

A. Like I said, it copies -- that is, intercepts for decoding and analysis -- communications from every targeted country. As far as the Soviet Union is concerned, we know the whereabouts at any given time of all its aircraft, exclusive of small private planes, and its naval forces, including its missile-firing submarines. The fact is that we're able to break every code they've got, understand every type of communications equipment and enciphering device they've got. We know where their submarines are, what every one of their VIPs is doing, and generally their capabilities and the dispositions of all their forces. This information is constantly computer correlated, updated, and the operations go on twenty-four hours a day.

Q. Let's break it down a little. How about starting with the aircraft. How does NSA keep track of the Soviet air forces?

A. First, by copying Soviet Navair, which is their equivalent of the system our military has for keeping track of its own planes. And their Civair, like our civilian airports: we copy all of their air controllers' messages. So we have their planes under control. Then we copy their radar plotting of their own air defense radar, which is concerned with flights that come near their airspace and violate it. By this I mean the U.S. planes that are constantly overflying their territory. Anyhow, all this data would be correlated with our own radar and with the air-to-ground traffic these planes transmitted and our operators picked up. We were able to locate them exactly even if they weren't on our radar through RDF -- radio direction finding. We did this by instantaneously triangulating reception coming through these gigantic antennas I mentioned. As far as Soviet aircraft are concerned, we not only know where they are: we know what their call signs are, what numbers are on the side of every one of their planes, and, most of the time, even which pilots are flying which plane.

Q. You said that we overfly Soviet territory?

A. Routinely as a matter of fact -- over the Black Sea, down to the Baltic. Our Strategic Air Force flies the planes, and we support them. By that I mean that we watch them penetrate the Soviet airspace and then analyze the Soviet reaction -- how everything from their air defense and tactical air force to the KGB reacts. It used to be that SAC flew B-52s. As a matter of fact one of them crashed in the Trans-Caucasus area in 1968 and all the Americans on board were lost.

Q. Was it shot down?

A. That was never clear, but I don't believe so. The Soviets know what the missions of the SAC planes are. A lot of times they scramble up in their jets and fly wing-to-wing with our planes. I've seen pictures of that. Their pilots even communicate with ours. We've copied that.

Q. Do we still use U-2s for reconnaissance?

A. No, and SAC doesn't fly the B-52s anymore either. Now the plane they use is the SR-71. It has unbelievable speed and it can climb high enough to reach the edge of outer space. The first time I came across the SR-71 was when I was reading a report of Chinese reaction to its penetration of their airspace. The report said their air defense tracking had located the SR-71 flying at a fairly constant pattern at a fairly reasonable altitude. They scrambled MIG-21s on it, and when they approached it, the radar pattern indicated that the SR-71 had just accelerated with incredible speed and rose to such a height that the MIG-21s just flew around looking at each other. Their air-to-ground communications indicated that the plane just disappeared in front of their eyes.

I might tell you this as a sort of footnote to your mentioning of the U-2. The intelligence community is filled with rumor. When I got to Turkey, I immediately ran into rumors that Gary Powers' plane had been sabotaged, not shot down. Once I asked someone who'd been in Istanbul for quite a while and he told me that it was reported in a unit history that this had happened. The history said it had been three Turks working for the Soviets and that they'd put a bomb on the plane. I didn't read this history myself, however.

Q. You have explained how we are able to monitor Soviet air traffic to the extent indicated, but it's hard to believe that we could know where all their missile submarines are at any given moment.

A. Maybe so, but that's the way it is. There are some basic ways in which we can keep track of them, for example through the interpretation of their sub-to-base signals which they encode and transmit in bursts that last a fraction of a second. First we record it on giant tape drops several feet apart, where it is played back slowly so that we get the signal clearly. Then the signal will be modulated -- that is, broken down so we can understand it. Then the codes are broken and we get the message, which often turns out to contain information allowing us to tell where they are.

Another way in which we keep track of these subs is much simpler. Often they'll surface someplace and send a weather message.

Q. But don't submarines go for long periods without communicating, maneuvering according to some pre-arranged schedule?

A. Actually, not very often. There are times during a war exercise or communications exercise when they might not transmit for a week or even longer. But we still keep track of them. We've discovered that they're like all Soviet ships in that they travel in patterns. By performing a very complicated, computerized pattern analysis, we are able to know where to look for a particular ship if it doesn't turn up for a while. The idea is that they revert from that pattern only in extreme emergency situation: but during such a situation they'll have to be in communication at least once. We know how many subs they have. And in practical terms, when one of them is not located, NSA units tasked with submarine detection concentrate all their energies on finding it.

Q. How do you know this? Did you ever have responsibility for submarine detection?

A. No. My information comes from two sources. First, the fact that there were analysts sitting right next to me in Karmasel who were tasked on subs. Second, I read what we called TEXTA. TEXTA means "technical extracts of traffic." It is a computer-generated digest of intelligence collected from every communications facility in the world -- how they communicate, what they transmit, and who to. It is the Bible of the SIGINT community. It is constantly updated, and one of an analyst's duties is reading it. You've got to understand that even though each analyst had his own area to handle, he also had to be familiar with other problems. Quite often I would get through my operators base-to-base submarine traffic and I'd have to be able to identify it.

Q. The implications of what you're saying are very serious. In effect, it means that based on your knowledge there is no real "balance of terror" in the world. Theoretically, if we know where every Soviet missile installation, military aircraft and missile submarine is at every moment, we are much closer than anyone realized to a first-strike capacity that would cripple their ability to respond.

A. Check.

Q. How many NSA people were there at Istanbul and in the rest of the installations in Europe?

A. About three thousand in our operation. It would be hard to even guess how many in the rest of Europe.

Q. What were the priorities for gathering information on Soviet operations?

A. First of all, NSA is interested in their long-range bombing forces. This includes their rocket forces, but mainly targets on their long-range bombers. This is because the feeling is that, if there is conflict between us and them, the bombers will be used first, as a way of taking a step short of all-out war. Second, and very close to the bombing capabilities, is the location of their missile submarines. Next would be tasking generated against the Soviet scrambler, which is their way of communicating for all of their services and facilities. After this would be their Cosmos program. After that things like tasking their KGB, their air controllers, their shipping, and all the rest of the things tend to be on the same priority.

Q. All this time, the Soviets must be doing intelligence against us too. What is its scope?

A. Actually, they don't get that much. They aren't able to break our advanced computer generated scrambler system, which accounts for most of the information we transmit. They do a lot of work to determine what our radar is like, and they try to find out things by working on some of the lower level codes used by countries like Germany and the Scandinavian countries we deal with. Their SIGINT operation is run by the KGB.

The key to it is that we have a ring of bases around them. They try to make up for the lack of bases by using trawlers for gathering data, but it's not the same. They're on the defensive.

Q. What do you mean by that?

A. That they're on the defensive? Well, one of the things you discover pretty early is that the whole thing of containing the communist menace for expansion is nonsense. The entire Soviet outlook of their military and their intelligence was totally different from ours. They were totally geared up for defense and to meet some kind of attack. Other than strategic capacities relating to the ultimate nuclear balance, their air capabilities are solidly built around defending themselves from penetration. They've set up the "forward" area -- our term for the so-called bloc countries of eastern Europe -- less as a launching pad into Europe than as a buffer zone. The only Soviet forces there are air defense forces, security forces. Put it this way: their whole technology is not of an offensive nature, simply, don't have the kind of potential for a tactical offensive that we do. They have no attack carriers, for instance. Soviet ships are primarily oriented toward protection of their coasts. Actually they do have carriers of a sort, but they are helicopter anti-submarine carriers. Another thing: they have a lot of fighters, but hardly any fighter-bombers. They do have a large submarine force, but given the fact that they are completely ringed by the U.S., this too is really of a strategic nature.

Everything we did in Turkey was in direct support of some kind of military operation, usually something clandestine like overflights, infiltrations, penetrations. If all we were interested in was what they call an "invulnerable deterrent," we could easily get our intelligence via satellite. We don't need to have these gigantic sites in Europe and Asia for this.

Q. You mentioned a few minutes ago that one of NSA's main targets was the Soviet space program. What sort of material were you interested in?

A. Everything. Obviously, one of the things we wanted to know was how close they were to getting a space station up. But w knew everything that went on in their Cosmos program. For instance, before I had gotten to Turkey, one of their rockets had exploded on the launching pad and two of their cosmonauts were killed. One died while I was there too. It was Soyuz, I believe. He developed re-entry problems on his way back from orbit. They couldn't get the chute that slowed his craft down in re-entry to work. They knew what the problem was for about two hours before he died, and were fighting to correct it. It was all in Russian, of course, but we taped it and listened to it a couple of times afterward. Kosygin called him personally. They had a video-phone conversation. Kosygin was crying. He told him he was hero and that he made a great achievement in Russian history, and that they were proud and he'd be remembered. The guy's wife got on too. They talked for a while. He told her how to handle their affairs, and what to do with the kids. It was pretty awful. Towards the last few minutes, he began falling apart, saying, "I don't want to die, you've got to do something." Then there was just a scream as he died. I guess he was incinerated. The strange thing was that we were all pretty bummed out by the whole thing. In a lot of ways, having the sort of job we did humanizes the Russians. You study them so much and listen to them for so many hours that pretty soon you come to feel that you know more about them than your own people.

Q. While you were monitoring the Soviet Union what sort of intelligence would have been considered but very important or serious?

