Jack Kelly reviews Triple Cross

Our bumbling FBI

Investigative reporter Peter Lance has just completed his third book describing FBI blunders (or worse) in the war on terror....

Mr. Lance's third book, Triple Cross, focuses mainly on how Ali Mohamed, one of Osama bin Laden's closest aides, bamboozled the FBI into thinking he was helping the bureau even as he was plotting multiple acts of mass terror....

Minutes after TWA 800's destruction, Yousef made a brief telephone call in his native language of Baluch, according to Mr. Lance and Jack Cashill, who wrote a book about TWA 800. It was translated by the National Security Agency: "What had to be done has been done. TWA 800 (last two words unintelligible)."

If what Mr. Lance says is true - if only a small fraction of what Mr. Lance says is true - the best that can be said of the FBI is that it has been grossly negligent.

A recent story in the New York Sun also does not inspire confidence in the bureau. According to an FBI court filing, the files in 22 of 94 investigations into leaks of classified information are missing.

"Knowing what I know, I can confidently say that until the investigative responsibilities for terrorism are removed from the FBI, I won't feel safe," said former FBI agent Robert Wright in June, 2001. Reading Mr. Lance's book won't make him feel any safer.

Merry Christmas from the Senate Intel Committee

Either they were inspired by the Grinch who stole Christmas or they were rushing to throw something out there by year end to act like they did a complete investigation.

I'm betting on the latter:

Alarming 9/11 claim is baseless, panel says
By Greg Miller, Times Staff Writer
7:03 PM PST, December 24, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Rejecting one of the most disturbing claims about the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes, the Senate Intelligence Committee has concluded as untrue a congressman's contention that a team of military analysts identified Mohamed Atta or other hijackers before the attacks, according to a summary of the panel's investigation obtained by The Times.

The findings repudiate assertions by Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) and a few military officers that U.S. national security officials ignored startling intelligence in early 2001 that might have helped to prevent the attacks.

In particular, Weldon and other officials have repeatedly claimed that the team of military analysts, known as Able Danger, produced a chart that included a picture of Atta and identified him as being tied to an Al Qaeda cell in Brooklyn, N.Y. Weldon has also said that the chart was shared with White House officials, including Stephen J. Hadley, then deputy national security advisor.

But after a 16-month investigation, the Intelligence Committee has concluded that those assertions are unfounded.

"Able Danger did not identify Mohammed Atta or any other 9/11 hijacker at any time prior to Sept. 11, 2001," the committee determined, according to an eight-page letter sent last week to panel members by the top Republican and Democrat on the committee.

Weldon, who is also the focus of a Justice Department corruption probe, was defeated last month in his campaign for a 11th term, though his suburban Philadelphia district has a large GOP majority in voter registration. Attempts Sunday to reach a spokesman for Weldon and an attorney representing him in the Justice Department investigation were unsuccessful.

The Senate panel, known formally as the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, launched its investigation of Able Danger in August 2005, after Weldon and others close to the program went public with their claims. At the time, Weldon was the vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and the House Homeland Security Committee.

The recently completed probe also dismissed other assertions that have fueled conspiracy theories surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks.

The panel said it found "no evidence" to support claims by military officers connected to Able Danger that Defense Department lawyers prevented the team's analysts from sharing their findings with counterterrorism officials at the FBI before the attacks.

Nor was the alleged chart or any information developed by Able Danger improperly destroyed at the direction of Pentagon lawyers, a charge that has stoked claims of a cover-up.

"Able Danger" was the unclassified name given to a program launched in 1999 by the U.S. Special Operations Command as part of an effort to develop military plans targeting the leadership ranks of Al Qaeda and other terrorist networks.

Military analysts assigned to the effort did create charts with pictures of Al Qaeda operatives whose identities were known publicly at the time, the committee found. But the committee concluded that none of those charts depicted Atta, and that the unfounded claims made by Weldon and others may have been due to confusion.

One of the charts, titled "The Al Qaeda Network: Snapshots of Typical Operational Cells Associated with UBL" was attached to the letter sent to committee members last week by Sens. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) and John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the panel's leaders.

"One of these individuals depicted on the chart arguably looked like Mohammed Atta," the committee concluded. "In addition, the chart contained names of Al Qaeda associates that sound like Atta, as well as numerous variations of the common Arab name Mohammed."

The committee also suggested that officials' memories may have been clouded by the flurry of charts and photographs of Atta that surfaced after the attacks. The panel noted that a defense contractor that produced the chart at the center of the controversy subsequently created a follow-up chart, after the attacks, that did include Atta.

Atta, an Egyptian-born Islamic radical, was the ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks and pilot of one of the planes that struck the World Trade Center.

In June 2005, Weldon generated significant controversy when he declared in a speech on the House floor and in a book released that month that he had met with Hadley at the White House shortly after the attacks and had given the national security official a copy of a chart showing that Atta had been identified by Able Danger.

But the committee concluded that the chart "was not a pre-9/11 chart" and that "at no time did Mr. Hadley ever see a chart with pre-9/11 data bearing Atta's picture or name as described by Congressman Weldon."

Weldon has relished the role of calling attention to national security threats he believes are being ignored by others in government. At times he has carried around a replica of a suitcase-size nuclear bomb to highlight the danger of terrorist nuclear threats. He has also accused Iran of hiding Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Weldon's rising legal troubles played a role in his reelection loss last month. It was disclosed last week that a federal grand jury had subpoenaed congressional records from Weldon's office as part of an FBI probe aimed at determining whether he traded his influence to get lobbying business for his daughter Karen and others.

The House seat was won by Democrat Joe Sestak, a retired Navy vice admiral.

The Senate Intelligence Committee noted in its report that its findings were consistent with the conclusions, released in September, of a similar investigation of Able Danger by the Defense Department Inspector General's office.

Triple Cross in the Fresno Bee

Finally papers are realizing, it's not just a good book, it's breaking news.

Dana Ewell, terror and a question of judgment

By Bill McEwen / The Fresno Bee 12/19/06 04:13:28

John Zent was supposed to be the star witness for his daughter's boyfriend, Dana Ewell. Confident in himself and in Ewell's innocence, Zent used his status as a veteran FBI agent to try to poke holes in the prosecution's case.

He testified that he doubted the abilities of Fresno County sheriff's detectives investigating the slayings of Ewell's father, mother and sister, and mocked two detectives as "Bert and Ernie" after the Sesame Street puppets.

But before the trial's conclusion in 1998, Zent's credibility was in tatters. Eleven witnesses disputed Zent's accounts of Ewell's actions and Zent's criticisms of the investigation. A month later, a jury found that Ewell had conspired with a college friend in the 1992 triple slaying so they could split Ewell's $8 million inheritance.

Now, author and five-time Emmy award-winning reporter Peter Lance has linked Zent with Ali Mohamed, the notorious al-Qaida spy who penetrated the CIA, the FBI and the Green Berets in the years leading to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

In "Triple Cross," his third book about the war on terror, Lance says that while Mohamed was living in Santa Clara and flying overseas to help Osama bin Laden, he became an FBI informant.

His control agent in the bureau's San Francisco office?

John Zent.

Writes Lance: "But within months of taking on Mohamed as a source, Zent is embroiled in a grisly triple murder case. He becomes the primary alibi witness for Dana Ewell. ...

"The multiyear investigation consumes much of Zent's attention — at a time when he is responsible for monitoring [Mohamed]."

Lance relies on interviews with Fresno investigators who worked the Ewell murders to make the case that Zent was the wrong agent to be in charge of Mohamed — a former Egyptian commando who lived a double life in the United States while serving as bin Laden's security chief.

"If [Zent] couldn't see the guilt of this kid [Ewell], who was an absolute sociopath, after two years — when we had an airtight forensic case with a co-conspirator who flipped — how was he going to sniff out an [al-Qaida] spy?" retired sheriff's detective John Souza says in the book.

Lance, in an interview for this column, says: "To me, the idea that a man like John Zent, who used his position with the FBI to intervene in the Ewell murder investigation and openly declared Dana innocent — even testified for him at trial six years after the murders — shows an incredible inability to judge character or admit that he was wrong — two fatal qualities in an investigator."

Lance says he interviewed Zent briefly for the book, but arrangements for an in-depth interview broke down when Zent sent an e-mail raising several issues, including "compensation" and "indemnity from legal actions."

Zent did not respond to a request for a comment left Monday on his voice mail at Yahoo, where he is a security and risk-management executive.

Mohamed admitted in federal court six years ago to his involvement in plots to kill American soldiers in Somalia and Saudi Arabia, U.S. ambassadors in Africa and American civilians throughout the world.

He is a free man today, hidden by the government he duped for years, in a witness-protection program.

Well, I don't think he's a free man. In the book, Lance reports that Mohamed is in "custodial witness protect" but his wife still goes to visit him, in jail.

U.S. seeks to rein in its military spy teams

From the Los Angeles Times:

WASHINGTON — U.S. Special Forces teams sent overseas on secret spying missions have clashed with the CIA and carried out operations in countries that are staunch U.S. allies, prompting a new effort by the agency and the Pentagon to tighten the rules for military units engaged in espionage, according to senior U.S. intelligence and military officials.

The spy missions are part of a highly classified program that officials say has better positioned the United States to track terrorist networks and capture or kill enemy operatives in regions such as the Horn of Africa, where weak governments are unable to respond to emerging threats.

But the initiative has also led to several embarrassing incidents for the United States, including a shootout in Paraguay and the exposure of a sensitive intelligence operation in East Africa, according to current and former officials familiar with the matter. And to date, the effort has not led to the capture of a significant terrorism suspect.

Some intelligence officials have complained that Special Forces teams have sometimes launched missions without informing the CIA, duplicating or even jeopardizing existing operations. And they questioned deploying military teams in friendly nations — including in Europe — at a time when combat units are in short supply in war zones.

The program was approved by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, and is expected to get close scrutiny by his successor, Robert M. Gates, who takes over today and has been critical of the expansion of the military's intelligence operations.

Senior officials at the CIA and the Pentagon defended the program and said they would urge Gates to support it. But they acknowledged risks for the United States in its growing reliance on Special Forces troops and other military units for espionage.

