Intelligence Agency Corruption News Stories

Excerpts of Key Intelligence Agency Corruption News Stories in Major Media

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Note: This comprehensive list of news stories is usually updated once a week. Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is “going dark” as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone. Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages. James X. Dempsey, vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an Internet policy group, said the proposal had “huge implications” and challenged “fundamental elements of the Internet revolution” — including its decentralized design. “They are really asking for the authority to redesign services that take advantage of the unique, and now pervasive, architecture of the Internet,” he said. “They basically want to turn back the clock and make Internet services function the way that the telephone system used to function.”

Note: For an analysis of this new government move to spy on US citizens, click here. For lots more from reliable sources on disturbing government threats to privacy and civil liberties, click here and here.

The Pentagon has burned 9,500 copies of Army Reserve Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer's memoir Operation Dark Heart, his book about going undercover in Afghanistan. A Department of Defense official tells Fox News that the department purchased copies of the first printing because they contained information which could cause damage to national security. The U.S. Army originally cleared the book for release. The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency attempted to block the book about the tipping point in Afghanistan and a controversial pre-9/11 data mining project called "Able Danger." In a letter obtained by Fox News, the DIA says national security could be breached if Operation Dark Heart is published in its current form. The agency also attempted to block key portions of the book that claim "Able Danger" successfully identified hijacker Mohammed Atta as a threat to the United States before the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Note: Able Danger was the program which identified Mohamed Atta and three other alleged 9/11 hijackers as a potential terror threat before 9/11. To read major media reports on the intense controversy around this program (which is likely why the book is being burned), click here.

Fifty years ago, Eric Gow had a baffling and unexplained experience. As a 19-year-old sailor, he remembers going to a clandestine military establishment, where he was given something to drink in a sherry glass and experienced vivid hallucinations. Other servicemen also remember tripping: one thought he was seeing tigers jumping out of a wall, while another recalls faces "with eyes running down their cheeks, Salvador Dalí-style". Mr Gow and another serviceman had volunteered to take part in what they thought was research to find a cure for the common cold. Mr Gow felt that the government had never explained what happened to him. But now he has received an official admission for the first time, confirmed last night, that the intelligence agency MI6 tested LSD on servicemen. One of the scientists involved at the time suggested that the experiments were stopped because it was feared that the acid could produce "suicidal tendencies". MI6, known formally as the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and responsible for spying operations abroad, carried out the tests in the cold war in an attempt to uncover a "truth drug" which would make prisoners talk against their will in interrogations. In parallel experiments, the CIA infamously tested LSD and other drugs on unwitting human subjects in a 20-year search to uncover mind-manipulation techniques. The trials were widely criticised when they came to light in the 1970s.

Note: For key reports from major media sources on CIA experimentation on unwitting subjects, click here.

The National Security Agency, headquarters for the government’s eavesdroppers and code breakers, has been located at Fort Meade, Md., for half a century. Its nickname, the Fort, has been familiar for decades to neighbors and government workers alike. Yet that nickname is one of hundreds of supposed secrets Pentagon reviewers blacked out in the new, censored edition of an intelligence officer’s Afghan war memoir. The Defense Department is buying and destroying the entire uncensored first printing of Operation Dark Heart, by Anthony Shaffer, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve and former Defense Intelligence Agency officer, in the name of protecting national security. Another supposed secret removed from the second printing: the location of the Central Intelligence Agency’s training facility — Camp Peary, Va., a fact discoverable from Wikipedia. And the name and abbreviation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, routinely mentioned in news articles. And the fact that Sigint means “signals intelligence.” Not only did the Pentagon black out Colonel Shaffer’s cover name in Afghanistan, Chris Stryker, it deleted the source of his pseudonym: the name of John Wayne’s character in the 1949 movie “The Sands of Iwo Jima.” The redactions offer a rare glimpse behind the bureaucratic veil that cloaks information the government considers too important for public airing.

Note: Interesting that this NY Times article fails to even mention the "Able Danger" program which Shaffer publicly revealed had identified some of the hijackers before 9/11. For powerful information suggesting government foreknowledge of 9/11 through this program, click here. Yet a Fox News article available here gives all the details. For lots more from major media sources on government secrecy, click here.

Not since the end of the Cold War has the Pentagon spent so much to develop and deploy secret weapons. But now military researchers have turned their attention from mass destruction to a far more precise challenge: finding, tracking, and killing individuals. Every year, tens of billions of Pentagon dollars go missing. The money vanishes not because of fraud, waste or abuse, but because U.S. military planners have appropriated it to secretly develop advanced weapons and fund clandestine operations. Next year, this so-called black budget will be even larger than it was in the Cold War days of 1987, when the leading black-budget watchdog, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), began gathering reliable estimates. The current total is staggering: $58 billionenough to pay for two complete Manhattan Projects.