A. In a way you do this almost routinely. That is, there are certain times that the activities of the targeted the entity are of such an important nature that a special type has to be sent out. It is called a CRITIC. This is sent around the world to a communications network called CRITICOM. The people in this network, besides NSA, are those in other intelligence or diplomatic capacities who might come across the intelligence of such importance themselves that the president of the United States would need to be immediately notified. When a CRITIC goes out, one analyst working alone can't do it can't do it. There is just too great a volume of material to correlate.

Q. What would be an example of something sent out as a CRITIC?

A. Well, one of the strangest I ever read was sent out by our base at Crete. One of the analyst traced a Soviet bomber that landed in the middle of Lake Baikal.  He knew it hadn't crashed from the type of communications he monitored, and he thought they had developed a new generation of bombers able to land on water.  It turned out to be a bad mistake because he neglected to remember that about three-fourths of the year this lake is completely frozen over.

But actually this sort of thing is rare.  Most CRITICs are based on good reasoning and data. You work around the clock, sometimes for 30 hours at a stretch putting things together. These are the times that the job stops being routine. I guess that's why they have a say about the work in NSA: "Hours of boredom and seconds of terror."

Q. Did you ever issue a CRITIC.

A. Yes, several. During  Czechoslovakia, for instance, when it became clear the Soviets were moving their troops up.  We also issued a number of CRITICs during the Mideast war of 1967.

Q. Why?

A. Well, I was part of an analysis team that was predicting the war at least two months before it began.  I guess we issued our first CRITIC on this in April.  We did it on the basis of two sources. One, we and the Crete station had both been picking up data as early as February that the Israelis had a massive build-up of arms, a massing of men and materiel, war exercises, increased level of Arab territory -- just everything a country does to prepare for war.  Two, there were indications that the Soviets were convinced there was going to be a war.  We know this from the traffic we had on diplomatic briefings sent down from Moscow to a commanding general of a particular region.  And by April they had sent their VTA airborne, their version of Special Forces paratroopers, to Bulgaria. Normally they're based in the Trans-Caucasus, and we knew from their contingency plans that Bulgaria was a launching point for the Middle East. Because some of these forces were being given to cram-courses in Israeli and Arabic languages.

Q. All this leaves the sequence of events that immediately preceded the Six Day War -- the various countercharges, the U.N. pullout, the closing of the Straits -- still pretty obscure.  Did NSA evidence clear this up?

A. No.  Not really.  But one of the things that confused us at first was the fact that until last days before the war the Arabs weren't doing anything to prepare.  They weren't being trained to scramble their air force.  This is why there was a total chaos when the Israelis struck.

Q. How did the White House react to your reports about all this?

A. Well, in every message we sent out, we always put in our comments at the end -- there's a place for this in the report form -- and they'd say something like "Believe there is some preparation for an expected Israeli attack . Request your comments." They didn't exactly ignore it. They'd send back, "Believe this deserves further analysis," which means something like, "We don't really believe you, but keep sending us information." Actually, we all got special citations when the whole thing was over.

Q. Why didn't they believe you?

A. I suppose because the Israelis were assuring them that they were not going to attack and Johnson was buying it.

Q. You remember about the "Liberty," the communications ship we sent in along the coast which was torpedoed by Israeli gunboats? The official word at the time was that the whole thing was a mistake. Johnson calls it a "heartbreaking episode" in The Vantage Point. How does this square with your information?

A. The whole idea of sending the "Liberty" in was that at that point the U.S. simply didn't know what was going on going on. We sent it in close so that we could find out hard information about what the Israelis' intentions were. What it found out, among other things, was that Dayan's intentions were to push on to Damascus and to Cairo.  The Israelis shot at the "Liberty," damaged it pretty badly and killed some of the crew, and told it to stay away. After this it got very tense. It became pretty clear that the White House had gotten caught with its pants down.  

Q. What were the Russians doing?

A.  The VTA airborne was loaded into planes.  They took off from Bulgaria and their intention was clearly to make a troop drop on Israel.  At this point became pretty clear that we were approaching a situation where World War III could get touched off at any time. Johnson got on the hot line and told them we were headed for a conflict if they didn't on those planes around. They did.

Q. Was it just these airborne units that were on the move?

A. No. There was all kinds of other action too. Some of their naval forces had started to move, and there was increased activity in their long-range bombers.

Q. What about this idea that Dayan had decided to push on to the cities you mentioned. What happened there?

A. He was called back, partly because of U.S. pressure, partly by people in the Israeli political infrastructure. he was somewhat chastened and never given back total control of the Army.

Q. How do you know this?

A. Like I said earlier, NSA monitors every government. This includes Tel Aviv. All the diplomatic signals from the capital to the front and back again were intercepted. Also at this same time we were copying the French, who were very much involved on both sides playing a sort of diplomatic good offices between Cairo and Tel Aviv. As far as Dayan is concerned, the information came from informal notes from analysts at Crete who were closer to the situation than we were. Analysts send these informal notes from one station to another to keep each other informed about what is happening. One of the notes I got from Crete said Dayan had been called back from the field and reprimanded. Obviously, by this time the Israelis were getting heat from the U.S.

Q. What did the Russians do after the situation cooled down a bit?

A. Immediately after the war -- well, not even afterwards, but towards the end -- they began the most massive airlift in the history of the world to Cairo and Damascus. Supplies, food, and some medical equipment, but mostly arms and planes. They sent in MIG-21s fully assembled, fueled, and ready to fly in the bellies of their big 101-10s. At landing the doors would open, and teh MIGs would roll out, ready to go. Also there was quite a bit of political maneuvering inside the Soviet Union right afterwards. I don't quite remember the details, but it was mainly in the military, not in the Politbureau.

Q. We routinely monitor the communications of allies like Israel?

A. Of course.

Q. What other sorts of things do we learn?

A. Practically everything. For instance, we know that the Israelis were preparing nuclear weapons at their development site at Dimona. Once the U.S. Ambassador to Israel visited there. They had been calling it a textile plant as a cover, and when he went there they presented him with a new suit. It was a charade, you know. They didn't have warheads deployed then, but they were close to it. I'm sure they must have a delivery system in operation b now. It was said that American scientific advisors were helping them in this development. I mean it was said on the intelligence grapevine. I didn't know it for a fact. But this grapevine is usually fairly accurate.

Q. All the material you've been discussing is classified?

A. Almost all of it.

Q. Who classified it?

A. I did. Analysts in NSA did. In the Agency, the lowest classification is CONFIDENTIAL. Anything not otherwise classified is CONFIDENTIAL. But SIGINT data is super-classified, meaning that only those in the SIGINT community have access to it, and then only on a "need-to-know" basis. A lot of the stuff I'd work with was SECRET and TOP SECRET, which is the highest classification of all. But after a while it occurred to me that we classified our stuff only partly because of the enemy. It seemed like they were almost as interested in keeping things from the American public as the Soviets. Hell, I'd give top secret classifications to weather reports we intercepted from Soviet subs. Certainly the Soviets knew that data. I remember when I was in school back at San Angelo one of the instructors gave us a big lecture about classifying material and he said that it was necessary because it would only confuse the American people to be let in on this data. He used those exact words. As a matter of fact, I used those words when I was training the people who worked under me.

Q. How did you relate to our allies in intelligence matters?

A. I'll have to digress a moment to answer that. The SIGINT community was defined by a TOP SECRET treaty signed in 1947. It was called the UKUSA treaty. The National Security Agency signed for the U.S. and became what's called First Party to the Treaty. Great Britain's GCHQ signed for them, the CBNRC for Canada, and DSD for Australia.New Zealand. They're all called Second parties. In addition, several countries have signed on -- ranging from West Germany to japan -- over the years as Third parties. Among the First and Second Parties there is supposed to be a general agreement not to restrict data. Of course it doesn't work out this way in practice. The Third party countries receive absolutely no material from us, while we get anything they have, although generally it's of pretty low quality. We also worked with so-called neutrals who weren't parties to the UKUSA treat. They'd sell us everything they could collect over radar on their Russian border.

As it works out, the treaty is a one-way street. We violate it even with our Second party allies by monitoring their communications constantly.

Q. Do they know this?

A. Probably. In part, we're allowed to do it for COMSEC purposes under NATO. COMSEC, that's communications security. There's supposed to be a random checking of security procedures. But I know we also monitor their diplomatic stuff constantly. In England, for instance, our Chicksands installation monitors all their communications, and the NSA unit in our embassy in London monitors the lower-level stuff from Whitehall. Again, technology is the key. These allies can't maintain security even if they want to. They're all working with machines we gave them. There's no chance for them to be on par with us technologically.

There's the illusion of cooperation, though. We used to go to Frankfurt occasionally for briefings. The headquarters of NSA Europe, the European Security region, and several other departments in the SIGINT community are located there, inside the I.G. Farben building. We'd run into people from GCHQ there, and from the other countries. It was all fairly cordial. As a matter of fact, I got to respect the English analysts very highly. They're real professionals in GCHQ, and some are master analysts. They'll stay on the job for twenty-five or thirty years and learn a lot. The CGG is also located in the I.G. Farben building. That's the West German COMINT agency. Most of them are ex-Nazis. We used to harass them by sieg heil-ing them whenever we say them.