"We are at war out there and frankly we need all the help that we can get," said Marine Maj. Gen. Michael E. Ennis, who since February has served as a senior CIA official in charge of coordinating human intelligence operations with the military. "But at the same time we have to be very careful that we don't disrupt established relationships with other governments, with their liaison services, or [do] anything that would embarrass the United States."

Ennis acknowledged "really egregious mistakes" in the program, but said collaboration had improved between the CIA and the military.

"What we are seeing now, primarily, are coordination problems," Ennis said in an interview with The Times. "And really, they are fewer and fewer."

The issue underscores the sensitivity of using elite combat forces for espionage missions that have traditionally been the domain of the CIA.

After Sept. 11, the Bush administration gave expanded authority to the Special Operations Command, which oversees the Army Green Berets, Navy SEALs and other elite units, in the fight against terrorism. At the same time, Rumsfeld, who lacked confidence in the CIA, directed a major expansion of the military's involvement in intelligence gathering to make the Pentagon less dependent on the agency.

Officials said this led to the secret deployment of small teams of Special Forces troops, known as military liaison elements, or MLEs, to American embassies to serve as intelligence operatives. Members of the teams undergo special training in espionage at Ft. Bragg and other facilities, according to officials familiar with the program.

The troops typically work in civilian clothes and function much like CIA case officers, cultivating sources in other governments or Islamic organizations. One objective, officials said, is to generate information that could be used to plan clandestine operations such as capturing or killing terrorism suspects.

Ennis said MLE missions were "low level" compared with those of the CIA. "The MLEs may come and go," he said, "but the CIA presence is there for the long term."

In a written response to questions from The Times, a spokesman for the Special Operations Command in Tampa, Fla., described MLEs as "individuals or small teams that deploy in support of (regional military commanders) in select countries, and always with the U.S. ambassador and country team's concurrence and support."

But critics point to a series of incidents in recent years that have caused diplomatic problems for the United States.

In 2004, members of an MLE team operating in Paraguay shot and killed an armed assailant who tried to rob them outside a bar, said former intelligence officials familiar with the incident. U.S. officials removed the members of the team from the country, the officials said.

In another incident, members of a team in East Africa were arrested by the local government after their espionage activity was discovered.

"It was a compromised surveillance activity," said a former senior CIA official familiar with the incident. The official said members of the unit "got rolled up by locals and we got them out." The former official declined to name the country or provide other details.

He said it was an isolated example of an operation that was exposed, but that coordination problems were frequent.

"They're pretty freewheeling," the former CIA official said of the military teams. He said that it was not uncommon for CIA station chiefs to learn of military intelligence operations only after they were underway, and that many conflicted with existing operations being carried out by the CIA or the foreign country's intelligence service.

Such problems "really are quite costly," said John Brennan, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center. "It can cost peoples' lives, can cost sensitive programs and can set back foreign policy interests."

Brennan declined to comment on specific incidents.

There have also been questions about where teams have been sent. Although conceived to bolster the U.S. presence in global trouble spots, the units have carried out operations in friendly nations in Europe and Southeast Asia where it is more difficult to justify, officials said.

On at least one occasion, a team tracked an Islamic militant in Europe. "They were trying to acquire certain information about a certain individual," said a former high-ranking U.S. intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity. The official declined to name the country, but said it was a NATO ally and that the host government was unaware of the mission.

Critics said such operations risked angering U.S. allies with a dubious prospect for payoff. In some countries where MLE teams are located, "There's not a chance … we're going to send somebody in there to snatch somebody unilaterally," said a government official who is familiar with the program.

At a time when the military is stretched thin, the official questioned the priority of using Special Forces for espionage, noting that the MLE program has not produced a significant success in terms of disrupting a plot or capturing a terrorist suspect.

"These are a highly trained, short-supply resource of the U.S. government," the official said. "What … are they doing there instead of Pakistan or Afghanistan?"

Gates, the former director of the CIA who is to run the Pentagon, has voiced concern over the military's encroachment on CIA missions. In an opinion piece published this year, Gates said that "more than a few CIA veterans, including me, are unhappy about the dominance of the Defense Dept. in the intelligence arena and the decline in the CIA's central role."

In response to such conflicts, the Bush administration previously designated the CIA director as the head of all U.S. human spying operations overseas, with CIA station chiefs serving as coordinators in specific countries.

Ennis, whose position at the CIA was created last year, said the agency and the Pentagon were developing a more rigorous system for screening proposed military intelligence operations.

"Like a pilot with a checklist," CIA station chiefs will be required to sign off on all aspects of a proposed military intelligence operation before it is allowed to proceed, Ennis said. The CIA station chief, he added, "would look at the risk in terms of embarrassment to the government. Do they have the right level of training to do what they claim that they want to do, and is this already being done somewhere else?"

Col. Samuel Taylor, director of public affairs for the Special Operations Command, dismissed the suggestion of coordination problems with other agencies, saying, "We have an excellent, effective and productive working relationship with the CIA."

Peter Lance interview with 1115

Here's the transcript:

We have been following the work of author/investigative journalist Peter Lance since the spectacular 1000 YEARS FOR REVENGE was released in 2003. If you haven’t read it (or its follow up COVER UP), we highly recommend that you catch up. We’ve previously interviewed Lance upon the publication of 1000 YEARS FOR REVENGE here and COVER UP here.

Lance’s new book TRIPLE CROSS: How bin Laden’s Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI - and Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him is out now. As we’ve come to expect from Lance, it is full of startling revelations and infuriating tales of incompetence, dereliction of duty, and willful cover-your-ass behavior by the very people charged with protecting this country. Lance has again granted us an extended interview in which he explains his methods and findings over his last five years of research.

Matt Cohen: One phrase often heard since 9/11 is “9/11 changed everything.” The timeline in TRIPLE CROSS starts 20 years earlier with the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981, and continues through the killing of Rabbi Meier Kahane in New York in 1990.

The subject of the book, Ali Mohamed was a member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad group that killed Sadat, and trained the men (man) who murdered Kahane, with some of the training even showing up on FBI surveillance photographs from a shooting range in Calverton, Long Island (as early as 1989).

Was 9/11 really necessary before it became a bad idea to let Ali Mohamed into the Army - and an elite and highly secure unit, at that - and allow him to operate as a CIA asset?

Peter Lance: In order to answer that question in depth, we need to track back a bit.

TRIPLE CROSS is the last book in my 9/11 investigative trilogy. All three books have sought to answer that question: was 9/11 necessary? By focusing on the New York Office of the FBI (NYO) and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), the two bin Laden “offices of origin.”

Keep in mind that up until 9/11 the U.S. conducted the “war on terror” almost entirely as a series of legal prosecutions investigated by the NYO through its Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) and Foreign Counterintelligence (FCI) squads and prosecuted by the Assistant U.S. Attorneys of the SDNY.

In 1000 YEARS FOR REVENGE I documented gross negligence by the NYO and JTTF in failing to stop Ramzi Yousef, the original WTC bomber who set the 1,500 pound urea-nitrate/fuel oil device in 1993. I also proved that it was Yousef who set in motion the “planes as missiles” plot in Manila in 1994 and that after his capture in 1995, the plot was merely executed by his uncle Khalid Shaikh Mohamed (KSM), the man the FBI calls the 9/11 “mastermind.”

In 1000 YEARS FOR REVENGE I pointed out multiple opportunities for the JTTF and other NYO investigators to interdict al Qaeda’s juggernaut from the murder of Kahane on Nov 5th, 1990 right up through September 11th.

It was Ali Mohamed who trained the first WTC bombing cell for Yousef. It was Ali Mohamed who trained Egyptian El Sayyid Nosair who killed Rabbi Meier Kahane in 1990. He also trained Clement Rodney Hampton El, an American Muslim who was convicted in 1995 in the “Day of Terror” plot to blow up the bridges and tunnels into Manhattan.

MC: In your two previous books you went beyond proof of gross negligence in the FBI and Justice Department and actually documented obstruction of justice. We cover negligence and obstruction every day, but most of that gets shrugged off as “politics as usual.” When it comes to the FBI/Justice Department, the goal should be to keep the country safe, yet they are just as bad as the politicians who run the show.

PL: In COVER UP – I proved that officials of the NYO and SDNY had actually buried a treasure trove of al Qaeda related evidence from Ramzi Yousef that they had obtained in 1996 from a mob informant who occupied the cell next to Yousef at the Metropolitan Correctional Center – the MCC in Lower Manhattan. Much of that intel was contained on a series of FBI #302 memos that can be accessed on my website.

They include a bomb recipe from Yousef which discusses the use of acetone peroxide as an explosive chemical. You will recall that acetone peroxide was the essential chemical that was to be used in the trans-Atlantic airliner bombing plot uncovered last August by MI-5 – a plot that both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times reported was a mirror image of Ramzi Yousef’s failed 1995 Bojinka plot. So I proved in COVER UP that ten year earlier the Feds in the FBI’s NYO and the SDNY buried key intelligence that could have alerted counter terrorism officials worldwide of such a plot a decade before.

MC: That sounds like it has chilling relevance to the terror threat climate today?

PL: Absolutely. When you have to take your shoes off before getting on an airline flight, it’s not because of Richard Reid, the so-called “shoe bomber.” It’s because in a “wet test” for the Bojinka plot aboard Philippine Airlines Flight #434 on December 11th, 1994, Yousef had smuggled the 9 volt batteries for his Casio-nitro “bomb trigger” in the heels of his shoes.

The reason there is now a restriction on carrying liquids and gels on flights is because of Yousef – the same restrictions were used for months in Asia in 1995 when his Bojinka plot to blow up a dozen airliners over the Pacific was first exposed.

Most of this (absent the August plot) was reported in COVER UP, published in 2004.

MC: But you still had a number of unanswered questions.

PL: That’s right. And the 9/11 Commission – before which I testified – told only a fragment of the full story – focusing on the years 1998 forward. In fact, a former SDNY prosecutor named Dietrich Snell, — who had prosecuted Yousef for Bojinka in 1996 — became the senior counsel to the Commission in charge of determining the “origin of the plot.”

