Possible CIA Boss Eyed as bin Laden Film Leaker

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Dec 18, 2012

Knight Ridder/Tribune 

by Marisa Taylor and Jonathan S. Landay

WASHINGTON - Pentagon investigators concluded that a senior Defense Department official who's been mentioned as a possible candidate to be the next CIA director leaked restricted information to the makers of an acclaimed film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, and referred the case to the Justice Department, according to knowledgeable U.S. officials.

The Justice Department received the case involving Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers in September, but so far it's declined to launch a criminal prosecution, said two senior U.S. officials who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

The case involved a determination by investigators of the Pentagon's inspector general's office that Vickers provided the makers of the film "Zero Dark Thirty" with the restricted name of a U.S. Special Operations Command officer who helped plan the May 2, 2011, raid on bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan, one official said. The identities of special forces personnel can be classified in certain circumstances and making them public is against the law, according to experts.

Vickers, a former Army special forces operator and onetime CIA paramilitary officer, is the top intelligence adviser to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and oversees the Pentagon's vast intelligence operations. He's been frequently mentioned as a candidate to replace retired Army Gen. David Petraeus as CIA director.

 "Mike Vickers is an outstanding defense and intelligence professional, and is well respected inside the Department of Defense and the intelligence community," Pentagon spokesman George Little said.

It was unclear whether the Justice Department review could hurt Vickers' chances of being nominated to the CIA post. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on the matter.

"When it comes to even the slightest hint that there may have been an unauthorized disclosure of classified information, there's actually little choice but to contact Justice," a senior defense official said. "That doesn't mean they will do anything with it. This is a routine practice."

The Pentagon inspector general's office is continuing to examine whether there were any other leaks of restricted information to the makers of the film. In a Dec. 4 letter denying a McClatchy Freedom of Information Act request for the findings, the office said the material was "currently part of an open investigation." A spokeswoman said Monday that the report "has not yet been finalized and issued."

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Director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter-producer Mark Boal said the criticisms amounted to people ... and screenwriter of "Zero Dark Thirty," Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal, say their film doesn't ... in this landscape, not to pretend to debate policy,” added Bigelow. “Was it difficult to shoot? Yes. Do I wish ...

Article - TheWrap Staff - 12/17/2012 - 00:10

Even though the inquiry was launched at the request of Republican Rep. Peter King of New York, who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, the Defense Department Inspector General's Office hadn't informed King or any other lawmaker of its findings by midday Monday, a politically risky decision that could ignite charges that officials were trying to protect President Barack Obama during his tough re-election battle.

King told McClatchy that the delay in notifying him "raises the question" of whether officials were trying to put it off for political reasons, but he wanted to see the full report before drawing any conclusions.

"I'm not looking for anyone to be indicted," he said. "But the IG does not make referrals to the Justice Department as a matter of routine. To me the fact that any information at all would be given to Hollywood producers by this administration is disgraceful."

"If it's wrong enough or questionable enough for the IG to refer it to the Justice Department, that means it shouldn't have been done."

The film, by director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, originally was set for release just weeks before the Nov. 6 election. But it was delayed amid Republican complaints that it could bring Obama votes by glorifying the bin Laden operation. The premiere was held last week and the film is due for a limited public release on Wednesday.

The senior defense official, who requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the matter publicly, wrote in an email that Pentagon officials don't think the case "will amount to anything." He pointed out that the Pentagon deemed as "unclassified" a transcript of a July 15, 2011, conversation among Vickers, Bigelow and Boal in which Vickers identified the U.S. special forces planner by name as someone who could be made available to brief the filmmakers. The transcript was released to Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog organization, in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

The investigators found no evidence that White House officials were involved in any leaks of classified materials to the filmmakers, according to U.S. officials familiar with the findings. They reached that conclusion, however, without interviewing any White House officials or Panetta, who was the CIA director at the time of the bin Laden raid. 

Panetta reassured Congress in June - before the investigators reached their findings - that no classified information had been released to the filmmakers.

A second U.S. official blamed bureaucratic hand-wringing for the delay in notifying King, not an orchestrated effort to protect the White House.

"This does not appear to be a cover-up or a wag-the-dog media stunt," the U.S. official said. "Rather, this is about who gets to break the law and leak information for their own benefit."

© Copyright 2012 Knight Ridder/Tribune. 

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The Man Who Hunted Osama Bin Missing

July 05, 2011

Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- After U.S. Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden, the White House released a photo of President Obama and his Cabinet inside the Situation Room, watching the daring raid unfold.

Hidden from view, standing just outside the frame of that now-famous photograph was a career CIA analyst. In the hunt for the world's most-wanted terrorist, there may have been no one more important. His job for nearly a decade was finding the al-Qaida leader.