Once I briefed Hubert Humphrey at the I.G. Farben building. It was in 1967, when he was vice-president. The briefing concerned the Soviet tactical air force and what was capable of doing. It was all quite routine. He asked a couple of pretty dumb questions, that showed he didn't have the foggiest notion of what NSA was and what it did.

Q. But you said that you often sent reports directly to the White House.

A. yes, I did. But the material that goes there is cleaned of any reference as to where the intelligence comes from. Every morning the President gets a daily intelligence summary complied by the CIA. This information will probably contain a good deal from the NSA in it, but it won't say where it came from and the means used to collect it. That's how a man like the vice-president could be totally ignorant of the way intelligence is generated.

Q. So far we've been talking about various kinds of sophisticated electronic intelligence gathering. What about tapping of ground communications?

A. I'm not sure on the extent of this, but I know that the NSA mission in the Moscow embassy has done some tapping there. Of course all trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific telephone calls to or from the U.S. are tapped.

Every conversation, personal, commercial, whatever, is automatically intercepted and recorded on tapes. Most of them no one ever listens to, and after being held available for a few weeks, are erased. They'll run a random sort through all the tapes, listening to a certain number to determine if there is anything in them of interest to our government worth holding on to and transcribing. Also, certain telephone conversations are routinely listened to as soon as possible. These will be the ones that are made by people doing an inordinate amount of calling overseas, or are otherwise tapped for special interest.

Q. What about Africa? Does the NSA have installations there?

A. Yes, one in Ethiopia on the East Coast and in Morocco on the West Coast. These cover northern Africa, parts of the Mediterranean, and parts of the Mideast.

Q. Do they ever gather intelligence on African insurgents?

A. I went to Africa once for a vacation. I understood that there were DSUs, that's direct support units, working against Mozambique, Tanzania, Angola, those countries. These DSUs are in naval units off the coast. They are tasked with two problems: first, they copy the indigenous Portuguese forces; and second, they copy the liberation forces.

Q. Is the information used in any way against the guerillas?

A. I don't know for sure. But I'd be surprised if it wasn't. There is information being gathered. This intelligence is fed back to NSA-Europe, of course. It has no strategic value to us, so it's passed on to NATO -- one of our consumers. Portugal is part of NATO, so it gets the information. I know that U.S. naval units were DF-ing the liberation forces. That's direction finding. The way it worked was that the ship would get a signal, people on board would analyze it so see if it came from the guerillas, say, in Angola. then they'd correlate with our installation in Ethiopia, which had also intercepted it, and pinpoint the source.

Q. Did you ever have any doubts about what you were doing?

A. Not really, not at this time. It was a good job. I was just 21 years old; I had a lot of operators working under me; I got to travel a lot -- to Frankfurt, for instance, at least twice a month for briefings. I was considered to be a sort of whiz kid, and had been since i'd been in school back in San Angelo. I guess you could say that I had internalized all the stuff about being a member of the elite that they had given us. I was advancing very rapidly, partly because of a runover in personnel that happened to hit at the time I came to Turkey, and partly because I like what I was doing and worked like crazy and always took more than other analysts. But, like I said earlier, I had developed a different attitude toward the Soviet Union. I didn't see them as an enemy or anything like that. Everyone I worked with felt pretty much the same. We were both protagonists in a big game -- that's the view we had. We felt very superior to CIA people we'd occasionally come in contact with. We had a lot of friction with them, and we guarded our information form them very carefully.

Q. Was there a lot of what you'd call esprit de corps among the NSA people there.

A. In some ways, yes; in other ways, no. Yes, in the sense that there were a lot who were like me -- eating, drinking, sleeping NSA. The very fact that you have the highest security clearance there makes you think a certain way. You're set off from the rest of humanity. Like one of the rules was -- and this was first set out when we were back at San Angelo -- that we couldn't have drugs like sodium pentothol used on us in medical emergencies, at least not in the way they're used on most people. You know, truth-type drugs. I remember once one of our analysts cracked up his car in Turkey and banged himself up pretty good. He was semi-conscious and in the hospital. They had one doctor and one nurse, both with security clearances, who tended to him. And one of us was always in the room with him to make sure that while he was delirious he didn't talk too loud. Let me say again that all the material you deal with, the codes words and all, becomes part of you. I'd find myself dreaming in code. And to this day when I hear certain TOP SECRET code words something in me snaps.

But in spite of all this, there's a lot of corruption too. Quite a few people in NSA are into illegal activities of one kind or another. It's taken to be one of the fringe benefits of the job. You know, enhancing your pocketbook. Practically everybody is into some kind of smuggling. I didn't see any heroin dealings or anything like that, like I later saw among CIA people when I got to Nam, but most of us, me included, did some kind of smuggling on the side. Everything form small-time black marketeering of cigarettes or currency all the way up to transportation of vehicles, refrigerators, that sort of thing. One time in Europe I knew of a couple of people inside NSA who were stationed in Frankfurt and got involved in the white slave trade. Can you believe that? They were transporting women who'd been kidnapped from Europe to Mideast sheikdoms aboard security airplanes. It was perfect for any kind of activity of that kind. There's no customs or anything like that for NSA people. Myself, I was involved in the transportation of money. A lot of us would pool our cash, buy up various restricted currencies on our travels, and then exchange it at a favorable rate. I'd make a couple of thousand dollars each time. It was a lark. My base pay was $600 a month, and looking back I figure that I made at least double that by what you'd call manipulating currency. It sounds pretty gross, I know, but the feeling was, "What the hell, nobody's getting hurt." It's hard for me to relate to the whole thing now. Looking back, it's like that was another person doing those things and feeling those feelings.

Q. All this sounds like a pretty good deal -- the job, what you call the fringe benefits, and all that. Why did you go to Vietnam?

A. Well, I'd been in Istanbul for over two years, that's one thing. And second, well, Vietnam was the big thing that was happening. I wasn't for the war, exactly, but I wasn't against it either. A lot of people in Europe were going there, and I wanted to go see what was happening. It doesn't sound like much of a reason now, but that was it.

Q. You volunteered?

A. Right. For Vietnam and for flying. They turned me down for both.

Q. Why?

A. Because of my classification. What I knew was too delicate to have me wandering around in a war zone. If I got captured, I'd know too much. That sort of thing. But I pulled some strings. I'd made what you'd call high-ranking friends, you know. Finally, I got to go. First I had a long vacation -- went to Paris for a while and that sort of thing. Then I was sent back to the U.S. for schooling.

Q. What sort of schooling?

A. It was in texas, near Brownsville. I learned a little Vietnamese and a lot about ARDF -- that's airborne radio direction finding. It was totally different from what I'd been doing. It was totally practical. No more strategic stuff, just practical analysis. I had to shift my whole way of thinking around. I was going to be in these big EC-47s -- airborne platforms they were called -- locating the enemy's ground forces.

After this first phase in Texas, I went to a couple of Air Force bases here in California and learned how to jump out of planes, and then up to Washington state to survival school. This was three weeks and no fun at all. It was cold as hell. I guess so we could learn to survive in the jungle. Never did figure that one out. We did things like getting dropped in the mountains in defense teams and learn E&E -- that's the process of escape and evasion. You divide the three-man team up into certain functions -- one guy scrounges for food, the other tires to learn the lay of the land, that sort of thing. We were out for two days with half a parachute and a knife between us. Strangely enough, we did manage to build a snare and catch a rabbit. We cooked it over a fire we built with some matches we'd smuggled. it was awful. We'd also smuggled five candy bars, though, and they were pretty good. Then we got captured by some soldiers wearing black pajamas. They put us in cells and tried to break us. It was a game, but they played it serious even though we didn't. it had its ludicrous moments. They played Joan Baez peacenik songs over the loudspeaker.This was supposed to make us think that the people back home didn't support us anymore and we'd better defect. We dug the music,of course. After this, I shipped out.

Q. How long were you in Vietnam?

A. Thirteen months, from 1968 to 1969.

Q. Where were you stationed?

A. In Pleiku most of the time.

Q. Is that where the major intelligence work is done?

A. No, there's a unit in Da Nang that does most of the longer-range work, and the major unit is at Phu Bai. It's the most secure base in Vietnam. An old French base, just below Hue and completely surrounded by a mine field. It's under attack right now. The people based there -- a couple of thousand of them -- will probably be the last ones out of Vietnam. I don't know if you know of this or not, but the first American killed in Vietnam was at Phu Bai. He was in NSA, working on short-range direction finding out of an armored personnel carrier -- you know, one those vans with an antenna on top. It was in 1954. We were told this to build up our esprit de corps.

Q. So what kinds of things did you do there?

A. Like I said, radio direction finding is the big thing, the primary mission. There are several collection techniques used there. Almost all of them are involved with the airborne platforms I mentioned. They are C-47s, "gooney birds," with an E in front of the C-47 because they're involved in electronic warfare. The missions go by different names. Our program was Combat Cougar. We had two or three operators on board and an analyst, which was me. The plane was filled with electronic gear, radios and special DF-ing equipment, about $4 million worth of it, all computerized and very sophisticated. The technology seemed to turn over every five months. As a sideline, I might tell you that an earlier version  of this equipment was used in Bolivia, along with infrared detectors, to help track down Che Guevara.