This was the single most important determination the Commission could make because, if you can’t pinpoint when the “planes as missiles” plot began, you can’t fairly hold U.S. counterterrorism officials accountable for failing to prevent it.

Snell had prosecuted Yousef in the case where that 1996 treasure trove of intelligence was buried. So he was a walking conflict of interest. It was Snell, indeed, who took my “testimony” on March 15th, 2004 in a windowless conference room at 26 Federal Plaza – the HQ of the FBI’s NYO where the Commission had offices.

In the end, Snell reduced the reams of once classified material I gave the Commission from the Philippines National Police to a footnote in the final report. And then he pushed the plot original forward two years from Manila to Afghanistan, claiming falsely that KSM had merely “pitched” the plot to bin Laden and that, at the time he wasn’t even a member of al Qaeda.

What was Snell’s authority in the 9/11 Commission Report – the last official report on the biggest mass murder in U.S. history? Khalid Shaikh Mohammed himself – his word alone – after having been tortured and water boarded following his capture in March 2003. To me this was like taking the word of David Berkowitz for when he did the first Son of Sam Murder. KSM was UTTERLY unreliable as a witness and yet Snell fixed the plot origin allegedly based on KSM’s word.

MC: Why would he do that?

PL: I believe to remove KSM’s nephew Ramzi from the plot and thus relieve the two “offices of origin” from culpability for not stopping 9/11. Because, as I prove definitively in 1000 YEARS FOR REVENGE, the JTTF could have stopped Yousef in 1992 – when George H.W. Bush was in the White House. And if they had – they would have stopped 9/11 because Yousef was the criminal genius behind its origin –

An outside the box thinker and engineer trained in Wales who went from building WMDs to be transported to a target by truck like the original WTC device, to these ingenious little “bomb triggers” which, when planted above the fuel tank of a 747, would blow down, acting as “blasting caps” to turn the entire aircraft itself into a bomb.

That was the intent of Bojinka. But for an Act of God – a fire in Yousef’s Manila bomb factory – he might have pulled it off in 1995.

MC: But why would responsible FBI and DOJ officials bury evidence of Yousef’s connection to the 9/11 plot or this 1996 “treasure trove?”

PL: The answers are in COVER UP. But I needed further proof to connect the dots and that’s why I woke up one day and realized that Ali Mohamed was the real key.

Mohamed, an ex-Egyptian Army Major and commando who spoke four languages including Hebrew and had two psychology degrees, was the chosen spy of Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri (head of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad EIJ) as early as 1984. Mohamed penetrated the CIA in Hamburg in 1994, then al-Zawahiri vectored in toward the U.S.

By 1989 after the EIJ had merged into al Qaeda, Ali Mohamed who had enlisted in the U.S. Army and gotten himself stationed at the JFK Special Warfare Center (SWC) at Fort Bragg – was stealing top secret documents and coming up weekends to New York where he trained – as noted: El Sayyid Nosair who murdered Kahane, Mohammed Salameh and Mahmoud Abouhalima, later convicted in Yousef’s WTC bombing and Clement Rodney Hampton El, a U.S. Muslim later convicted by Patrick Fitzgerald and Andrew C. McCarthy in the 1995 “Day of Terror” case.

MC: So you’re saying that Ali Mohamed by the mid 90’s was on Patrick Fitzgerald’s radar?

PL: Mohamed had been named as an unindicted co-conspirator along with bin Laden, his brother in law Mohammed Jamal Khalifa and 168 others and yet, I was astonished to discover that Ali Mohamed has been working as an FBI informant from 1992 – snookering the two “offices of origin” the way he’s snookered the Green Berets.

After taking a long time to answer your question – the reason, I concluded that the Feds allowed him to operate with such impunity – is that they first thought they could turn him and later, they were terrified that his years of eating the FBI’s lunch would come out if he ever got on the stand so they stuck their fingers in the leaking dike and hoped that it would hold. But it didn’t – and the African Embassy bombings, which Mohamed had personally planned and helped to execute, were the immediate result.

MC: In your reporting, did you come across any theories as to what the government is doing with Mohamed now?

PL: After the Embassy bombings in early August 1998, the Feds took a month to arrest Mohamed. They then held him for 9 months in the MCC on a John Doe warrant, terrified that word of his years of duplicity would get out. They negotiated with him and his lawyers for almost 2 years and finally cut a plea deal in October 2000 which spared him the death penalty.

But as best as I could determine all they got in return was his silence. He’s never seen the light of day in a courtroom – even though under the exception to the Rule Against Hearsay for co-conspirator testimony he would have been the best possible witness for Patrick Fitzgerald to put on the stand in February, 2001 when he commenced U.S. vs. bin Laden, the African Embassy bombing case.

In fact, Ali was never called to testify because as defense lawyers told me, the Feds didn’t want defense counsel peeling back the layers and showing how from the 1984 CIA penetration to the 2 years at Fort Bragg and the six years from 1992 that Ali was interacting with the FBI and federal prosecutors, nobody seemed to realize that he was al Qaeda’s perfect spy – this…

· Despite the fact that as early as 1993 he’d confessed to his west coast control Agent John Zent that he was working for somebody named bin Laden and an organization called al Qaeda that was bent on overthrowing the Saudi Government

· Despite the fact that Andrew McCarthy met face to face with Ali in December 1994 around the time he’d named him as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Day of Terror case and Ali had told him that he was merely running a scuba diving business in Kenya.

· Despite the fact that from 1996 on Squad I-49, the bin Laden Squad in the NYO had a wiretap on the Nairobi phone of Wadih El-Hage, one of the primary bombing plotters, whom Ali was staying with in Kenya.

· Despite the fact that in August 1997, Dan Coleman, a key special agent in I-49, which Patrick Fitzgerald was directing, searched El-Hage’s house and found Ali Mohamed’s phone number and address in Sacramento, California where he was living.

· Despite the fact that in October, 1997 Fitzgerald and two I-49 agents including Jack Cloonan met Ali at a restaurant in Sacramento and tried, in vain, to turn him. At that meeting Ali said that he “loved” bin Laden and that he didn’t need a fatwa or religious degree to attack the U.S. (his adopted country). He also said that he had multiple sleepers that he could make operational on a moment’s notice and that he himself could disappear.

· Despite the fact that after that meeting Fitzgerald turned to Cloonan and declared Ali the most dangerous man he had ever met and vowed not to leave him “on the street.” And yet he did for another 10 months only to have the bombs go off in Kenya and Tanzania – a plot that was more Ali Mohamed’s than any other single al Qaeda operative.

MC: What did the Feds get in return for cutting this deal with Mohamed?

PL: Basically, they got Ali Mohamed’s silence. In return for that Ali Mohamed exists today in a form of custodial witness protection. He has never been sentenced for his crimes and the Judge at his plea hearing in 2000 even raised the possibility that he would someday be released.

MC: Why did he get this special treatment?

PL: Because as I wrote in TRIPLE CROSS in the poker game between the hunters and the hunted Ali held all the face cards.

As soon as they locked him up he knew that he was in the cat bird’s seat because the Feds would rather not bring him to justice than be embarrassed at how he’d eaten their lunches for years.

MC: But as you suggest that decision had catastrophic consequences

PL: Clearly. First because if Ali’s 14 year terror spree had been fully exposed in early 2001 that intelligence on al Qaeda’s bench strength, taken together with all of the other intel that was bombarding U.S. agencies in the spring and summer of 2001 might have alerted the Feds to the 9/11 plot –

Second because Ali himself knew every detail of the plot and the Feds, in giving him a pass, failed to get it out of him.

Worse – I prove in the book in the case of Sphinx Trading that Fitzgerald and McCarthy were onto a mailbox store in Jersey City (where El Sayyid Nosair – the Kahane killer had a mailbox)
as early as 1990.

MC: You write about Sphinx Trading as a sort of epicenter of terror. Yet either no one put the pieces together, or didn’t want to.

PL: Fitzgerald and McCarthy had named Waleed al-Noor, the store’s co-incorporator to that same unindicted co conspirators list that Ali and bin Laden were on in 1994/1995.

Where do you think two of the 9/11 muscle hijackers (al-Midhar and al-Hazmi) got their fake ID’s in July of 2001? Sphinx Trading.

As I detailed on the Huffington Post on November 17th, all the Feds had to do was treat Sphinx the way they’d treated John Gotti’s Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry Street and they would have been right in the middle of the “planes as missiles” plot.

MC: At what point in your research of this book did you uncover Fitzgerald’s links to Mohamed?

PL: As I noted in the story of Sphinx, Fitzgerald and McCarthy were onto Ali as early as 1994.

In January, 1996, Fitzgerald began directing I-49 in the NYO as a dedicated “bin Laden Squad”. Lawrence Wright in THE LOOMING TOWER covers some of this ground, but he does zero critical analysis of these FBI agents. He just takes their word at face value.

What I’ve done is analyzed their stories against a massive database that I’ve been building for five years that includes dozens of books, more than 10,000 open source news articles, more than 45,000 pages of trial transcripts and dozens of interviews with sources inside and retired from the FBI and the DOJ.

One of my most stunning findings – and there’s a seven page Affirmation sworn to by Fitzgerald and dated June 25th, 1999 – it’s an appendix in TRIPLE CROSS. In it he tried to explain why he buried that treasure trove of intel from Ramzi Yousef in 1996 – including proof of an active al Qaeda cell in NYC – by calling it a “hoax” and a “scam.”

Well I found the wiseguy, John Napoli whom Fitzgerald cites as the primary source for that “hoax” and “scam” story and he categorically denied it.

There are some people who might consider Fitzgerald’s suppression of that evidence as obstruction of justice. The problem is that it would take a federal prosecutor from the Justice Department to make that determination.

Do you see how the dog starts to chase his tail here?

MC: To people who don’t follow such things very closely, Fitzgerald’s media coverage during the Plame investigation seemed to come out of nowhere. But it was always the same people vouching for his integrity and tenacity that drove the narrative. Shouldn’t something as big as his cover up of Mohamed have come out when Fitzgerald was in the headlines every day?