The analyst was the first to put in writing last summer that the CIA might have a legitimate lead on finding bin Laden. He oversaw the collection of clues that led the agency to a fortified compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. His was among the most confident voices telling Obama that bin Laden was probably behind those walls.

The CIA will not permit him to speak with reporters. But interviews with former and current U.S. intelligence officials reveal a story of quiet persistence and continuity that led to the greatest counterterrorism success in the history of the CIA. Nearly all the officials insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters or because they did not want their names linked to the bin Laden operation.

The Associated Press has agreed to the CIA's request not to publish his full name and withhold certain biographical details so that he would not become a target for retribution.

Call him John, his middle name.

John was among the hundreds of people who poured into the CIA's Counterterrorism Center after the Sept. 11 attacks, bringing fresh eyes and energy to the fight.

He had been a standout in the agency's Russian and Balkan departments. When Vladimir Putin was coming to power in Russia, for instance, John pulled together details overlooked by others and wrote what some colleagues considered the definitive profile of Putin. He challenged some of the agency's conventional wisdom about Putin's KGB background and painted a much fuller portrait of the man who would come to dominate Russian politics.

That ability to spot the importance of seemingly insignificant details, to weave disparate strands of information into a meaningful story, gave him a particular knack for hunting terrorists.

"He could always give you the broader implications of all these details we were amassing," said John McLaughlin, who as CIA deputy director was briefed regularly by John in the mornings after the 2001 attacks.

From 2003, when he joined the counterterrorism center, through 2005, John was one of the driving forces behind the most successful string of counterterrorism captures in the fight against terrorism: Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Nashiri, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Ramzi bin Alshib, Hambali and Faraj al-Libi.

But there was no greater prize than finding bin Laden.

Bin Laden had slipped away from U.S. forces in the Afghan mountains of Tora Bora in 2001, and the CIA believed he had taken shelter in the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan. In 2006, the agency mounted Operation Cannonball, an effort to establish bases in the tribal regions and find bin Laden. Even with all its money and resources, the CIA could not locate its prime target.

By then, the agency was on its third director since Sept. 11, 2001. John had outlasted many of his direct supervisors who retired or went on to other jobs. The CIA doesn't like to keep its people in one spot for too long. They become jaded. They start missing things.

John didn't want to leave. He'd always been persistent. In college, he walked on to a Division I basketball team and hustled his way into a rotation full of scholarship players.

The CIA offered to promote him and move him somewhere else. John wanted to keep the bin Laden file.

He examined and re-examined every aspect of bin Laden's life. How did he live while hiding in Sudan? With whom did he surround himself while living in Kandahar, Afghanistan? What would a bin Laden hideout look like today?

The CIA had a list of potential leads, associates and family members who might have access to bin Laden.

"Just keep working that list bit by bit," one senior intelligence official recalls John telling his team. "He's there somewhere. We'll get there."

John rose through the ranks of the counterterrorism center, but because of his nearly unrivaled experience, he always had influence beyond his title. One former boss confessed that he didn't know exactly what John's position was.

"I knew he was the guy in the room I always listened to," the official said.

While he was shepherding the hunt for bin Laden, John also was pushing to expand the Predator program, the agency's use of unmanned airplanes to launch missiles at terrorists. The CIA largely confined those strikes to targets along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan. But in late 2007 and early 2008, John said the CIA needed to carry out those attacks deeper inside Pakistan.

It was a risky move. Pakistan was an important but shaky ally. John's analysts saw an increase in the number of Westerners training in Pakistani terrorist camps. John worried that those men would soon start showing up on U.S. soil.

"We've got to act," John said, a former senior intelligence official recalls. "There's no explaining inaction."

John took the analysis to then CIA Director Michael Hayden, who agreed and took the recommendation to President George W. Bush. In the last months of the Bush administration, the CIA began striking deeper inside Pakistan. Obama immediately adopted the same strategy and stepped up the pace. Recent attacks have killed al-Qaida's No. 3 official, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, and Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud.

All the while, John's team was working the list of bin Laden leads. In 2007, a female colleague whom the AP has also agreed not to identify decided to zero in on a man known as Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, a nom de guerre. Other terrorists had identified al-Kuwaiti as an important courier for al-Qaida's upper echelon, and she believed that finding him might help lead to bin Laden.

"They had their teeth clenched on this and they weren't going to let go," McLaughlin said of John and his team. "This was an obsession."