Q. So what would be your specific mission?

A. Combat Cougar planes would take off and fly a particular orbit in a particular part of Indochina. We were primarily tasked for low-level information. that is, we'd be looking for enemy ground units fighting or about to be fighting. This was our A-1 priority. As soon as we locate one of these units through our direction finding, we'd fix it. This fix would be triangulated with fixes made by other airborne platforms, a medium-range direction finding outfit on the ground, or even from ships. Then we'd send the fix to the DSUs on the ground -- that's direct support units -- at Phu Bai or Pleiku. They'd run it through their computers and call in B-52s or artillery strikes.

Q. How high did you fly?

A. It was supposed to be 8000 feet, but we couldn't get close enough, so we went down to 3000.

Q. You hear a lot about seismic and acoustic sensors and that sort of thing being used. How did this fit into what you were doing?

A. Not at all. They weren't that effective. A lot of them get damaged when they land; some of them start sending signals and get stuck; others are picked up by the Vietnamese and tampered with. Those that come through intact can't tell civilian from military movements. Whatever data is collected from sensors on the trail and at the DMZ is never acted on until correlated with our data.

Q. How did the NVA and NLF troops communicate their battle orders? They seem to take us by surprise, while from what you said earlier the Soviet Union can't.

A. That's because there are no grand battle orders except in a few cases. Almost everything is decided at a low level in the field. That's why most of our intelligence was directed toward those low-level communications I've been talking about. NSA operations in Vietnam are entirely tactical, supporting military operations. Even the long-range stuff, on North Vietnamese air defense and diplomacy, on shipping in and out of Haiphong -- the data collected at Da Nang, Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines and somewhat in Thailand -- is used in a tactical sense only. It's for our bombers going into North Vietnam. they aren't engaged in probing or testing the defenses of a targeted entity like in Europe. It's all geared around the location of enemy forces.

Q. What would be the effect if the U.S. had to vacate ground installations like the ones you've mentioned?

A. Well, we wouldn't have that good intelligence about the capabilities of the North Vietnamese to shoot our planes down. We wouldn't know what their radar was doing or could do, where their ground-to-air missile sites were, when their MIGs were going to scramble. We'd still be able to DF their troops in the field of course. that won't change until our air forces, including the airborne platforms I flew on, go out too.

Q. NVA and NLF troops must have some sort of counter-measures to use against operations like the ones you were in. Otherwise they wouldn't be as effective as they are.

A. Basically, you're right, although you shouldn't underestimate the kind of damage done by the strikes we called in as a result of our direction finding. To a certain extent, though, the Vietnamese have developed a way to counteract our techniques. Their headquarters in the North is known as MRTTH -- Military Region Tri Tin Hue. It is located on the other side of the Valley, somewhere just into Laos. MRTTH has a vast complex of antennas strung all over the jungle. When they're transmitting orders, they play with the switchboard, and the signal goes out over a several-mile area from these different antennas. When you're up in one of these airborne platforms, the effect is like this: you get a signal and fix it. First it will be nine miles in one direction and then, say, twelve miles in another, and fifteen in another. We never found MRTTH. It's one of the high priorities.

Q. But you'd say that the sort of data you collected through DF-ing had some effect?

A. Right, generally. At least in locating field units. It also leads to some large actions. For instance, the first bombing that ever occurred from ARDF data occurred in 1968. There was an area about 19 kilometers southwest of Hue that we'd been flying over. Some of the communications we collected and pattern analysis that was performed on it indicated that there were quite a few NVA or VC units concentrated in a small area, about a mile in diameter. General Abrams personally ordered the largest B-52 raid that had ever taken place in Vietnam at that time. There was one sorties and hour for thirty-six hours, thirty tons dropped by each sortie on the area. Afterwards it was just devastated. I mean it was wasted. It was along time before they could even send helicopters into that area to evaluate the strike because of the stench of burning flesh. On the perimeter of the area there were Vietnamese that had died just from the concussion. The thing of it was, though, there wasn't any way to tell which of the dead were military and which were civilian. It was pretty notorious. Afterwards it was called Abrams Acres. It was one of the things that began to turn me off to the war.

Q. You said that your A-1 priority was locating enemy units on the ground. What were the other targets?

A. Mainly supplies. We tried, not too successfully, to pinpoint their supply capabilities. All along the Trail the Vietnamese have these gigantic underground warehouses known as "bantrams," where either men or supplies are housed. The idea is that in case of an offensive like the one that's going on now, they don't have to go north for supplies. They've got them right there in these bantrams, enough to last for a long time at a fairly high level of military activity. They had about 11 bantrams when I was there. We knew where they were within twenty-five or thirty miles, but no closer. I remember the first Dewey Canyon invasion of Laos. I flew support for it. It happened because the 9th Marines went in there to locate a couple of bantrams. Their general was convinced he was going to end the war. It was a real macho trip. He got called back by the White House pretty quick, though, when his command got slaughtered.

Q. What about the idea of an invasion from the north. How does this equate with what you collected?

A. It doesn't. There's no invasion. The entire Vietnamese operation against Saigon and the U.S. is one unified military command throughout Indochina. Really, it's almost one country. They, don't recognize borders: that's seen in their whole way of looking at things, their whole way of fighting.

Q. But you made a distinction between VC and NVA forces didn't you?

A. There are forces we'd classify as VC and others as NVA, yes. But it was for identification, like the call signs on Soviet planes. The VC forces tended to merge, break apart, then regroup, often composed differently from what they were before. As far as the NVA is concerned, we'd use the same names they were called back home, like the 20th regiment. Hanoi controls infiltration, some troops and supplies coming down the Trail. But once they get to a certain area, MRTTH takes over. And practically speaking. MRTTH is controlled by the NLF-PRG.

Q. How did you know that?

A. We broke their messages all the time. We knew the political infrastructure.

Q. You mean that your intelligence would have in its official report that this MRTTH base which was on the other side of the Ashau Valley, was controlled by the NLF?

A. Of course. Hanoi didn't control that area operationally. MRTTH controls the whole DMZ area. Everything above Da Nang to Vinh. The people in control are in the NLF. MRTTH makes the decisions for its area. Put it this way: it is an autonomous political and military entity.

Q. What you're saying is that in order to gather intelligence and operate militarily, you go on the assumption that there is one enemy? That the NLF is not subordinate to the North Vietnamese Command?

A. Right. That's the way it is. This is one thing I wish we could bring out. Intelligence operates in a totally different way, from politics. The intelligence community generally states things like they are. The political community interprets this information. changes it, deletes some facts and adds others. Take the CIA report that bombing in Vietnam never really worked, That was common knowledge over there. Our reports indicated it. Infiltration always continued at a steady rate. But of course nobody back at the military command or in Washington ever paid any attention.

Q. What were some of the other high intelligence priorities besides locating ground units, MRTTH and the bantrams?

A. One of the strange ones came from intelligence reports we got from the field and copies from North Vietnam. These reports indicated that the NLF had two Americans fighting for them in the South. We did special tasking on that. We were on the lookout for ground messages containing any reference to these Americans. Never found them, though.

Q. When you were there in Vietnam did you get an idea of the scope of U.S. operations in Southeast Asia or were you just involved with these airborne platforms exclusively?

A. I was pretty busy. But I took leaves, of course, and I saw a lot of things. One thing that never came out, for example, was that there was a small war in Thailand in 1969. Some of the Meo tribesmen were organized and attacked the Royal Thai troops for control of their own area.

Q. What happened to them?

A. Well, as you know, Thailand is pretty important to us. A stable Thailand, I mean. CAS-Vientiane and CAS-Bangkok were assigned to put down the uprisings.

Q. What does CAS mean?

A. That's the CIA's designation. Three of our NSA planes were taken to Udorn, where the CIA is based in Thailand, and flew direct support for CIA operations against the Meos. We located where they were through direction finding so the CIA planes could go in and bomb them.

Q. You mean CIA advisors in Thai Air Force planes?

A. No. The CIA's own planes. Not Air America -- those are the commercial-type planes used just for logistics support. I'm talking about CIA military planes. They were unmarked attack bombers.

Q. What other covert CIA operations in the area did you run into?

A. From the reports I saw, I knew there were CIA people in southern China, for instance, operating as advisors and commanders of Nationalist Chinese commando forces. It wasn't anything real big. They'd go in and burn some villages, and generally raise hell. The Chinese always called these "bandit raids."

Q. What would be the objectives of these raids besides harassment?

A. There's some intelligence probing. And quite a bit of it is for control of opium trade over there. Nationalist Chinese regular officers are occasionally called in to lead these maneuvers. For that matter, there are also CIA-run Nationalist Chinese forces that operate in Laos and even in North Vietnam.

Q. Did you ever meet any of these CIA people?

A. Sure. Like I said, I flew support for their little war in Thailand. I remember on the guys there in Vientiane that we were doing communications for, said he'd been into Southern China a couple of times.

Q. You got disillusioned with the whole Vietnam business?

A. yes.

Q. Why?

A. Well, practically everybody hated it. Everybody except the lifers who were in the military before Vietnam. Even after that wasting of the area called Abram's Acres that I told you about before, everybody else was really sick about it, but these lifers kept talking about all the commies we had killed.