PL: I was able to make these connections after five years of seven day weeks and fourteen hour days. I also had not only the capability – with a J.D. and classical training as an investigative reporter with ABC News – but I had the will –

I kept the mass card of Ronnie Bucca on the wall next to my desk each day as I worked. He was the incredibly heroic FDNY Fire Marshal whose story I told in 1000 YEARS FOR REVENGE. Not only had he been predicting for years that al Qaeda and Yousef’s people would return to hit “The Towers,” but on 9/11 he died on the 78th floor of the South Tower trying to save lives and beat back the flames.

I invite any of your readers to sample the detail that I put into this epic story. They can download a pdf of the 32 page color, illustrated time line in the middle of the book by going to peterlance.com. They can also sample some of the heretofore classified DOJ documents in the book and download pdf’s of some of the FBI 302’s.

Anyone that takes half an hour to read that time line will tell you that a daily deadline reporter – even one with the will – could never have uncovered the story of Fitzgerald’s negligence and intent in the midst of the CIA leak coverage.

MC: In 1000 Years, and Cover Up you exposed a multitude of mistakes and acts of willful subterfuge on the part of FBI/CIA agents and prosecutors, but with the exception of Special Agent in Charge Carson Dunbar’s disastrous intervention into the case of informant Emad Salem, Triple Cross is the first time you’ve really written about anyone in positions of real power.

Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, who has been under attack since 9/11 for her infamous “wall memo” on investigations vs. intelligence gathering, comes under your microscope, but not for the reasons she has up to now. Others in the Southern District of New York U.S. Attorney’s office are called into question as well. Isn’t it the job of supervisors and management to analyze the work product of their organizations and look for the kinds of conflict and incompetence you have illustrated in three successive books?

PL: Sure it’s their job – but even the best managers, as I found – began covering up the incompetence and negligence years earlier. Sen. Chuck Grassley at a Judiciary Committee hearing in September, 2005 called it “the oldest excuse inside the Beltway – CYA.”

What I’ve documented in my three books isn’t some big “Oliver Stone conspiracy.” It’s the repeated failure of the best and the brightest in the FBI and the DOJ to do their jobs and then, when confronted with the consequences of the negligence – like the attacks on the WTC, the Embassies and the U.S.S. Cole – to prevent the American public from getting a true picture of just how at risk they really are from al Qaeda.

MC: You tie the Pentagon’s data-mining project “Able Danger” into the larger cover-up. When the story of Able Danger first broke in 2005, it was typically a very polarizing subject, due in no small part to its source, Pennsylvania Congressman Curt Weldon. But even discounting Weldon’s role, Army Lt Colonel Anthony Shaffer seems to be a very credible witness who has certainly suffered some serious retribution for his public statements. Not much remains of Able Danger’s findings, but you include a link chart in Triple Cross that seems to prove they were onto something. How does Able Danger fit in with the rest of your reporting?

PL: Able Danger was a data mining operation commenced in December, 1999 on the orders of Gen. Hugh Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Gen. Pete Schoomaker, head of the Special Operations Command (SOCOM).

More than a year after the Embassy bombings, they realized that the U.S. military would eventually have “boots on the ground” against al Qaeda, so they commenced a massive “dating mining” operation. Here’s an excerpt from TRIPLE CROSS to give you an idea of how it worked citing an extensive interview I did with Col. Shaffer, whom I consider impeccably honest.

“The operation’s data-mining center was located at the Land Information Warfare Activity (LIWA) at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Known as ‘spook central,’ Fort Belvoir housed the Information Dominance Center—a building full of army intelligence “geeks,” whose bullpen area was designed to look like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek.

“The lead LIWA analyst running the data mine was Dr. Eileen Priesser, a double Ph.D. The operations officer was a decorated U.S. Navy captain named Scott Phillpott. Army Major Eric Kleinsmith was LIWA’s intelligence chief. J.D. Smith and Jacob L. Boesen, working as a contract analysts from Orion Scientific, designed many of the link charts in which the “deep data points” connecting the key al Qaeda players were represented graphically.

“’You would ask them, for example, to look at Khalid Shaikh Mohammed,’ says Shaffer, ‘and these search engines would scour the internet 24/7 looking at any number of open-source databases, from credit reporting agencies to court records and news stories to Lloyd’s of London insurance records. You name it. Once a known associate of KSM was found, they would go through the same process for that individual.’

“One IDC analyst I spoke to described it as ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon on steroids.”

“Told to ‘Start with the words ‘Al Qaeda’ and go,’ the LIWA data crunchers began an initial harvest in December 1999. The data grew fast and exponentially, and before long it amounted to two terabytes—equal to about 9 percent of the books in the Library of Congress. “It was a mile wide and an inch deep,” says Kleinsmith. “Naturally only a small percentage of the data related to terrorism,” says Tony, ‘So we would have to neck it down —cull it — until we had some substantive hits.’

Within months, Operation Able Danger had uncovered some astonishing intelligence.

“’We found active an al Qaeda cell in the U.S linked to radical Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman,’” says Shaffer, now a lieutenant colonel. ‘That was most frightening—that as late as early 2000 we detected that kind of al Qaeda presence here.’

“Examining Sheikh Rahman’s Brooklyn cell—which operated out of Ali Mohamed’s old stomping grounds, the al Farooq mosque—the LIWA analysts made another alarming discovery.

“We identified lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, who flew UA 175 into the South Tower of the Trade Center, and two of the muscle hijackers aboard AA 77, which hit the Pentagon,’ says Shaffer. That linkage was made months before any of the other Big Five intelligence agencies would trip to their presence.

Coming as it did in early 2000, the identification of Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi was a crucial find for the SOCOM operation.

“Of all the 9/11 hijackers, these two Saudis had the longest records of al Qaeda involvement, and beginning in January 2000, they soon became the most visible of the 19 operatives. In fact, the two failed pilots appeared on the radar of the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI so many times in the eighteen months before 9/11 that the U.S. intelligence community had multiple opportunities to thwart the plot.

“Al-Midhar and Al-Hazmi were the poster boys who came to symbolize the “stove piping” between U.S. agencies in their failure to share intelligence before 9/11.

“Until now, most of the blame for failure to track the two Saudis has been leveled at the Central Intelligence Agency. As recently as August 2006, in his 9/11 book THE LOOMING TOWER, New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright charged that the CIA’s hoarding of intelligence on al Midhar, al Hazmi, and another key al Qaeda operative ‘may, in effect, have allowed the September 11 plot to proceed.’

“But even if the FBI had received no help from any other agency, we’ve uncovered compelling evidence that the agents of Squad I-49 should have tripped to the presence of the two hijackers in the U.S. months before they flew AA Flight 77 into the Pentagon.

Atta himself came into the U.S. on or about June 3rd, 2000, and we know that the Able Danger unit swept INS lists – so it is entirely conceivable that they I.D.’d him as Shaffer and Phillpott claimed they did. In fact, Atta rented a room in Brooklyn using his own name. He wasn’t as highly visible as al Midhar and al Hazmi were in San Diego, but his presence could have easily been detected given the kind of sweep Able Danger was doing.

MC: With the reports over the last few years of the government listening to domestic calls without even easily obtainable (and retroactive) warrants, tracing money via the SWIFT bank transfer system in contravention of the laws in Europe, and other quasi-legal intelligence gathering methods, do you have any doubt that a program identical to Able Danger is up and running? And if so, how do you balance privacy with the government’s need to know? Wouldn’t a good example of the conundrum a situation like the FBI going after the Times reporters who broke the domestic spying story or even Judy Miller’s time in prison for defying Fitzgerald?

PL: In my opinion there is a huge difference between doing data mining sweeps of open source data, as was done by Able Danger and then honing down the links related to known terrorists – such as declared members of al Qaeda and spying on U.S. citizens via wiretaps – or chilling reporters with subpoenas – both of which undermine the constitutional underpinnings of this nation.

Here’s the difference: there is no harm in the detection of raw intelligence with a potential connection to terrorism, especially if the intel is collected from open source data bases where an individual would have no reasonable expectation of privacy.

The harm is in the long term storage of data on what are known as U.S. persons – a term defined by Executive Order 12333, an intelligence directive signed in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan after the Senate and House hearings into CIA domestic spying abuses in the late 1970s.

“The EO,” as it’s known, was designed to prevent the Pentagon from storing data indefinitely on “U.S. persons,” a term defined to include American citizens, U.S. corporations; even permanent resident aliens.

That kind of storage can produce Gestapo-like files on American citizens, and legal aliens and that is something I would fight tooth and nail against.

But making connections on known terrorists using open source data is not only legal but necessary to thwart the al Qaeda threat. And, in fact, there are two enormous exceptions in EO 12333 for data collected from open sources and terrorism related intelligence.

What we have to fear – and I think Patrick Fitzgerald’s conduct in the CIA leak case represents this problem at its extreme – is the Government interfering with the press in pursuit of an investigation.

The fact that Fitzgerald put Judith Miller away for 85 days is shocking – no matter how you might feel about her flawed reporting on Iraqi intel in the lead up to war. She’s still a reporter and needs to be able to protect her confidential sources.

Clearly we need a federal shield law that protects not only daily deadline print and electronic media journalists, but historians and writers like me who report on the internet and in book form on matters of public interest.

MC: What is your opinion of Fitzgerald’s conduct of the CIA leak case?