It took three years, but in August 2010, al-Kuwaiti turned up on a National Security Agency wiretap. The female analyst, who had studied journalism at a select U.S. university, tapped out a memo for John, "Closing in on Bin Laden Courier," saying her team believed al-Kuwaiti was somewhere on the outskirts of Islamabad.

As the CIA homed in on al-Kuwaiti, John's team continually updated the memo with fresh information. Everyone knew that anything with bin Laden's name on it would shoot right to the director's desk and invite scrutiny, so the early drafts played down hopes that the courier would lead to bin Laden. But John saw the bigger picture. The hunt for al-Kuwaiti was effectively the hunt for bin Laden, and he was not afraid to say so.

The revised memo was finished in September 2010. John, by then deputy chief of the Pakistan-Afghanistan Department, emailed it to those who needed to know. The title was "Anatomy of a Lead."

As expected, the memo immediately became a hot topic inside CIA headquarters and Director Leon Panetta wanted to know more. John never overpromised, colleagues recall, but he was unafraid to say there was a good chance this might be the break the agency was looking for.

The CIA tracked al-Kuwaiti to a walled compound in Abbottabad. If bin Laden was hiding there, in a busy suburb not far from Pakistan's military academy, it challenged much of what the agency had assumed about his hideout.

But John said it wasn't that far-fetched. Drawing on what he knew about bin Laden's earlier hideouts, he said it made sense that bin Laden had surrounded himself only with his couriers and family and did not use phones or the Internet. The CIA knew that top al-Qaida operatives had lived in urban areas before.

A cautious Panetta took the information to Obama, but there was much more work to be done.

The government tried everything to figure out who was in that compound.

In a small house nearby, the CIA put people who would fit in and not draw any attention. They watched and waited but turned up nothing definitive. Satellites captured images of a tall man walking the grounds of the compound, but never got a look at his face.

Again and again, John and his team asked themselves who else might be living in that compound. They came up with five or six alternatives; bin Laden was always the best explanation.

This went on for months. By about February, John told his bosses, including Panetta, that the CIA could keep trying, but the information was unlikely to get any better. He told Panetta this might be their best chance to find bin Laden and it would not last forever. Panetta made that same point to the president

Panetta held regular meetings on the hunt, often concluding with an around-the-table poll: How sure are you that this is bin Laden?

John was always bullish, rating his confidence as high as 80 percent.

Others weren't so sure, especially those who had been in the room for operations that went bad. Not two years earlier, the CIA thought it had an informant who could lead him to bin Laden's deputy. That man blew himself up at a base in Khost, Afghanistan, killing seven CIA employees and injuring six others.

That didn't come up in the meetings with Panetta, a senior intelligence official said. But everyone knew the risk the CIA was taking if it told the president that bin Laden was in Abbottabad and was wrong.

"We all knew that if he wasn't there and this was a disaster, certainly there would be consequences," the official recalled.

John was among several CIA officials who repeatedly briefed Obama and others at the White House. Current and former officials involved in the discussions said John had a coolness and a reassuring confidence.

By April, the president had decided to send the Navy SEALs to assault the compound.

Though the plan was in motion, John went back to his team, a senior intelligence official said.

"Right up to the last hour," he told them, "if we get any piece of information that suggests it's not him, somebody has to raise their hand before we risk American lives."

Nobody did. Inside the Situation Room, the analyst who was barely known outside the close-knit intelligence world took his place alongside the nation's top security officials, the household names and well-known faces of Washington.

An agonizing 40 minutes after Navy SEALs stormed the compound, the report came back: Bin Laden was dead.

John and his team had guessed correctly, taking an intellectual risk based on incomplete information. It was a gamble that ended a decade of disappointment. Later, Champagne was uncorked back at the CIA, where those in the Counterterrorism Center who had targeted bin Laden for so long celebrated. John's team reveled in the moment.

Two days after bin Laden's death, John accompanied Panetta to U.S. Congress. The Senate Intelligence Committee wanted a full briefing on the successful mission. At one point in the private session, Panetta turned to the man whose counterterrorism resume spanned four CIA directors.

He began to speak, about the operation and about the years of intelligence it was based on. And as he spoke about the mission that had become his career, the calm, collected analyst paused, and he choked up.

© Copyright 2011 Associated Press

FULL STORY HERE...

http://www.military.com/news/article/the-man-who-hunted-osama-bin-laden.html?ESRC=eb.nl

[Information contained in BKNT E-mail is considered Attorney-Client and Attorney Work Product privileged, copyrighted and confidential. Views that may be expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of any government, agency, or news organization.]