For me, part of it was when we crashed our EC-47. We'd just taken off and were at about 300 feet and it just came down. We crash-landed in a river. We walked out of it, but I decided that there was no easy way to get me into an airplane after that. We got drunk that night, and afterwards I spent two weeks on leave in Bangkok. When I got back to Saigon i got another three days vacation in Na Trang. The whole thing was getting under my skin. I told them that I wasn't going to fly any more. And mainly they left me alone. They figured I'd snap out of it. But finally they asked me what my reasons for refusing to fly were. I told them that it was crazy. I wasn't going to crash anymore, I wasn't going to get shot at anymore, I was afraid. I told the flight operations director that I wasn't going to do it anymore, I didn't care what was done to me. Strangely enough, they let me alone. They decided after a few days to me Air Force liaison man up at Phu Bai. So I spent the last three months up there correlating data coming in from airborne platforms. Like the one I'd flown in and sending DSU reports to the B-52s. It happened all of a sudden, my feeling that the whole war was rotten. I remember that up at Phu Bai there were a couple of other analysts working with me. We never talked about it, but we all wound up sending the bombers to strange places -- mountain tops, you know, where there weren't any people. We were just biding our time till we got out. We were ignoring priorities on our reports, that sort of thing.

It's strange. When I first got to Nam, everybody was still high about the war. But by the time I left at the end of 1969, morale had broken down all over the place. Pot had become a very big thing. We were even smoking it on board the EC-47s when we were supposed to be doing direction finding. And we were the cream of the military, remember.

I loved my work at first. It was very exciting -- traveling in Europe, the Middle East, Africa; knowing all the secrets. It was my whole life, which probably explains why I was better than others at my job. But then I went to Nam, and it wasn't a big game we were playing with the Soviets anymore. It was killing people. My last three months in Nam were very traumatic. I couldn't go on, but I wasn't able to quit. Not then. So faked it. It was all I could do. Now I wish I had quit. If I had stayed in Europe, I might still be in NSA. I might have re-enlisted. In a way, the war destroyed me.

Q. What happened when you mustered out?

A. Well, having the sort of credentials I had, I had my pick of a lot of jobs. Some ex-NSA people get jobs with private corporations. A lot of them run their own SIGINT operations. For instance, oil companies will have SIGINT against Middle East sheikdoms that have pretty primitive intelligence operations. But I didn't want to do this sort of thing. NSA offered me a nice civilian job. The CIA said they'd pay me a $10,000 bonus in two installments if I'd come to work with them -- $5000 on signing up, and $5000 at the end of two years. They said they'd give me a GS-9 rating -- that's about $10,000 a year -- and promote me to GS-11 in a year. But I didn't want any of it.

Q. Why is it you wanted to tell all this?

A. It's hard for me to say. I haven't digested it all; even though I've been out almost two years now, I still feel as though I'm two people -- the one who did all the things I've laid out and another, different person who can't quite understand why. But even being against the war, it's taken a long time for me to want to say these things. I couldn't have done it nine months ago, not even three months ago. Daniel Ellberg's releasing the Pentagon Papers made me want to talk. It's a burden; in a way I just want to get rid of it. I don't want to get sentimental or corny about it, but I've made some friends who love the Indochinese people. This is my way of loving them too.

[End]

Source: Columbia University, Butler Library, Microfilm, No. 3044, Ramparts v. 11. 1-12. July 1972 - June 1973. Call No. Fa612 (2nd of 2 rolls).

Transcription and HTML by JYA/Urban Deadline

Excerpt from The Puzzle Palace, James Bamford, Penguin, 1983, (paper), p. 334:

In August 1972 a twenty-five-year-old former staff sergeant in the Air Force Security Service decided to bare his top secret soul to the magainze Ramparts. A latent Vietnam War protestor and former traffic analyst at listening posts in Turkey, West Germany, and Vietnam, Perry Fellwock wove a tale of much fact and some fancy in a question-and-answer session with the magazine, using the pseudonym Winslow Peck. The Joplin, Missouri, native's claim that NSA was able to break all Soviet code systems ("We're able to break every code they've got"), was most likely an exaggeration, but the majority of the sixteen-page article was, unfortunately for the Agency, quite accurate. Once the magazine hit the stands there was little the red-faced officials of the Puzzle Palace could do except to hold their tongues in embarassed silence. Prosecution, they must have reasoned, would only serve to confirm all that Fellwock had said.

Additional information on NSA electronic interception:

http://jya.com/echelon-dc.htm
http://jya.com/echelon.htm
http://jya.com/echelon2.htm
http://jya.com/stoa-atpc.htm
http://jya.com/pp08.htm
http://jya.com/pp09.htm
http://jya.com/pp10.htm

Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1998
To: ukcrypto@maillist.ox.ac.uk
From: Duncan Campbell duncan@mcmail.com
Subject: The discovery of global sigint networks : the early years,  part 2


Ramparts in 1972 was indeed the starting point.   Sadly, many subsequent
reporters later confused what "Winslow Peck" [= Perry (not Peter) Fellwock,
which *is* his true name]  wrote about "keyword" interception of
international telephony traffic.  

The story from then on ..

Early in 1976, Winslow came to London.  I interviewed him at length and
then carried out my own research on GCHQ.  I then published an article in
Time Out, June 1976, called the Eavesdroppers which did for GCHQ and the UK
what Winslow did for NSA and the US.    My co-author was another American
journalist, a Time Out staffer called Mark Hosenball.

The Eavesdroppers was the first (and full) description of what GCHQ was and
did.   There had been no previous article, although World In Action had
attempted a programme in 1972.

GCHQ's directors were apoplectic.  The more so because the combined efforts
of the GPO (who tapped my phone from May 76 onwards), the Special Branch
and MI5 (who followed MH and me around) revealed that we had actually got
the article out *without* breaking the Official Secrets Act.   I had done
my research from open technical sources, and (!) telephone directories;
Peck, as an American wasn't covered by the British law.  

But they got even.   Hosenball, an American, was declared a threat to
national security and deported.   Philip Agee, the famous whistleblower
from the CIA, was added in to the deportation list.

Seven months later, I *was* arrested in the furore over their deportations
together with another Time Out reporter, Crispin Aubrey.   We had talked to
a former British sigint operator, John Berry.   The case became known as
"ABC" after our initials.   Over the coming two years, I was accused of
having too much information and faced two counts of espionage as well as
one of breaching section 2 of the Official Secrets Act (a law which was
repealed almost ten years ago now).   These counts totalled a potential
sentence of 30 years imprisonment.   

At Court 1 in the Old Bailey in October 1978, this disgaceful prosecution -
which marked the high water point of MI5's manic campaigns against
"internal subversion" - fell apart.   The story has just recently been told
in the delightful autobiography of Geoff Robertson QC, who was then my no 2
lawyer.  His book is called "The Justice Game".    Maybe its time for me
own autobio ...

Mrs Thatcher put GCHQ firmly on the world map with the union ban, 5 years
later.   And now ...

Philip Agree is married to a ballerina and lives in Germany.
Mark Hosenball is a reporter in Washington.
Perry Fellwock is a lobbyist in Washington.
Crispin Aubrey is an organic farmer in Somerset
John Berry is a social worker in Somerset.	
NSA and GCHQ are still listening. 
And I'm signing off for now.


At 13/04/98, John Young wrote:

Peter Sommer noted recently that one of the earliest accounts
of NSA global electronic interception was published in a
1972 Ramparts magazine article, which we offer for a bit
of history:
   http://jya.com/nsa-elint.htm  (84K)

James Bamford, Duncan Campbell, Nicky Hager and others
have confirmed and extended what was at the time viewed as 
the fanciful antiwar exaggeration of a young former NSA 
analyst, named Peter Fellwock, first known by the pseudonym 
Winslow Peck.

Bamford says in The Puzzle Palace that NSA elected to not
prosecute Fellwock in the hope that no one would believe his
astonishing claims of NSA ELINT-ing friends and foes alike.

Would anyone know where Peter Fellwock is now? Assuming
that the marvelous "Fellwock" is not a NSA-pseudo for "Peck."
 

***********

MSNBC REPORTS ON SNIFFER PROTEST -ECHELON/ILEITS COMES OUT OF THE CLOSET
Oct. 22, 1999
Spy computers 'spammed'E-mail protest full of threats designed to overwhelm
surveillance system maintained by world governmentsBy Bob Sullivan MSNBC
Oct. 21 - Perhaps you noticed even more cyberfrustration than usual
Thursday as e-mails with words like "manifesto," "terrorism," "bomb" and
"kill Bill Clinton" were slung around the Net. Not to worry - it was a
bit of a prank meant to irritate government agents who the pranksters
say monitor communication for subversion. The system they find offensive
is known as Echelon, which some say monitors 2 million worldwide
communications per hour. So on Thursday "hactivists" sent as many
e-mails as they could full of keywords meant to trigger the system in
the hopes of overloading it.