PL: Consider this excerpt from TRIPLE CROSS on my sense of how Fitzgerald has already chilled the New York Times, arguably the greatest paper in America:

The determination of whether or not the Bush White House used its media influence to spank a critic who accused the administration of cooking the intelligence books in the lead-up to the war, and put a CIA employee (of any status) at risk, is a question worthy of investigation. If Patrick Fitzgerald botched it through negligence or intent, he ought to be held accountable. There seems to be bipartisan dissatisfaction about the way he’s run the leak probe.
But until he issues other indictments, or backs out of the Libby case and shuts down the grand jury, he deserves the benefit of the doubt on whether his investigation will ever yield the full truth on the Plame-Wilson outing.
Having said that, one thing is very clear: whether he’s uncovered a convictable crime in the leak, Fitzgerald has chilled the press, and that may well be his most damaging legacy.
As recently as September 18, writing in the New York Observer, Michael Calderone noted that a number of New York Times reporters have had to adopt the techniques of drug dealers—literally resorting to disposable cell phones and erasable notes in their efforts to avoid subpoenas and “shake” the Feds.
In a 2006 memo, Times executive editor Bill Keller reportedly cited “the persistent legal perils that confront us.” On September 18, 2006 Keller found himself on the cover of New York magazine in a story headlined “Times Under Siege.” It detailed a December 2005 meeting at the White House in which Keller was confronted by the president, former counsel Harriet Miers, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, and former National Security Agency director (now CIA director) Michael Hayden. For a year, the Times had delayed publication of a story that the NSA had been monitoring the phone calls of U.S. citizens without court authorized warrants.
The December meeting in the Oval Office signaled a showdown over the possible publication of the piece. At one point in the meeting, according to reporter Joe Hagen, “Bush issued an emphatic warning: If [the Times] revealed the secret program to the public and there was another terrorist attack on American soil, the Paper of Record would be implicated. ‘The basic message,’ recalls Keller, ‘was ‘You’ll have blood on your hands.’’”
Eleven days after that meeting on December 16, the Times ran a story at the top left of its front page headlined “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts.” It was written by reporters James Risen, who had done such seminal work on Ali Mohamed, and Eric Lichtblau, who was among the first reporters to reveal the failure of the Trilogy project at the FBI. That first piece, and their ongoing coverage of the NSA wiretap story, earned Risen and Litchblau the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. It also locked the “Grey Lady,” as the Times is known, in a war with the White House that only escalated after the publication on June 23, 2006, of another piece by Lichtblau and Risen (with reporter Barclay Walsh) revealing a secret Bush administration program to examine the bank records of thousands of Americans.
The White House campaign against the Times has led to a grand jury probe of the NSA wiretap leak, and calls by conservative columnists to charge Keller and other Times editors under the Espionage Act.
“The main worry these days is not libel, proving that you actually quoted something accurately,” said Craig Witney, the standard’s editor for the Times, “It’s being subpoenaed.”
Indeed, on August 12, 2006, in researching the Able Danger issue for this book, I placed a call to New York Times reporter Phil Shenon, who (with Douglas Jehl) was among the first to break the data-mining story a year earlier. There was a Fitzgerald-related angle that I wanted to pursue.
Shannon’s response? “Peter, I’m sorry but I can’t discuss anything that might even remotely involve [Patrick] Fitzgerald. He’s subpoenaed my records.”
Last month, in another case involving former Times reporter Judith Miller, a New York appeals court ruled that Fitzgerald could seize her phone records, as well as Shenon’s, in connection with their reporting on Islamic charities.
As an author, I can only wonder whether hypersensitivity to Fitzgerald’s tactics will cause the New York Times or other major media outlets to avoid coverage of the findings in this book. Time will tell.

MC: When the British government broke up a terror cell last summer based on the “bojinka” plot (smuggling liquid explosives and crude digital watch timers onto airlines) originally conceived by Ramzi Yousef in 1994 and live-tested on Philippines Air Lines flight in December of that year, what did it say about our security that government officials expressed surprise and the TSA immediately banned liquids on planes despite the method being 12 years old?

PL: The trans-Atlantic airliner plot was a mirror image of Ramzi Yousef’s Bojinka plot. The primary explosive was to have been manufactured using acetone peroxide. Go to peterlance.com and click #302s and scroll to the bottom of the right hand column to a note from Yousef to Scarpa Jr. in 1996 entitled “How to Smuggle Explosives Into An Airplane.” He cites the use of acetone peroxide.

This was part of the treasure trove of intel from Yousef buried by Patrick Fitzgerald and other Feds in that ends/means decision to save those six mob cases in 1996. Ask yourself which is the greatest worry: that al Qaeda would seek to resurrect a failed plot or that it took MI-5 to detect it because our own FBI and Justice Department are in denial over the Bojinka Yousef-Scarpa Jr. intel.

MC: Also in the area of things I learned first from reading your books is the case of Lindley DeVecchio, the former FBI agent who has figured prominently in your books as corrupt, even providing names and locations to one of his assets knowing that the information would lead to murder. How satisfying was it to have your work lead in part to DeVecchio’s arrest on murder charges? What do you know about the status of that case given the conflict of interest inherent if the Justice Department takes over the prosecution?

PL: “Allegedly corrupt,” since he has not yet been tried on those murder charges stemming – in some part from my research in COVER UP. It is satisfying to me as a journalist to know that I’m capable of uncovering truths, long buried and that there are some government officials that will respond to the truth. But it’s sad that it took the Brooklyn D.A. to open this investigation vs. the Feds themselves. It’s another measure of how the FBI and DOJ routinely circles the wagons in defense of their errors vs. admitting them and attempting to change the system.

MC: After writing about cover-ups, what was it like to become the victim of one when Justice Department officials convinced the National Geographic Channel to withhold interview transcripts that they were contractually obligated to share with you?

PL: In answer to that question I would like to refer your readers to the Huffington Post that I did on the subject.

In effect, the National Geographic Channel acquiesced to a hijacking of my research, but worse, they whitewashed virtually all of my critical findings about how the FBI failed to stop Ali Mohamed. They told half the story – only the fascinating Ali Mohamed part, not the second and most important part of the story about how Patrick Fitzgerald and some key Feds in Squad I-49 failed to stop Ali Mohamed. One of those Feds was Jack Cloonan, who the National Geographic Channel and the producer Towers Productions effective used to replace me as the narrative voice of a documentary they had contracted with me (via Towers Productions Inc.) to be based ENTIRELY on my enterprise reporting.

Fortunately I’ve got the COMPLETE story in TRIPLE CROSS available online and at bookstores everywhere.

MC: In the preface of Triple Cross, you explain that is was your son’s (then in high school) proximity to the World Trade Center and the loss of FDNY marshal Ronnie Bucca on 9/11 that pulled you back into investigative journalism to explore how that day came to pass. How have the last five years affected your outlook, do you feel that this time was well spent, and what would you do differently if you had the chance?

PL: I don’t have a single regret. I feel privileged to be able to use the skills I’ve developed over 30+ years as an investigative reporter to cover the most important story of our era and to cover it in the kind of depth any daily deadline reporter can only dream of.

My hope is that people will find TRIPLE CROSS and then go back and access my first two books (1000 YEARS FOR REVENGE and COVER UP) books, that I hope won’t only educate them to the al Qaeda threat but make them smart about how utterly the FBI and Justice Department played catch up all of those years – from the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan in February, 1989 up through 9/11 and beyond.

The only change will come when the public is sufficiently informed, then angered and finally motivated to act. The first step is getting the intelligence to the people and TRIPLE CROSS does that – naming names and focusing the laser beam of accountability like no other book relating to the greatest mass murder in U.S. history – the ultimate “cold case,” 9/11.

Peter Lance on Fox and Friends

PeterLance.com has the video from yesterday morning.

UPDATE: He'll be on Fox and Friends early Friday morning, as well.

Judyth Piazza chats with Peter Lance

Via the Student Operated Press:

Judyth Piazza chats with Peter Lance Five-time Emmy-winning investigative reporter

by Judyth Piazza CEO (Editor)

Click here for the audio feed.

Peter Lance is a five-time Emmy-winning investigative reporter now working as a screenwriter and novelist. With a Masters Degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a J.D. from Fordham University School of Law, Lance spent the first 15 years of his career as a print reporter and network correspondent. In 1981 Lance became Investigative Correspondent for ABC News.

Lance was a member of the first American crew into Indochina after the end of the Vietnam War, he chased rebel insurgents through Laos and members of the Gambino Family through the toxic wastelands of New Jersey, he tracked knife-happy surgeons in the Deep South, and nuclear terrorists through the twisted streets of Antwerp. Then, in 1987, he took a break from non-fiction.

Lance came to L.A. and began working as a writer and story editor for Michael Mann on two of his acclaimed series: Crime Story and Miami Vice. In 1989 he became the co-executive producer and "show runner" on the fourth season of Wiseguy and in 1993 he co-created Missing Persons. Following the 9/11 attacks Lance began investigating the origins of the FBI's original probe of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Ahmed Yousef.

New Anthrax Vaccine Lawsuit

Not much news going on this week regarding Able Danger. However, long time advocate for the Able Danger cause, Mark Zaid, has filed suit against the DOD on a separate issue. Here is the Washington Post story. Here is Mark's press release:

NEW LAWSUIT FILED CHALLENGING LEGALITY
OF THE DEFENSE DEPARTMENT'S ANTHRAX
VACCINATION IMMUNIZATION PROGRAM

Action Against Pentagon, HHS And FDA Seeks To
Again Stop Government’s Illegal Vaccination Program

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Two years after an earlier lawsuit shut down the Department of Defense’s (“DoD”) Anthrax Vaccination Immunization Program, another six military servicemembers and Defense Department civilian contractors filed suit today in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia to request that a federal judge once again declare that the anthrax vaccine is an unapproved drug and unlawful without informed consent. The identities of the plaintiffs are being withheld for fear of retaliation by the government. Each of the plaintiffs faces either termination from employment or criminal prosecution if they refuse inoculation with the vaccine. The lawsuit is being filed as part of a class action effort on behalf of all military servicemembers and civilians facing inoculation purportedly to prevent aerosolized exposure from anthrax.

This past October 2006, the DoD announced it was reinstituting a mandatory inoculation program (applicable to those serving in the Korean and Middle East theatres) after having administered it on a voluntary basis for two years in the aftermath of a court order to do so. The DoD’s action follows the Food and Drug Administration’s (“FDA”) pronouncement of December 19, 2005 of a Final Rule and Order declaring the vaccine to be safe, effective, and not misbranded as protection against all forms of anthrax. The FDA is aloso a defendant in the current case.

"FDA’s certification of the vaccine, which is based on slipshod statistical analysis, and an improper use of testing data, as well as DoD’s alteration of the vaccine dosing schedule, render the vaccine a drug unapproved for its applied use under current federal law," said John J. Michels, Jr., co-counsel in the litigation and a partner in the Chicago law office of McGuire Woods LLP. "Under these circumstances, the vaccine may not be administered to service members without their informed consent. It is patently illegal", he added.