Note: For other detailed reports on Pentagon weapons development, click here and here.

That photo of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. riding one of the first desegregated buses in Montgomery, Ala.? He took it. The well-known image of black sanitation workers carrying “I Am a Man” signs in Memphis? His. He was there in Room 306 of the Lorraine Hotel, Dr. King’s room, on the night he was assassinated. But now an unsettling asterisk must be added to the legacy of Ernest C. Withers, one of the most celebrated photographers of the civil rights era: He was a paid F.B.I. informer. On [September 12], The Commercial Appeal in Memphis published the results of a two-year investigation that showed Mr. Withers, who died in 2007 at age 85, had collaborated closely with two F.B.I. agents in the 1960s to keep tabs on the civil rights movement. From at least 1968 to 1970, Mr. Withers, who was black, provided photographs, biographical information and scheduling details to two F.B.I. agents in the bureau’s Memphis domestic surveillance program, Howell Lowe and William H. Lawrence, according to numerous reports summarizing their meetings. The reports were obtained by the newspaper under the Freedom of Information Act and posted on its Web site. While he was growing close to top civil rights leaders, Mr. Withers was also meeting regularly with the F.B.I. agents, disclosing details about plans for marches and political beliefs of the leaders, even personal information like the leaders’ car tag numbers.

Note: For a fascinating CNN interview with civil rights leader and former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young on this issue, click here. For key reports from reliable sources raising unanswered questions about the assassination of Martin Luther King and other major US political leaders, click here.

Germany’s intelligence service has turned over thousands of files on top Nazi Adolf Eichmann’s whereabouts after World War II to a journalist who sued for them. But with so many passages blacked out and pages missing, she’s taking the matter back to court. An attorney for freelance reporter Gabriele Weber said ... he was confident that she would win greater access eventually, even though Chancellor Angela Merkel’s office has argued that some Eichmann files should stay secret. Last week, Weber went to see the government files on the man known as the “architect of the Holocaust” for coordinating the Nazi’s genocide policy. She was surprised to find some 1,000 pages missing, despite a federal court’s order in April that the intelligence agency, the BND, could not keep all of the documents secret. Of the pages she did receive, much of the information was blacked out. Weber hopes the files will shed more light on missing pieces of the [Eichmann] puzzle. Who helped him escape? How much did Germany know about where he was? Is there more to the story of his capture?

Note: Why are these documents from over 60 years ago still being censored? Could it be that the Vatican and allies were secretly working together to allow key German leaders to escape? For lots more on this learn about Operation Paperclip here and here.

A federal appeals court ... dismissed a lawsuit [on September 8] accusing a Bay Area aviation-planning company of arranging CIA flights of [captives] to overseas dungeons. The ruling is a victory for both President George W. Bush's administration, which directed the rendition program and acknowledged its existence, and the Obama administration, which ... argued that it was too sensitive to be litigated in court. The American Civil Liberties Union said it would appeal to the Supreme Court. The high court has refused to review two rulings by other appeals courts dismissing suits against the government by men who said they were abducted by the CIA and flown to foreign torture chambers. "Not a single victim of the Bush administration's torture program has had his day in court," ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner said. Jeppesen, a Boeing Co. subsidiary, was described in a 2007 Council of Europe report as the CIA's aviation services provider. In a court declaration in the current suit, a company employee quoted a director as telling staff members in 2006 that Jeppesen handled the CIA's "torture flights." Dissenting Judge Michael Hawkins said the courts should decide legal disputes rather than "permitting the executive to police its own errors." He also said the court should have kept the case alive and required the government to show why specific evidence should remain secret.

Note: The ruling in this case can be read here. For analysis, click here and here.

With Mir Hossein Mousavi as the de facto leader of the opposition movement, the mass executions of the 1980s have become a hot topic among Iranians and Iran watchers, including many readers of this site. Mousavi was prime minister in that decade. Though this article was first published in 1986, it lends a new perspective to the issue, at least with respect to the thousands of executions that took place in the early 1980s. The CIA's assistance to Ayatollah Khomeini, which apparently prompted the executions, is not a well-known fact: The Reagan administration's secret overtures and arms shipments to Iran are part of a seven-year-long pattern of covert Central Intelligence Agency operations -- some dating back to the Carter administration -- that were designed both to curry favor with the regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and support Iranian exiles who seek to overthrow it, according to informed sources. In 1983, for example, the CIA participated in a secret operation to provide a list of Soviet KGB agents and collaborators operating in Iran to the Khomeini regime, which then executed up to 200 suspects. Khomeini also expelled 18 Soviet diplomats, imprisoned the Tudeh party leaders and publicly thanked God for "the miracle" leading to the arrests of the "treasonous leaders." At the same time, secret presidential intelligence orders, called "findings," authorized the CIA to support Iranian exiles opposed to the Khomeini regime, the sources said.