THE DEMONSTRATION was chiefly spontaneous, born out of
discussion on an Internet mailing list called "hactivism." According to
posters, it was meant to create cover for Friday's Anti-Police Brutality
Day. With monitoring systems distracted, protesters could organize with
less fear of being watched.
So when Wednesday came, Echelon protestors sent as many
e-mails as they could containing as much inflammatory language as they
could muster. One sample work (sic):
"Yes, Me and my MILITIA CADRES are running a CRACK
COCAINE MANUFACTURING plant which we use along with our CHILD
PORNOGRAPHY racket to fund our REVOLUTIONARY ARMED STRUGGLE. Please
don't let ASIOor ASIS or the CIA in on the SECRET, because we're
PLANNING to launch an ATTACK on NARRUNGA, ROXBY DOWNS and several US
EMBASSIES, using PLASTIC EXPLOSIVES we made from a recipe in THE
ANARCHIST'S COOKBOOK, while simultaneously attacking their bases with
BOTULINUM, SARIN GAS, FLOODNET and stolen KALASHNIKOVs. Then we can free
our COMRADES whoare being held RANSOM by the FASCIST DICTATORS and get
on with setting up AN ANARCHIST UTOPIA based on WORKER'S COOPERATIVES
where we will share wealth EQUALLY in PEACE and SOLIDARITY."
Implicit in the effort is the idea that a worldwide operation funded
by governments in the U.S., U.K., Australia and elsewhere monitors every
phone call, every fax, even every e-mail that's sent. Several writers to
the list find that a bit far-fetched: "One of the listers
pointed out that if the system is designed for that kind of massive
surveillance at that level it would be big enough to look at every
e-mail, and we couldn't clog it with a few notes," one told MSNBC.
Others felt the organized effort was little more than spam sent back and
forth among protestors. Still, the "Jam Echelon Day" drew
attention to the topic, with several big-city newspapers covering the
event as it unfolded. That means it was successful, according to Rep.
Bob Barr, R-Ga. He's been trying to convince Congress to hold hearings
on Echelon since last year. "It's worthwhile because it
will help draw attention to this program and will help us get some
answers down the road," he said. "Unless there is a widespread and
consistent public interest in this, nothing will happen."

Echelon, though still officially unconfirmed by the U.S.
government, is widely regarded as a network of communications monitoring
devices shared by the U.S. and its allies. It was born out of the Cold
War, when international communication was quite rare. Today, even an
e-mail sent across town might "hop" through international routes, giving
the U.S. government wide latitude to monitor it. Barr
says 2 million communications per hour are monitored around the world.
A bill working its way through Congress called the
Foreign Intelligence Authorization Act would require the Department of
Justice, the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence
Agency to submit to Congress a report detailing the legal standards the
agencies use when they eavesdrop on American citizens.

**********

*********

From: "H.F.C. Buma" hfcbuma@wanadoo.nl
October 12, 1999
Protests against echelon in progress. Euro's hate the concept.

Friends,

got a Dutch email where the following URL was put in, together with
the announcement of actions against the echelon-email-filtering
vwar-stuff. Read Ellis' page for that, and follow the link, please.

http://www.wodip.opole.pl/~laslo/Echelon-links.html

Fred.
Some hints on how echelon works

http://www.echelon.wiretapped.net/

(een fragment uit de oproep:)

On October 21, 1999, netizens around the globe are implored to
send out at least one email with at least 50 keyword words.
You need not be privy to knowing exactly what words Echelon
uses. It is safe to assume that words  such as "revolution"
and "manifesto" and "revolt" [etc.] will work. Just be sure to
sound as subversive as possible. There isn't even any need to
write a cohesive paragraph or sentence. Echelon's computers
does not understand the language anyway. It only knows to look
for certain words. By doing this we can at least temporarily
jam the global surveillance system.

______________


From: "Ellis Smith" <smithorg@bellatlantic.net

We've been doing this every so often, usually when their sniffers get
so irritating that they interfere with normal activities. I'd love to see
everyone get behind this one as sniffers are inherently a violation
of privacy.  If everyone does it, the systems crash or at the very
least, become content worthless, thus negating their viablity.

We had on our list one of the program managers of a company
who developed and provides sniffers.  If you'd like to see their product
spec's look up  SRA , its a fun read and yes, they can handle the bandwidth
just fine.
Ellis

**********************

Echelon dictionary.

From: "H.F.C. Buma" <hfcbuma@wanadoo.nl

The following is in one of the links from the URL I posted previously.
It's supposedly a list of the words known to the writer of this, to be in the
dictionary of the Echelon-system. There wasn't an email addy to ask him to
crosspost, but I'm sure he doesn't mind.
Can you imagine my LOL when I discovered my former ISP in the list?
Man, they must be doing overtime....;-)). All of those emails.....

(XS4ALL.NL)

Fred.

"I started collecting 'spook words' this after reading about a rumor that the
major intelligence agencies would scan all messages floating around on the
Internet looking for something interesting, This is why some paranoid folks
say the Internet is so slow, The NSA says that they don't, but that's what
the NSA would say. Another rumor to the story is that the NSA and all those
other three lettered agencies just don't have the bandwidth to look at all
those messages, and that its all those people farting around watching Bugs
Bunny on Real Audio from work sucking down all that bandwidth.

There may be some truth to the rumors, digital wiretaps have been done on
the Internet looking for particular words used by criminal hackers and only
a few messages that weren't related to the case were captured and
dissseminated.

The idea here is that if lots of people add suspicious words to their
messages, the world's intel agencies will be too busy with spurious input
that they will have to give up reading it all.

Anyone who has read the source code of my homepage or Prayers Pay will see
the list below with some additions here and there, You might want to
sprinkle some of these words into your X-headers for a little fun. Most to
nearly all of these words have been collected using open sources, (books,
online, seminars, conventions, broadcasts, movies, etc...)But I am always
looking for more. Mail me if you have any.



                                            William Knowles
                                                         Last updated 1.18.98

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Terrorism, Firewalls, Secure Internet Connections, ISS, Passwords, DefCon V,
Hackers, Encryption, Espionage, USDOJ, NSA, CIA, S/Key, SSL, FBI, Secert
Service, USSS, Defcon, Military, White House, Undercover, NCCS, Mayfly, PGP,
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~, CDC, DOE, FMS, HPCC, NTIS, SEL, USCODE, CISE, SIRC, CIM, ISN, DJC, SGC,
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1997, Whitewater, MOD, York, plutonium, William Gates, clone, BATF, SGDN,
Nike, Atlas, Delta, TWA, Kiwi, PGP 2.6.2., PGP 5.0i, PGP 5.1, siliconpimp,
Lynch, 414, Face, Pixar, IRIDF, eternity server, Skytel, Yukon, Templeton,
LUK, Cohiba, Soros, Standford, niche, 51, H&K, USP, ^, sardine, bank, EUB,
USP, PCS, NRO, Red Cell, Glock 26, snuffle, Patel, package, ISI, INR, INS,
IRS, GRU, RUOP, GSS, NSP, SRI, Ronco, Armani, BOSS, Chobetsu, FBIS, BND,
SISDE, FSB, BfV, IB, froglegs, JITEM, SADF, advise, TUSA, HoHoCon, SISMI,
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PFS, Aladdin, chameleon man, Hutsul, CESID, Bess, rail gun, Peering, 17,
312, NB, CBM, CTP, Sardine, SBIRS, SGDN, ADIU, DEADBEEF, IDP, IDF, Halibut,
SONANGOL, Flu, &, Loin, PGP 5.53, EG&G, AIEWS, AMW, WORM, MP5K-SD, 1071,
WINGS, cdi, DynCorp, UXO, Ti, THAAD, package, chosen, PRIME, SURVIAC, [Hello
to all my friends and fans in domestic surveillance]

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October 01, 1999 7:31 AM

Ellis

http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shuttle/5604/circle.html

The Last Circle

INTRODUCTION (Author Unknown)

RE: "The Last Circle"

The following condensed version of The Last Circle was provided in October 1996 to a secret Investigative Committee comprised of Congress people, lawyers and former POW's at their request. I originally contacted Congresswoman Maxine Waters in Washington D.C. and offered information relative to CIA drug trafficking, but was told the information was too complex and would I mind putting the information into a newspaper story, get it published and send it to her office?

I agreed and contacted a local newspaper reporter who, after reading portions of the material, decided it needed to be reviewed by individuals who had special knowledge of CIA drug trafficking, arms shipments, and biological warfare weapons.

After a brief meeting with these individuals, former Special Forces soldiers from the Vietnam era, they asked for copies of the manuscript, guaranteed an immediate congressional inquiry, and advised me NOT to place the information on the Internet as they feared the information could be, in their words, "taken as just another anti-government conspiracy."

I condensed the manuscript into the attached treatise, covering information relative to THEIR focus, and sent it to them along with key documents. Shortly afterward, they re-contacted me and set up elaborate security measures to insure my safety. As of this writing, I've had no need to institute those measures.

I have in my possession five boxes of documents, obtained from a convicted methamphetamine chemist whose closest friends were a 20-year CIA operative and a former FBI Senior-Agent-in-Charge of the Los Angeles and Washington D.C. bureaus. The labyrinthine involvements of these people and their corporate partners is revealed in this manuscript, along with information obtained by Washington D.C. journalist Danny Casolaro prior to his death in 1991.

A great deal of investigation still needs to be accomplished. I have neither the financial means nor the ability to obtain "evidence" for "prosecution." I am simply an investigative writer, placing this information into the public forum in hopes that someone, somewhere, will grasp the significance of the data and initiate a full-scale investigation with subsequent subpoena power.

With subpoena power, government agents can testify (some kept anonymous in this manuscript) who would otherwise lose their jobs and retirement if they came forward. Witnesses can be protected and/or provided immunity, and financial transactions of government and underworld figures can be scrutinized.

To date, I have not had more than one hour conversation with anyone associated with any Congressional investigation, and therefore am extremely limited in my ability to present the information I have. Much of what I learned during my five-year investigation cannot at this point be inserted into a manuscript. I must be assured the information and witnesses will be handled appropriately.

I personally do not believe the Department of Justice will ultimately "prosecute" this or any other drug trafficking case if it involves government officials. But I have made the effort to put forth enough information to generate interest and show good faith. I hope it will be of some value to the American public.