Internal government documents, many of which are described in the lawsuit, reveal a history of regulatory violations and scientific concerns regarding the DoD's Anthrax Vaccination Immunization Program (“AVIP”). A 1994 report by the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee concluded that the vaccine could not be expected to protect troops against airborne anthrax and should be considered experimental. In February 2000, the House of Representative's Committee on Government Reform recommended the termination of the mandatory AVIP. In December 2003 and again in October 2004, a federal judge declared the vaccination program illegal until the FDA acted.

“The AVIP is a public relations program fueled by bureaucratic concerns rather than science that flouts FDA precedent to such a degree that all logic has been thrown out the window. The FDA has disgraced its reputation by statistically manufacturing supporting evidence in order to support an unlawful military policy,” said Mark S. Zaid, Esq., a Washington, D.C. lawyer serving as co-counsel in the litigation. Zaid added that all available threat information indicates the residents of the Washington, D.C. area are likely at far greater risk of exposure to anthrax than members of the military serving in Korea or Iraq.

In December 1997, the DoD ordered the inoculation of all 2.5 million active duty personnel, regardless of duty station or responsibilities. The immunization series calls for six injections of the vaccine over a period of 18 months, followed by annual booster shots. Vaccinations began in March 1998, but in July 2000 the scope of the mandatory vaccination program was reduced due to the continuing inability of the vaccine manufacturer, BioPort, to comply with federal manufacturing standards. After a four-year hiatus, the FDA allowed BioPort to resume production in January 2002. Inoculations were temporarily halted by a federal judge in December 2003, and the mandatory program was permanently stopped in October 2004. Since that time approximately 50% of those offered the vaccination declined.

Nearly 500 active-duty service-members have refused the vaccine, and more than 100 have been court-martialed. Additionally, approximately 500-1000 pilots and flight crew members have quit, resigned or transferred from the Air National Guard or Reserves rather than take the vaccine. The vaccine is voluntary in the Australian, British and Canadian militaries, as well as for U.S. Department of State employees even though they serve in the same geographical region as that of U.S. military servicemembers.

John J. Michels, Jr., is a partner in the Chicago office of McGuire Woods LLP (www.mcguirewoods.com), and previously represented Major Sonnie Bates and Captain John Buck, the highest military officers to refuse the anthrax vaccine, and was the author of a high-profile legal memorandum analyzing the illegality of the AVIP; the subject matter of which he testified on before Congress in October 2000. Mr. Michels served as co-counsel in Doe#1 et al. v. Rumsfeld et al, which declared the mandatory vaccination program unlawful in 2004.

Mark S. Zaid is a Washington, D.C. lawyer who specializes in representing individuals employed within the United States Intelligence and Military communities. He also serves as the Executive Director of The James Madison Project (www.jamesmadisonproject.org), a non-profit organization that educates the public on national security issues including the anthrax vaccine controversy. Mr. Zaid has represented dozens of anthrax refusers, including service as senior defense counsel in nearly one dozen courts-martials. He testified before the House of Representatives regarding the AVIP in March 1999, and was co-counsel in Doe#1 et al. v. Rumsfeld et al, which declared the mandatory vaccination program unlawful in 2004.

A copy of the Complaint is attached.

Searchable text of the IG report

It's available over at cryptome.org for those who are interested. No, they did not figure out any of the Non-OPSEC redacted names. Yes, I am still working on figuring them out myself.

UPDATE: Here is what I know so far.

DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
OFFICE OF INSPECTOR GENERAL
REPORT OF INVESTIGATION
CASE NUMBER
H05L97905217

DATE
SEP 18 2006

ALLEGED MISCONDUCT BY SENIOR DOD OFFICIALS
CONCERNING THE ABLE DANGER PROGRAM AND
LIEUTENANT COLONEL ANTHONY A. SHAFFER, U.S. ARMY RESERVE


Prepared by the Office of the Deputy Inspector General for Investigations


INSPECTOR GENERAL
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
400 ARMY NAVY DRIVE
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA 22202-4704

SEP 18 2006

MEMORANDUM FOR

UNDER SECRETARY OF DEFENSE (INTELLIGENCE)
COMMANDER, UNITED STATES SPECIAL OPERATIONS COMMAND
DIRECTOR, DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
SUBJECT:

Investigation into Alleged Misconduct by Senior DoD Officials
Concerning the Able Danger Program and Lieutenant Colonel Anthony A.
Shaffer, U.S. Army Reserve (Case Number H05L979052l7)
This report provides the results of our investigation into allegations that DoD officials mismanaged an antiterrorist program known as "Able Danger," and that in doing so they reprised against a key proponent of Able Danger, Lieutenant Colonel (LTC) Anthony A. Shaffer, a member of the U.S. Army Reserve who holds a civilian position in the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

The investigation addressed nine specific allegations raised in the media and by various Members of Congress. We did not substantiate those allegations. The evidence did not support assertions that Able Danger identified the September 11, 2001, terrorists nearly a year before the attack, that Able Danger team members were prohibited from sharing information with law enforcement authorities, or that DoD officials reprised against LTC Shaffer for his disclosures regarding Able Danger.

We found some procedural oversights concerning the DIA handling of LTC Shaffer's office contents and his Officer Evaluation Reports. We recommend that the Director, DIA, review these areas and advise us of action taken within 90 days. By separate correspondence we will advise LTC Shaffer of his options for correcting his military record and offer our assistance if he chooses to do so.

We appreciate the courtesies extended to our investigative staff. Should you have any questions, please contact me or Mr. John R. Crane, Assistant Inspector General, Communications and Congressional Liaison, at (703) 604-8324.

[Signed]

Thomas F. Gimble
Acting



FORWARD
The course of this investigation, in particular the central issues, was framed through a series of requests from Members of Congress, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and Lieutenant Colonel (LTC) Anthony A. Shaffer, U.S. Army Reserve.

In letters to the Secretary of Defense dated October 7, 2005, and to this Office dated October 18, 2005, Representative Curt Weldon requested an explanation for the suspension of LTC Shaffer's security clearance and "a detailed report on the destruction of LTC Shaffer's documents and other files." In a floor speech on October 21, 2005, Representative Weldon alleged that DIA included Government property and classified documents in a shipment of personal effects to LTC Shaffer.

In a letter to the Secretary of Defense dated October 20, 2005, Chairman Duncan Hunter, House Armed Services Committee, requested that we "conduct an independent review of the facts and circumstances surrounding DIA's actions to revoke LTC Shaffer's security clearance."

In a letter to this Office dated October 21, 2005, Chairman Charles E. Grassley, Senate Finance Committee, asked that we review LTC Shaffer's representations concerning Able Danger's "alleged early warnings" of the September 11, 2001 (9/11), terrorist attack and whether LTC Shaffer was "subjected to any action which constituted reprisal for disclosures related to Able Danger."

In a letter to this Office dated December 20, 2005, Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman requested that we investigate allegations that Able Danger identified 9/11 terrorists before the attack, DoD failed to share that information with cognizant Government agencies, and DoD closed down Able Danger prematurely, improperly destroying Able Danger records.

In a joint letter to this Office dated February 8, 2006, Representatives Peter Hoekstra and Frank R. Wolf asked that we "investigate what intelligence the Able Danger program generated regarding al Qaeda, Mohammed Atta, and other 9/11 highjackers," and whether, if generated, that intelligence was shared with the FBI. Additionally, Representatives Hoekstra and Wolf asked us to investigate alleged destruction of Able Danger intelligence and the nature of Able Danger information shared with the 9/11 Commission.

By letter dated November 1,2005, the General Counsel, DIA, asked us to conduct an independent assessment of matters involving LTC Shaffer.

Because the background and fact patterns for allegations involving Able Danger and LTC Shaffer are similar, we address them in a single report to avoid duplicative effort and to provide a single repository for the results of our investigative work.

Although many aspects of the Able Danger program remain classified, this report is unclassified to promote maximum utility and avoid delays that would attend a classified issuance. We believe the issues are fully addressed without the inclusion of classified information.



TABLE OF CONTENTS
Section Page

I. INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY

II. BACKGROUND ON ABLE DANGER

III. SCOPE OF THE INVESTIGATION

IV. FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS

A. Did the Able Danger team identify Mohammed Atta and other 9/11 terrorists before September 11,2001?
B. Did DoD officials prohibit Able Danger members from sharing relevant terrorist information with the FBI, the CIA, or other agencies which could have acted on that information?

C. Did DoD officials improperly direct the destruction of Able Danger mission related data?

D. Did DoD officials terminate the Able Danger project prematurely?

E. Did DoD officials execute the Able Danger mission in compliance with applicable intelligence oversight guidance?

F. Did DIA officials, when cleaning out LTC Shaffer's civilian office, improperly destroy Able Danger documents that LTC. Shaffer had accumulated?

G. Did DIA officials improperly ship Government property and classified documents to LTC Shaffer's attorney?

H. Did DIA officials take action to suspend LTC Shaffer's access to classified information and revoke his security clearance in reprisal for his communications to Members of Congress or the 9/11 Commission staff regarding Able Danger?

I. Did DIA officials issue LTC Shaffer unfavorable Officer Evaluation Reports (OERs) in reprisal for communicating with the 9/11 Commission staff regarding Able Danger?