Israel’s undercover operations here, including missions to steal U.S. secrets, are hardly a secret at the FBI, CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies. From time to time, in fact, the FBI has called Israeli officials on the carpet to complain about a particularly brazen effort to collect classified or other sensitive information, in particular U.S. technical and industrial secrets. The most notorious operation employed Jonathan Pollard, the naval intelligence analyst convicted in 1987 and sentenced to life in prison for stealing tens of thousands of classified documents for Israel. One of Israel’s major interests, of course, is keeping track of Muslims who might be allied with Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, or Iran-backed Hezbollah, based in Lebanon. As tensions with Iran escalate, according to former CIA officer Philip Giraldi, “Israeli agents have become more aggressive in targeting Muslims living in the United States as well as in operating against critics. There have been a number of cases reported to the FBI about Mossad officers who have approached leaders in Arab-American communities and have falsely represented themselves as ‘U.S. intelligence,’ ” Giraldi wrote recently in American Conservative magazine. “Because few Muslims would assist an Israeli, this is done to increase the likelihood that the target will cooperate. It’s referred to as a ‘false flag’ operation.”

Note: For an excellent overview of "false-flag" operations, click here.

The aide to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan at the center of a politically sensitive corruption investigation is being paid by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to Afghan and American officials. Mohammed Zia Salehi, the chief of administration for the National Security Council, appears to have been on the payroll for many years, according to officials in Kabul and Washington. It is unclear exactly what Mr. Salehi does in exchange for his money, whether providing information to the spy agency, advancing American views inside the presidential palace, or both. Mr. Salehi’s relationship with the C.I.A. underscores deep contradictions at the heart of the Obama administration’s policy in Afghanistan, with American officials simultaneously demanding that Mr. Karzai root out the corruption that pervades his government while sometimes subsidizing the very people suspected of perpetrating it. Other prominent Afghans who American officials have said were on the C.I.A.’s payroll include the president’s half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, suspected by investigators of playing a role in Afghanistan’s booming opium trade. Over the course of the nine-year-old war, the C.I.A. has enmeshed itself in the inner workings of Afghanistan’s national security establishment. From 2002 until just last year, the C.I.A. paid the entire budget of Afghanistan’s spy service, the National Directorate of Security.

Note: For key reports on the corruption and profiteering that are the real fuels for war, click here.

The secret services must become more transparent if they are to halt the spread of damaging conspiracy theories and increase trust in the Government, claims a leading think tank. A Demos report published today, "The Power of Unreason", argues that secrecy surrounding the investigation of events such as the 9/11 New York attacks and the 7/7 bombings in London merely adds weight to ... claims that they were "inside jobs". It ... recommends the Government fight back by infiltrating internet sites to dispute these theories. The Royal United Services Institute warned last week that the UK may soon face a new wave of home-grown terrorists, when criminals who have been targeted by jihadists while in prison are released.

Note: The report cited in this article advocates UK government infiltration of "conspiracist" organizations and websites. In the US the same recommendation has been made by Obama appointee Cass Sunstein, whose article "Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures" has just been fully dissected by WantToKnow team member David Ray Griffin in his new book Cognitive Infiltration: An Obama Appointee's Plan to Undermine the 9/11 Conspiracy Theory.

The United States has long been an exporter of terrorism, according to a secret CIA analysis released [August 25] by the Web site WikiLeaks. And if that phenomenon were to become a widely held perception, the analysis said, it could damage relations with foreign allies and dampen their willingness to cooperate in "extrajudicial" activities, such as the rendition and interrogation of terrorism suspects. That is the conclusion of the three-page classified paper produced in February by the CIA's Red Cell, a think tank set up after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by then-CIA Director George J. Tenet to provide "out-of-the-box" analyses on "a full range of analytic issues." The paper cites Pakistani American David Headley, among others, to make its case that the nation is a terrorism exporter. Headley pleaded guilty this year to conducting surveillance in support of the 2008 Lashkar-i-Taiba attacks in Mumbai, which killed more than 160 people. Such exports are not new, the paper said. In 1994, an American Jewish doctor [Baruch Goldstein, a member of the militant group Kach founded by the late Meir Kahane,] who had emigrated from New York to Israel years earlier, opened fire at a mosque at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, killing 29 Palestinian worshippers.