Please keep in mind as you read the attached pages that the complex corporate structures and technological projects described herein "may" have been nothing more than an elaborate smoke and mirrors cover for narcotics trafficking.

This aspect of my investigation was corroborated by several government investigators, one of whom was a House Judiciary investigator, who spent three years investigating the Inslaw stolen software case and said in response to my findings:

"There's some great information here. You did a very good investigative job, I have to commend you on that. I realize it's only a fraction of everything you have. What you have done, you have put the pieces of the whole thing together. Little bits and pieces of things that I have known about, that I had theorized about, you have found answers to those specific questions." (See Chapter 13 for entire conversation). That investigator is now in the White House Office of Drug Control Policy.

To those interested, nearly everything noted in the attached manuscript is supported by documents or tape recorded interviews. Some are extremely bulky and not quoted extensively in the manuscript, such as lengthy FBI wire tap summaries.

I wish to thank Garby Leon, formerly Director of Development at Joel Silver Productions, Warner Bros. in Burbank, California for tirelessly prompting me to get a first draft of The Last Circle written in 1994 and helping me with countless tasks during our joint investigation of the death of Danny Casolaro.

By Carol Marshall

NOTE:

This is a FIRST DRAFT, bare-bones, unpolished manuscript without prose, characterizations etc.

CHAPTER 1

For the deputies of the Mariposa Sheriff's Department, the awakening occurred on June 24, 1980, when deputy Ron Van Meter drowned in an alleged boating accident on Lake McClure. The search party consisted mainly of three divers, deputies Dave Beavers, Rod Cusic and Gary Estep. Although adjacent counties offered additional divers, sheriff Paul Paige refused outside help, even a minisubmarine offered by Beavers' associate.

In the shallow, placid waters of Lake McClure, Van Meter's body was not recovered that week, and indeed would not be found until ten years later, in September, 1990 when his torso, wrapped in a fish net and weighted down by various objects, including a fire extinguisher, washed ashore a few hundred yards from where Sergeant Roderick Sinclair's houseboat had once been moored.

Van Meter's widow, Leslie, had been at home baking cookies when she was notified of her husband's disappearance. She was an Indian girl who had no affinity with sheriff Paul Paige. The horror began for her that day also. Her home was ransacked and her husband's briefcase and diary were seized by the Mariposa Sheriff's department. Only she and a few deputies knew what Van Meter's diary contained. He'd told his wife he'd taken out a special life insurance policy two weeks before, but after the search that was missing also.

Leslie was taken to a psychiatric clinic for evaluation shortly after the incident.The story surfaced years later, one tiny bubble at a time. The selfinvolved little community of Mariposa did not cough up its secrets gladly. On March 23, 1984, Leslie Van Meter filed a Citizen's Complaint with the Mariposa County Sheriff's department alleging that the Sheriff's office had been negligent and unprofessional in their investigation of her husband's disappearance. His body had still not been found, despite private searches by Sergeant Beavers and other friends of the missing deputy. She wanted the case reopened.

Paul Paige was no longer sheriff, but newly elected Sheriff Ken Mattheys responded by reopening the investigation. Investigator Raymond Jenkins, a Merced College Police Chief, and retired FBI agent Tom Walsh from Merced, were notified by Sheriff Mattheys in October, 1984 that the Van Meter case had been reopened and he wanted their help in cleaning up the Sheriff's Department.

Their investigation led them straight to the doorstep of MCA Corporation (Music Corporation of America), parent company to Curry Company, the largest concessionaire in Yosemite National Park. A major drug network had surfaced in the park, compelling one park ranger, Paul Berkowitz, to go before the House Interior Subcommittee on National Parks and Recreation to testify about drug distribution by Curry Company officials.

Ed Hardy, the president of Curry Company, was closely associated with Mariposa County officials, in particular, Mariposa District Attorney Bruce Eckerson, County Assessor Steve Dunbar, and Congressman Tony Coelho, whose district encompassed Mariposa and the Park. The annual camping trips that the three men took together was encouraged by the local townsfolk because most of Mariposa's tax base emanated from Curry Company.Coelho and Hardy were regular fixtures around town, seen at most of the social events. Coelho even cooked and served spaghetti dinners for the whole town annually at the Mariposa Fair Grounds, and purchased property in partnership with one member of the Mariposa Board of Supervisors. In fact, Mariposa was one of the first places he bid farewell to after resigning from Congress to avoid an investigation of his finances.

Meanwhile, investigator Raymond Jenkins had followed the drug trail from Yosemite back to the Mariposa airport, where sheriff's deputies were seen regularly loading and unloading packages from planes in the dead of night.

One Indian girl complained bitterly about deputies using the Sara Priest land allotment (reservation) to grow marijuana and operate methamphetamine labs. Jenkins, by now retired from the position of Police Chief of Merced College, was called in to interview the Indian girl. That same day, as a favor, he provided me with copies of his notes. I followed up with a tape recorded interview at her home in Bear valley. Her father and uncle operated a small auto dismantling business on the reservation in Midpines, and after locating them and gaining their confidence, the uncle drove me out to Whiskey Flats, the site of the marijuana and methamphetamine lab operations. That week I rented a horse and rode down into the rocky, isolated valley of Whiskey Flats. Brush and shrubbery tore at the saddle on the horse and at the end of the dirt path I encountered three snarling Rottweiler dogs who put the horse into a frenzied lather.

Nevertheless, I managed to photograph the irrigation system, artesian spring and pond from which the water was supplied as well as various points of identification for future reconnaissance. I later returned in a fourwheel drive pickup truck and managed to view the trailer and lab shack.

The tape recorded interview with the Indian girl, the photos and notes from my discovery were provided to the Stanislaus County Drug Task Force, but jurisdictionally, they couldn't enter Mariposa County without authority of the Mariposa Sheriff's department. It was a catch 22 situation. Ultimately I provided the same information anonymously to several related agencies. It was not until 1993 that the fields were eradicated, and 1994, before the labs were raided. However, no arrests of any deputies were ever forthcoming. In fact, no arrests occurred at all, except for a few non-English speaking Mexican nationals who had handled the "cooking." The head of the Los Angeles Drug Enforcement Agency noted to a local newspaper that the meth lab was part of a large California drug network, but they were unable to identify the kingpins.

On July 6, 1985, Mrs. Van Meter filed a "Request for Official Inquiry" with the State of California Department of Boating and Waterways stating that no satisfactory investigation was ever conducted into the matter of her husband's disappearance.

That same month, shortly after a meeting at Lake McClure with Mrs. Van Meter, Sheriff Mattheys mysteriously resigned from his position at the Mariposa Sheriff's Department. Mattheys revealed to reporter Anthony Pirushki that he had been ordered by two county supervisors and the county's attorney "to stay away from the Van Meter investigation." But that was not the reason he resigned. The whole story would not surface until seven years later when a reporter for the Mariposa Guide interviewed him.

However, while still in office, Mattheys and his internal affairs investigators had learned the reason for Van Meter's disappearance. A few weeks prior to his death in 1980, Van Meter had driven to the Attorney General's office in Sacramento and reported drug dealing and other types of corruption within the Mariposa Sheriff's Department. This, according to his friends whom he had confided in, deputies Dave Beavers, a fifteen year veteran of the sheriff's department, and Rod Cusic, a seventeen year veteran. Both deputies were ultimately forced out of the department and retired on stress leave.

On that same day, reserve deputy Lucky Jordan had driven to the Fresno office of the FBI to report similar information. According to Jordan, they had split up and reported to separate agencies in the event "something" happened to one of them.The crux of the story was State Attorney General Van De Kamp's response to the requested investigation by Ron Van Meter. When Ron returned home from Sacramento, he was confronted by Sheriff Paige. Paige had received a call from the Attorney General informing him of the visit and its contents, and the sheriff was livid about Van Meter's betrayal.Van Meter had been photographing and journalizing drug activity by deputies at Lake McClure. He was part of a California State Abatement Program which involved harvesting and eradicating marijuana fields in Yosemite National Park and adjacent counties. Instead, the harvested marijuana was being stored in abandoned cars and towed out of town by a local wrecker under contract with the sheriff's department. It was also being distributed at a hidden cove at Lake McClure.

On June 24, 1980, frustrated and angry at the Attorney General for betraying him, Van Meter had borrowed a boat and was on his way to arrest the deputies at Lake McClure himself. He never returned. The investigation of Van Meter's "accident" was initially handled by Sergeant Roderick Sinclair, who could not have known on that fateful day that in exactly three years, three months, and nineteen days, he would enter the Twilight Zone where his own private hell awaited him.

The first substantial hint that a tentacle of the Octopus had slithered into Mariposa County occurred on March 5, 1983 when a Mariposa County Sheriff's vehicle scouting Queen Elizabeth II's motorcade route rounded a curve in the Yosemite National Park foothills, crossed a highway and collided head-on with a Secret Service car, killing three Secret Service agents. CHP (California Highway Patrol) Assistant Chief Richard Hanna reported that the collision occurred at 10:50 a.m. between Coulterville and La Grange on Highway 132 about 25 minutes ahead of Queen Elizabeth's motorcade.CHP Sergeant Bob Schilly reported that Mariposa County Sheriff's Sergeant Roderick Sinclair, 43, was driving with his partner, Deputy Rod McKean, 51, when "for some reason, [he didn't] know why," Sinclair crossed the center line and hit the second of the three Secret Service cars, which went tumbling down a 10foot embankment.