V. CONCLUSIONS

VI. RECOMMENDATIONS



LIST OF ACRONYMS
Acronym Refers to:

AR
Army G2

CIA

CAPT

CDR

CINC

Col

COL

CPT

DAC

DCID 6/4

DCIPS

DIA

DMSM

DoD

E.O. 12333

FBI

GEN

GOMOR

GPS

HUMINT

INSCOM

IG

IO

JCAG

JWAC

LIWA

LTC

Lt Col

LTG

Maj

MG

NSA

OCWG

OER

OPSEC

OUSD(I)

RADM

RDML

SAB

SCI

SOCC

SOIO

TDY

TOR

TWC

UBL

UC

USSOCOM
Army Regulation
U.S. Army Office of Intelligence

Central Intelligence Agency

Captain (Navy)

Commander (Navy)

Commander in Chief

Colonel (Air Force)

Colonel (Army)

Captain (Army)

Directorate of Administration, Counterintelligence and Security Activity

Director of Central Intelligence Directive 6/4

Defense Civilian Intelligence Personnel System

Defense Intelligence Agency

Defense Meritorious Service Medal

Department of Defense

Executive Order 12333

Federal Bureau of Investigation

General (Army)

General Officer Memorandum of Reprimand

Global Positioning Satellite

Human Intelligence

U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command

Inspector General

Information Operations

Joint Counterintelligence Assessment Group

Joint Warfare Analysis Center

Land Information Warfare Activity

Lieutenant Colonel (Army)

Lieutenant Colonel (Air Force)

Lieutenant General (Army)

Major (Air Force)

Major General (Army)

National Security Agency

Operational Concepts Working Group

Officer Evaluation Report

Operations Security

Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence

Rear Admiral (Upper Half) (Navy)

Rear Admiral (Lower Half) (Navy)

Security Appeals Board

Sensitive Compartmented Information

Special Operations Collaborative Center

Special Operations Information Operations

Temporary Duty

Terms of Reference

Transnational Warfare Center

Usama (Osama) Bin Laden

Unit Chief (FBI)

United States Special Operations Command






ALLEGED MISCONDUCT BY SENIOR DOD OFFICIALS
CONCERNING THE ABLE DANGER PROGRAM AND
LIEUTENANT COLONEL ANTHONY A. SHAFFER, U.S. ARMY RESERVE



I. INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY

We initiated the investigation to address allegations that senior DoD officials mismanaged a DoD antiterrorist program known as "Able Danger," and that in doing so they sought to end the military and civilian careers of a key proponent of Able Danger, Lieutenant Colonel (LTC) Anthony A. Shaffer, a member of the U.S. Army Reserve who also held a civilian position as a senior intelligence officer in the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).1

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1 LTC Shaffer served in DIA as both a civilian employee and, when called to active duty, a military officer. Because the allegations cover time periods and events that relate to both his military and civilian duties, we will refer to LTC Shaffer using his military rank in this report.

Allegations concerning Able Danger became public in August 2005 when media sources reported allegations, made by LTC Shaffer, that the identities of terrorists involved in the attack of September 11, 2001 (9/11), were discovered by Able Danger before the attack, but DoD officials prohibited Able Danger personnel from sharing that information with law enforcement authorities. Subsequently, Members of Congress contacted this Office requesting investigations into unfavorable actions allegedly being taken by DIA officials against LTC Shaffer for making those allegations, as well as into the allegations themselves. In response to those communications, we formulated the following issues/allegations that warranted investigation and will be addressed in this report:

Allegations involving the Able Danger program:


Did the Able Danger team identify Mohammed Atta and other 9/11 terrorists before the 9/11 attack?
Did DoD officials prohibit Able Danger members from sharing relevant terrorist information with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or other agencies which could have acted on that information?
Did DoD officials improperly direct the destruction of Able Danger mission related data?
Did DoD officials terminate the Able Danger program prematurely?
Did DoD officials execute the Able Danger mission in compliance with applicable intelligence oversight guidance?
Did DIA officials, when cleaning out LTC Shaffer's civilian office, improperly destroy Able Danger documents that LTC Shaffer had accumulated?2
Did DIA officials improperly ship Government property and classified documents to LTC Shaffer's attorney when disposing of what they believed to be LTC Shaffer's personal property?
___________________

2 As discussed in this report, LTC Shaffer was placed on administrative leave from DIA and vacated his office in April 2004. His office was then cleared for occupancy by another employee.

Allegations of reprisal against LTC Shaffer:


Did DIA officials take action to suspend LTC Shaffer's access to classified information and revoke his security clearance in reprisal for his communications to Members of Congress or the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (9/11 Commission) regarding Able Danger -- or in reprisal for his earlier communications to the DIA Inspector General (IG)?3

Did DIA officials issue LTC Shaffer unfavorable (military) Officer Evaluation Reports (OERs) in reprisal for his communications with the 9/11 Commission staff regarding Able Danger?

___________________

3 The 9/11 Commission was created by congressional legislation signed by President George W. BushirLNovember 2002. The Commission's mission was to prepare a full account of circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and report its findings to the President and Congress.

Conclusions concerning Able Danger issues

We found that in October 1999, General (GEN) Henry H. Shelton, U.S. Army, thenChairman ofthe Joint Chiefs of Staff, directed the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) to develop a "campaign plan"; that is, an operational concept that when implemented would obtain detailed information on international terrorist organizations, identifying terrorist leaders, command and control infrastructures, and supporting institutions. The unclassified name for the initiative to develop such a campaign plan was "Able Danger."

An "Operational Concepts Working Group" consisting of six to eight members was established at USSOCOM to produce the campaign plan, which called for the use of state-of-theart information technology tools to gather information on international terrorists from Government data bases and open sources (to include the World Wide Web) with the initial focus on al Qaeda. The campaign plan was presented to GEN Shelton in January 2001. Upon presenting the campaign plan to GEN Shelton, USSOCOM's tasking was satisfied, the Able Danger mission was terminated, and the Able Danger team disbanded. Data mining and visualization tools similar to those employed by Able Danger to formulate the campaign plan were subsequently incorporated into intelligence gathering efforts at USSOCOM.

We concluded that prior to September 11, 2001, Able Danger team members did not identify Mohammed Atta or any other 9/11 hijacker. While we interviewed four witnesses who claimed to have seen a chart depicting Mohammed Atta and possibly other terrorists or "cells" involved in 9/11, we determined that their recollections were not accurate. Testimony by witnesses who claimed to have seen such a chart varied significantly from each other, and in some instances testimony obtained in reinterviews was inconsistent with testimony that witnesses provided earlier. In particular, we found inaccurate LTC Shaffer's assertions regarding the existence of pre-9/11 information on the terrorists and his suggestion that DoD officials thwarted efforts to share Able Danger information with law enforcement authorities. In drawing this conclusion, we found particularly persuasive the sworn testimony of witnesses who disavowed statements and claims that LTC Shaffer attributed to them.

The preponderance of witness testimony indicated that recollections concerning the identification of 9/11 terrorists were linked to a single chart depicting al Qaeda cells responsible for pre-9/11 terrorist attacks, which was obtained but not produced by the Able Danger team.

That chart (Figure 1 of this report) was produced by Orion Scientific Corporation (Orion) in May 1999 and contained the names and/or photographs of 53 terrorists who had been identified and in many cases, incarcerated, before 9/11, including a Brooklyn cell, but it did not identify Mohammed Atta or any ofthe other 9/11 terrorists. Our review of Able Danger team records found no evidence that Able Danger team members had identified Mohammed Atta or any ofthe other terrorists who participated in the 9/11 attack.

With respect to allegations concerning prohibited contacts between Able Danger and law enforcement authorities, we found no evidence to corroborate LTC Shaffer's claims that Able Danger members were prohibited by DoD officials from attending meetings he allegedly arranged with the FBI. All witnesses who were in a position to know denied LTC Shaffer's claim that efforts to meet with FBI antiterrorism units were made, much less thwarted by DoD officials. One Able Danger team member alleged that he was prohibited from providing the chart at Figure 1 to the FBI by a senior USSOCOM official sometime in early 2000. However, the senior official did not recall the incident and we are persuaded that the chart would have been of minimal intelligence value to the FBI. Accordingly, any decision to prohibit transfer of the chart would not have been inappropriate under the circumstances.

We found that large quantities of data that had been collected at two locations as part of the Able Danger data mining mission were destroyed. One intelligence analyst told us that he destroyed approximately "2.5 terabytes" of Able Danger data that had been collected at the Land Information Warfare Activity (LIWA), Fort Belvoir, V A, where Able Danger activities were initially located. Additionally, an Able Danger analyst testified that a large quantity of "extraneous" data was destroyed when the Able Danger team departed its second location -- a contractor facility in Garland, Texas -- and returned to USSOCOM. We found no basis to conclude that either of those destructions was improper, but rather followed established procedure and violated no regulation.

As indicated above, we concluded that the Able Danger project was appropriately terminated after it had met its objective of producing an antiterrorism campaign plan. Further, we determined that it complied with applicable intelligence oversight guidance.

With respect to allegations concerning the improper disposal of materials located in LTC Shaffer's DIA office, we found no evidence to corroborate LTC Shaffer's assertion that he came to possess a significant volume of Able Danger documents in his DIA office, rendering the allegation of their improper destruction moot. Witnesses whom LTC Shaffer identified as being aware of Able Danger documentation he purportedly stored in his DIA office did not corroborate his assertions in that regard. In particular, Able Danger team members, whom LTC Shaffer asserted had left Able Danger documentation with him for safekeeping on their travel to Washington, D.C., denied doing so. DIA employees responsible for cleaning out LTC Shaffer's office acknowledged destroying some Government documents, but none recalled seeing any documents associated with Able Danger. Accordingly, we concluded the alleged improper destruction did not occur.

We concluded that DIA officials did not improperly ship classified documents or Government property of significant value to LTC Shaffer.4 We confirmed that DIA shipped seven boxes of personal items to LTC Shaffer's attorney. A member of congressional committee staff provided us four classified documents (six pages) that LTC Shaffer indicated were included in that shipment.5 However, the evidence was insufficient to conclude that any classified items were in the boxes at the time that DIA officials shipped them. Additionally, LTC Shaffer provided us a Government-owned Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) unit that he said was included in the boxes that were sent to his attorney. We confirmed, by serial number, that this GPS unit had been provided to LTC Shaffer in Afghanistan by a DIA contractor employee, but we found that LTC Shaffer never returned the GPS unit to DIA. As a result, that GPS unit could not have been included by DIA employees in the boxes that were shipped to LTC Shaffer's attorney.

____________________

4 We acknowledge that some Government office supplies may have been included in the shipment (e.g., commercially available pens, pencils, blank CD ROM disks), but considered that inclusion an oversight not warranting further investigation.
5 LTC Shaffer provided the four documents to congressional staff.