Pakistan's The NATION Editorial: BLUNT US WARNING

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Blunt US warning

Published: June 25, 2011

 

The two official voices that came out of Washington on Thursday, a day after President Obama used tough words for Islamabad while announcing a phased withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, appeared unanimous in demonstrating that the strains in the Pak-US relationship were getting on the US policymakers’ nerves. If Secretary of State Clinton warned of the suspension of military aid to Pakistan, in case it did not take certain concrete “steps” that she did not elaborate but, perhaps, had been specified to officials here by her and Senator John Kerry when they last visited Islamabad soon after the Abbottabad operation; Defence Secretary Gates was dismissive of Pakistan’s role now that, he and most American officials claim, the militants in Afghanistan are on the back foot. Their views evidently reflected extreme anger, frustration as well as arrogance. Clinton’s deposition before the Senate, however, clashed with Gates’ in the sense that she thought Pakistan’s role was important in routing the terrorist forces. Similarly, General Petraeus, the outgoing commander of US forces in Afghanistan and would-be CIA chief, declared that without Islamabad’s help victory against the militants was not possible. 

The growing estrangement should not come as a surprise to those Pakistanis who have an idea about how the US had been cold-shouldering Islamabad once it had served its purpose. Most of the local media and political analysts cautioned the Pakistani leadership against taking the American overtures of abiding friendship too seriously. As the US is withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan and, at the same time, preparing India as a counterweight to China it is obvious that it would find excuses not to fulfil its commitments to Pakistan. But that provides us with a golden opportunity to end our association with the US in the war on terror that has brought so much misery upon us. 

Read FULL EDITORIAL HERE...

http://nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/Opinions/Editorials/25-Jun-2011/Blunt-US-warning

ALLEGED Detention Abuse Suspect CIA Officials Rarely Reprimanded

ALLEGED Detention Abuse Suspect CIA Officials Rarely Reprimanded, Sometimes Promoted
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Intelligence - OPEN SOURCE

CIA Officials Involved in Abuse Detention Rarely Reprimanded, Sometimes Promoted

by Marian Wang
ProPublica, Feb. 9, 2011, 12:16 p.m

CIA officers who were involved in cases of wrongful imprisonment, mistreatment and even detainee deaths have often avoided serious punishment and in many cases been promoted within the agency [1], an investigation by the Associated Press has found.

Take the case of German citizen Khaled El-Masri, who was kidnapped and transferred to a secret prison in Afghanistan for interrogation in 2003. U.S. officials have since admitted that the CIA wrongfully imprisoned El-Masri [2].

Though the lawyer who signed off on the decision received a reprimand, the CIA never punished the analyst who pressed for El-Masri’s wrongful rendition, despite recommendations from the CIA’s inspector general, AP reported.

A former CIA official told [2] the Washington Post in 2005 that the analyst “didn’t really know. She just had a hunch” when she made the decision regarding El-Masri. The analyst now runs the CIA’s Global Jihad unit, which leads the U.S. government’s counterterrorism efforts against al-Qaeda.

She’s hardly the only example of the CIA’s failure to hold officers accountable for their decisions. Other cases in the AP story in which officers made serious mistakes with little to no punishment include:

• A case in which a terrorism suspect froze to death in a makeshift prison in Afghanistan after CIA officers stripped him and left him overnight in an unheated cell. An investigation of the incident raised concerns about the top officer at the prison, the CIA’s station chief in Afghanistan, and management at headquarters. Nobody was punished.

• A case in which a CIA interrogator performed a “mock execution” by holding an unloaded gun and bitless drill to the head of an al-Qaeda operative at a secret CIA prison in Poland. Mock executions are not authorized by the Justice Department, but the interrogator received only a reprimand.

• A case of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in which a prisoner was interrogated, covered by a hood, shackled to a window, and found dead a half hour later. His death was ruled a homicide and the medical examiner said the hood over his head and the position he was constrained to contributed to his death, but the CIA officer who ran the detainee unit only received a letter of reprimand.

Many of the internal investigations which found past mistakes by CIA officers were conducted by the CIA’s inspector general—a position that sat vacant for more than a year [3] before a new inspector general [4] was sworn in last fall.

A CIA spokesman told the AP, “Any suggestion that the agency does not take seriously its obligation to review employee misconduct — including those of senior officers — is flat wrong,”and said that CIA Director Leon Pannetta has fired employees for misconduct.

Shorter versions of the AP story have been published [5]elsewhere [6], but for all the details, read the full report [1].

http://www.propublica.org/blog/item/cia-officials-involved-in-abuse-and-wrongful-detention-rarely-reprimanded-s

[Information contained in BKNT E-mail is considered Attorney-Client and Attorney Work Product privileged, copyrighted and confidential. Views that may be expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of any government, agency, or news organization.]