The three Secret Service agents killed in the collision were identified as George P. LaBarge, 41, Donald Robinson, 38, and Donald A. Bejcek, 29. Sinclair, who had sustained broken ribs and a fractured knee, was first stabilized at Fremont Hospital in Mariposa, then transported several days later to Modesto Memorial Hospital.

Years later, several nurses who had been present when Sinclair was brought into Fremont Hospital confided that Sinclair had been drugged on the day of "the Queen's accident" as it became known in Mariposa. For months Sinclair had been receiving huge daily shots of Demerol, "enough to kill most men," according to one billing clerk. Some former deputies who had feared punitive measures if they spoke up, later corroborated the story of the nurses.

Meanwhile, Assistant U.S. Attorney James White in Fresno ordered Dr. Arthur Dahlem's files seized to prove Sinclair's drug addiction. Sinclair's Mariposa doctor and close friend had been prescribing heavy sedatives to him for years. When White attempted to prosecute Sinclair for criminal negligence, he was called into chambers during the federal probe and told by U.S. District Court Judge Robert E. Coyle to "drop the criminal investigation" because Sinclair's drug problem was not relevant to the prosecution and the drug records could not be used in court. Judge Coyle's reasoning was that no blood tests had been taken on Sinclair at the Fremont Hospital on the day of the accident, therefore no case could be made against him.

In fact, the blood tests HAD been taken, but later disappeared.A significant piece of information relative to Judge Coyle's background was passed to me during my investigation of the Queen's accident by retired FBI agent Thomas Walsh. Allegedly, the Judge was once the attorney of record for Curry Company (owned by MCA Corporation) in Yosemite National Park. I later learned, in 1992, that Robert Booth Nichols had strong ties to MCA Corporation through Eugene Giaquinto, president of MCA Corporation Home Entertainment Division. Giaquinto had been on the Board of Directors of Nichols' corporation, MIL, Inc. (Meridian International Logistics, Inc.) and also held 10,000 shares of stock in the holding corporation. MIL, Inc. was later investigated by the Los Angeles FBI for allegedly passing classified secrets to overseas affiliates in Japan and Australia. It is interesting to note, though unrelated, that shortly afterward, the Japanese purchased MCA Corporation, one of the largest corporate purchases to take place in American history.

Relative to the Queens accident, in the civil trial that followed the tragic accident, Judge Coyle ruled that both Sinclair and the deceased Secret Service agents were at fault. Mariposa County was ordered to pay 70 percent of the claim filed by the widows, and the Secret Service to pay 30 percent. The county's insurance company paid the claim, and ironically, Sinclair was subsequently promoted to Commander of the Mariposa Sheriff's Department where he is still employed as of this writing.

In an interview on March 7, 1988, at Yoshino's Restaurant in Fresno, former U.S. Attorney James White recalled that the original CHP report on the Queens accident was sent to the State Attorney General's office (Van De Kamp) in Sacramento. The report was first received by Arnold Overoye, who agreed with White that Sinclair should be prosecuted. But when the report crossed Van De Kamp's desk, he told Overoye and his assistant to discard it trash it.

Van De Kamp then appointed Bruce Eckerson, the Mariposa County District Attorney, to take charge of the investigation and submit a new report. Coincidentally, Bruce Eckerson's disclosure statements on file at the Mariposa County Courthouse indicated that he owned stock in MCA Entertainment Corporation. White added that ALL of the crack M.A.I.T.S. team CHP officers involved in the original investigation either resigned or were transferred (or fired) afterward. The CHP Commander and the Deputy Commander who supervised the M.A.I.T.S. investigation also resigned as did Assistant U.S. Attorney White himself after the coverup took place.

However, White noted that before he resigned, he quietly filed with Stephan LaPalm of the U.S. Attorney's office in Sacramento the transcripts of the trial and an affidavit which listed the "hallucinatory" drugs Sinclair had used prior to the accident. I privately continued with the Queen's accident investigation, interviewing deputies Dave Beavers and Rod Cusic who had been privy to Sinclair's drugged condition on the day of the accident.

Beavers, who was the first deputy to arrive on the scene, maintained four years later, in 1987, that he was cognizant of Sinclair's condition, but when he was questioned by James White he was NOT ASKED about the drugs. (James White had by then been ordered to drop the criminal investigation and stay away from the drug aspect of the case).

In January 1988, deputy Rod Cusic strode into the offices of the Mariposa Guide, a competitor newspaper to the Mariposa Gazette, and stated that he was "told by Rod Sinclair to lie to a Grand Jury" about Sinclair's drug addiction and the resulting Queen's accident. Cusic added that he officially disclosed this to the Fresno FBI on April 26, 1984 and again on October 9, 1987. In 1987, Cusic also noted that he witnessed a boobytrapped incendiary device explode at Rod Sinclair's home during a visit to his residence. Additionally, earlier on, Sinclair allegedly barricaded himself inside his home and boobytrapped the property, as witnessed by numerous deputies who tried to persuade him to come out.

While reviewing old newspaper clippings from the Mariposa Gazette, I discovered an odd sidebar to the story. In December, 1984, during the Queen's accident civil trial in Fresno, U.S. Attorney James White had introduced testimony that Sinclair's vehicle contained "a myriad of automatic weapons including a boobytrapped bomb" when the collision occurred on March 5, 1983. It was not until 1991 that I discovered the depth of the coverup.

A CBS television executive and a Secret Service agent who had ridden in the third car of the Queen's motorcade in 1983, arrived in Mariposa to enlist my help in putting the pieces of the puzzle together on the Queen's accident. The Secret Service agent's best friend had been the driver of the car in which all three agents were killed. I signed a contract with the television executive for the sale of the story then drove them to the site of the accident, then to the site of where the damaged vehicle was stored near Lake McClure. The Secret Service agent broke down at the sight of the vehicle, remembering the gruesome appearance of his dead friend in the front seat. He turned, tears welling in his eyes, and said, "His heart burst right through his chest and was laying in his lap when I found him."

Dave Beavers joined us the next day. As did former sheriff Ken Mattheys. Beavers did not know that the same Secret Service agent whom he was sitting with in the car was the man who had tried to pull Sinclair out of the sheriff's vehicle on the day of the accident. There had been a scuffle, Beavers insisting that Sinclair go to the hospital with "his own people," and the Secret Service ultimately conceding.The Secret Service agent reflected sadly that they didn't know to ask the hospital for blood tests on Sinclair that day, didn't know of his drug addiction. By the time the case went to court, the records at the hospital were gone.

Two weeks after the agent left Mariposa, I received a packet containing copies of Sinclair's drug records for three years prior to the accident. They were the same records that U.S. District Court Judge Robert Coyle had disallowed in the Queen's accident trial. But it was not until producer Don Thrasher, a tenyear veteran of ABC News "20/20," came to town, that I learned of Sinclair's background, or the extent of his addiction.

By chance, at a book signing engagement at B. Dalton Bookstore, I had mentioned to the manager, Shaula Brent, that my next book contained information about the Queens accident.Surprised, Shaula blurted out that she had worked at Fremont Hospital when Sinclair was brought in from the accident. Shaula recounted the following: Rod Sinclair was brought into Fremont Hospital and placed in a room with an armed "FBI" agent outside the door. Sinclair had been receiving huge shots of Demerol in the arm every day prior to the accident, by order of Dr. Arthur Dahlem. Shaula noted that Sinclair was a big man and the amount of Demerol he had been receiving would have killed most men. After the Queen's accident, all drugs were withdrawn from Sinclair, and employees, including Shaula, could hear him raving aloud for days from his hospital room. The employees at the hospital were instructed not to speak about or repeat what took place at the hospital while Sinclair was there.

Because Shaula and her friend, Barbara Locke, who also worked at the hospital, were suspicious about Sinclair's hospital records, they secretly took photostats of the records "before they were destroyed by the hospital." Blood HAD been drawn on Sinclair on the day of the Queen's accident, and he HAD been under the influence, according to Shaula. Shaula gave the names of six nurses who were witness to Sinclair's condition at the time he was brought into Fremont Hospital. When his body was finally drugfree, Sinclair was transported, against his wishes, to Modesto Hospital.

In January, 1992, the final pieces to the puzzle fell into place. Sinclair's background had been the key all along. Producer Don Thrasher had interviewed the Secret Service agent and, although the information he obtained would not be used in his production, he advised me to follow up. The Secret Service corraborated the following profile: Sinclair's father had been a military attache to General Douglas MacArthur during World War II. (I had privately mused how many of MacArthur's men later became arms of the Octopus). In Japan, after the war, Colonel Sinclair (sr.) supervised the training of selected Japanese in intelligence gathering operations.

According to the Secret Service, he was an "international figure," highly regarded in the intelligence community. Rod Sinclair, Jr. attended school in Japan during this time. He later reportedly worked in the Army C.I.D. in a nonmilitary or civilian capacity, allegedly receiving training at Fort Liggett in San Luis Obispo, a training center for military intelligence operations.

Front Page or Contents

Techno Warfare/ MACRO-USGOV Espionage Operations - Page 1
 Techno Warfare/MACRO-USGOV Espionage Operations - Page 2
 Techno Warfare/MACRO-USGOV Espionage Operations - Page 3
Techno Warfare/MACRO-USGOV Espionage Operations - Historicals