Conclusions concerning reprisal

We concluded that DIA officials did not reprise against LTC Shaffer, in either his civilian or military capacity, for making disclosures regarding Able Danger or, in a separate matter, for his earlier disclosures to the DIA IG regarding alleged misconduct by DIA officials. In that regard, we identified the following communications which warranted consideration during our analysis of alleged reprisal:6


Communications that LTC Shaffer asserted he made to the DIA IG, as part oftwo investigations during the March to December 2002 period. Although our investigation found that LTC Shaffer was not the source of some of the communications, nevertheless, for purposes of this investigation, we assumed that DIA officials believed that he was the source. (The communications and investigation were not related to Able Danger.)
Communications during a meeting with staff members of the 9/11 Commission in October 2003, while serving in Afghanistan. LTC Shaffer testified that he told the 9/11 Commission staff members that Able Danger discovered the identity of 9/11 terrorists before the attack but was prevented from sharing that information with law enforcement authorities. However, four witness also present at the meeting unanimously disputed LTC Shaffer's recollection -- testifying, under oath, that LTC Shaffer made no such claims for Able Danger at that meeting.
Disclosures regarding Able Danger to Members of Congress beginning in February 2005 and to the media beginning in August 2005.
___________________

6 In conducting reprisal analysis, we recognize that whistleblower complaints made by civilian employees in the intelligence community are excluded from the jurisdiction of the Office of Special Counsel under Section 2302 (a)(2)( c) of Title 5, United States Code. However, it is our policy to apply Title 5 standards for all investigations into complaints of reprisal submitted by civilian appropriated fund employees.

The overriding unfavorable action taken by DIA officials following those disclosures was the final revocation of LTC Shaffer's access to classified information in September 2005 and the revocation of his security clearance in February 2006. That revocation essentially ended LTC Shaffer's career as an intelligence officer, both at DIA and in the Army Reserve.7

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7 Based on the revocation of his access and anticipated revocation of his clearance, LTC Shaffer was proposed for removal from his DIA civilian position in November 2005. That action was held in abeyance pending completion of this investigation. LTC Shaffer continued on paid administrative leave.

We concluded that DIA officials would have taken action to revoke LTC Shaffer's access and clearance regardless of his disclosures to the DIA IG, the 9/11 Commission staff members, Members of Congress, or the media. We found that the action was based on misconduct by LTC Shaffer that was substantiated during an official DIA IG investigation taken together with other security-related issues that were not previously sufficient to trigger adverse security action at DIA. Of note, the final decision to revoke LTC Shaffer's access was recommended by a panel of three senior intelligence officers, one of whom was not a DoD employee. Sworn testimony from those panel members compellingly demonstrated that their recommendation regarding LTC Shaffer followed established security guidelines, was justified by circumstances, and would have occurred absent his disclosures. Moreover, our comparison of LTC Shaffer's case to those of other DIA employees who had their access or clearances revoked found no basis to conclude that DIA's actions with respect to LTC Shaffer were outside the norm or otherwise gave evidence of disparate treatment.

Finally, we concluded that an OER issued to LTC Shaffer in September 2004 would have contained the same XXXXXX ratings had he not made protected communications to the DIA IG and the 9/11 Commission staff members and, therefore, was not an act of reprisal. However, we found minor procedural anomalies in the processing of LTC Shaffer's OER that warrant review by the Director, DIA.

[XXXXXX = Redaction]
[Citations below for redaction justification; hereafter omitted.]

b(6)
b(7)(C)



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

II. BACKGROUND

In October 1999 GEN Shelton tasked USSOCOM to develop a campaign plan to deter al Qaeda. As part ofthe tasking, USSOCOM was directed to employ advanced analytical information technology tools. Further, USSOCOM's campaign plan was to be integrated into an overarching interagency plan. The unclassified name for the tasking was "Able Danger." The Able Danger program was classified "Top Secret" and only personnel with a "need to know" were "read-on" to the program.

GEN Shelton testified that he had no specific recollection of term "Able Danger" or the Able Danger program, but did recall that while he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff he was concerned about al Qaeda and the need to develop a holistic view of al Qaeda. GEN Shelton stated,

the genesis of starting to try to collect on a worldwide basis against terrorists, came about as a result of me looking at all the information that was coming into the Chairman's office, and seeing that we would get -- we were just being inundated with information, and it wasn't really intelligence, but little snippets.
USSOCOM's initial goal was to identify al Qaeda's worldwide operations. GEN Peter J. Schoomaker, current Army Chief of Staff, and formerly Commander, USSOCOM, characterized Able Danger as "an effort to put together a campaign plan to address the al Qaeda terrorist network."

The Operational Concepts Working Group (OCWG) -- a term used to identify USSOCOM personnel assigned to produce the campaign plan -- represented the core personnel working on Able Danger and ranged from six to eight members. Throughout the duration of Able Danger, various USSOCOM officers and civilian employees augmented the OCWG as necessary. For ease of reference in this report, we refer to the OCWG and its augmentees collectively as the "Able Danger team."

Colonel (Col) XXXXXX U.S. Air Force, served as the Director of the Able Danger team from June 2000 to January 2001. Col XXXXXX reported to Major General (MG) Geoffrey C. Lambert, U.S. Army, former Director, Center for Operations, Plans and Policy, USSOCOM. MG Lambert, in turn, reported directly to GEN Schoomaker on issues related to Able Danger. Captain (CAPT) (then-Commander) XXXXXX U.S. Navy, who was assigned to the Center for Intelligence and Information Operations at USS COM, served as the Operations Officer for the Able Danger team from its inception until the end of October 2000. At the time, Rear Admiral (RDML) Thomas W. Steffens, U.S. Navy, was the Director, Center for Intelligence and Information Operations. By the nature of his position, RDML Steffens was involved with the Able Danger mission.

The Able Danger team focused on "identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities associated with al Qaeda's command and control infrastructure, its leadership and supporting organizations." In order to accomplish these goals, the team employed advanced analytic tools and methodologies that were available in the 1999-2000 time frame. It sought to identify linkages and patterns in large volumes of data (data mining) and display the mined data in a userfriendly fashion for intelligence analysts and operations planners (data visualization). The data that the members mined came from Government data bases supplied by various intelligence agencies and organizations as well as open source material. Open source material included information retrieved from the World Wide Web. Additionally, the team attempted to initiate a collaborative environment (chat room) for members of the intelligence community, within and outside DoD, to share information.

The Able Danger team initially arranged to utilize the Joint Warfare Analysis Center (JWAC), Dahlgren, VA, for support. JWAC, at that time, offered the Able Danger team an analytical tool called the Situational Influence Assessment Module (SIAM). SIAM allowed users to "construct graphic depictions of complex, cause-and-effect relationships involving uncertainty." GEN Schoomaker stated, "One of the reasons we went to JW AC is I remember telling people that JW AC-type tools would probably be useful to us because we had used them operationally in the past."

On November 22, 1999, an "Initial Planning Conference Announcement" was communicated to the various Able Danger participants. This conference was held January 10-14, 2000, at JWAC. Attendees to the conference represented a wide cross section ofthe intelligence community and included members of the DIA, CIA, National Reconnaissance Office, National Security Agency, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence organizations. The participants used SIAM to attempt to map out the al Qaeda network. Regarding their results, CAPT XXXXXX testified, "with high-priced help . . . we still couldn't do it . . . it was feckless." Accordingly, other options for support to the Able Danger mission were considered.

CAPT XXXXXX testified that during the XXXXXX conference at JWAC, LTC Shaffer approached him and recommended that CAPT XXXXXX contact Dr. XXXXXX a civilian intelligence analyst then-working for LIWA. LIWA was a subordinate organization of the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM). Accordingly, immediately after that conference, CAPT XXXXXX visited Dr. XXXXXX at LIWA and she provided an overview of LIWA's capabilities, showing him various products. CAPT XXXXXX recalled that, within 3 or 4 days of his LIWA visit, XXXXXX provided three charts to LTC Shaffer, who, in turn, delivered them to CAPT XXXXXX at USSOCOM headquarters in Tampa, Florida.

As discussed at Section IV. A. of this report, the three charts that were provided to CAPT XXXXXX included two charts that were produced by Orion and one chart that was produced by LIWA. The Orion charts are depicted at Figures 1 and 2.8 An example of the type of chart that was produced by LIWA and provided to CAPT XXXXXX is depicted at Figure 3.9 All three charts are examples of link analysis.

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8 Photographs of Figures 1 and 2 were retrieved from a laptop computer that contained Able Danger material in a safe at USSOCOM Headquarters. We did not locate the original charts.
9 We did not locate the actual chart that had been provided to CAPT XXXXXX.







Subsequent Able Danger conferences were held at JWAC during the periods January 24-27 and February 9-17, 2000. Dr. XXXXXX and Mr. XXXXXX formerly an active duty major in the U.S. Army assigned to LIWA as Chief, Intelligence Branch, attended the conference that was held January 24-27,2000. During this conference CAPT XXXXXX traveled to LIWA and met with senior officials there to pursue a cooperative association between Able Danger and LIWA.

At the February 2000 JW AC conference, Mr. XXXXXX attended but Dr. XXXXXX was prohibited by the LIWA commander from attending. Mr. XXXXXX stated Dr. XXXXXX did not attend "because they [INSCOM and LIW A leadership] were not happy with her ability to get along well with others." In a timeline prepared by CAPT XXXXXX for this Office, an entry for February 14, 2000, provided, "Dr. XXXXXX removed from program." Dr. XXXXXX testified she was, thereafter, "very limited" in the support she could do for the Able Danger team and that she was "being minimized." Although we agree that Dr. XXXXXX role in the Able Danger program itself was limited, we believe she played a significant role in the Able Danger controversy because she subsequently claimed to have seen Mohammed Atta depicted on charts she provided to CAPT XXXXXX in January 2000. Dr. XXXXXX also claimed that on September 25, 2001, she had a brief glimpse of a chart prepared before the 9/11 attack, which depicted terrorist activities and which she believed contained a picture of Mohammed Atta.

CAPT XXXXXX testified that although he was disappointed with the products that had been produced at JWAC, he was very impressed by what he had seen during his two visits to LIWA as well as by the three charts that had been provided to him by Dr. XXXXXX via LTC Shaffer. CAPT XXXXXX thereby decided that support for the Able Danger mission should be moved from JWAC to LIWA However, he indicated that his chain of command essent