Note: For reports from major media sources that illuminate the realities of state-sponsored terrorism, click here.

Fidel Castro says al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden is a bought-and-paid-for CIA agent who always popped up when former President George W. Bush needed to scare the world, arguing that documents recently posted on the Internet prove it. "Any time Bush would stir up fear and make a big speech, bin Laden would appear threatening people with a story about what he was going to do," Castro told state media during a meeting with a Lithuanian-born writer known for advancing conspiracy theories about world domination. "Bush never lacked for bin Laden's support. He was a subordinate." Castro said documents posted on WikiLeaks.org — a website that recently released thousands of pages of classified documents from the Afghan war — "effectively proved he was a CIA agent." Last week, he began highlighting the work of Daniel Estulin, who wrote a trilogy of books highlighting the Bilderberg Club, whose prominent members meet once a year behind closed doors. During the meeting, Estulin told Castro that the real voice of bin Laden was last heard in late 2001, not long after the Sept. 11 attacks. He said the person heard making warnings about terror attacks after that was a "bad actor."

Note: WantToKnow team member David Ray Griffin has analyzed the evidence for bin Laden's likely death in December 2001 in his important book Osama Bin Laden: Dead or Alive?. For key reports from major media sources on secret societies such as the Bilderberg Club, click here.

OSI [Office of Scientific Intelligence] has investigated the work currently being performed on flying saucers. Since 1947, ATIC [Air Technical Intelligence Center] has received approximately 1500 official reports of sightings plus an enormous volume of letters, phone calls and press reports. During the month of July 1952 alone, official reports totaled 250. Of the 1500 reports, Air Force carries 20% as unexplained. A study should be instituted to determine what, if any, utilization could be made of these phenomena by United States psychological warfare planners, and what, if any, defenses should be planned in anticipation of Soviet attempts to utilize them. A national policy should be established as to what should be told the public regarding the phenomena, in order to minimize risk of panic. It is recommended that: a. The Director of Central Intelligence advise the National Security Council of the security implications inherent in the flying saucer problem. b. CIA, under its assigned responsibilities, and in cooperation with the psychological strategy board, immediately investigate possible offensive or defensive utilization of the phenomena for psychological warfare purposes both for and against the United States.

Note: To access this document on the CIA website, click on the link above and then click on the first link listed, with the title "FLYING SAUCERS," or see a full copy with comments at this link. Why was the CIA interested in using the UFO phenomenon for psychological warfare? How did that play out? For lots more reliable, verifiable information on this intriguing topic, click here.

Nearly 60 years ago, a French town was hit by a sudden outbreak of hallucinations, which left five people dead and many seriously ill. On 16 August 1951, postman Leon Armunier was doing his rounds in the southern French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit when he was suddenly overwhelmed by nausea and wild hallucinations. "It was terrible. I had the sensation of shrinking and shrinking, and the fire and the serpents coiling around my arms," he remembers. Leon, now 87, fell off his bike and was taken to the hospital in Avignon. Over the coming days, dozens of other people in the town fell prey to similar symptoms. Doctors at the time concluded that bread at one of the town's bakeries had become contaminated by ergot, a poisonous fungus that occurs naturally on rye. That view remained largely unchallenged until 2009, when an American investigative journalist, Hank Albarelli, revealed a CIA document labelled: "Re: Pont-Saint-Esprit and F.Olson Files. SO Span/France Operation file, inclusive Olson. Intel files. Hand carry to Belin - tell him to see to it that these are buried." F. Olson is Frank Olson, a CIA scientist who, at the time of the Pont St Esprit incident, led research for the agency into the drug LSD. David Belin, meanwhile, was executive director of the Rockefeller Commission created by the White House in 1975 to investigate abuses carried out worldwide by the CIA. Albarelli believes the Pont-Saint-Esprit and F. Olson Files, mentioned in the document, would show - if they had not been "buried" - that the CIA was experimenting on the townspeople, by dosing them with LSD.

Note: Frank Olson later had his drink spiked with LSD and allegedly committed suicide shortly thereafter. Yet many believe he was "suicided" as he was having misgivings about his involvement in this program and considering spilling the beans, as reported in this news article. For an overview of CIA mind-control experimentation, click here.

A retired FBI agent from Summit County is making claims regarding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy that go beyond conspiracy theories. Don Adams ... doesn't waiver from his position that Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill President John F. Kennedy in Dallas. "It is a fact," says Adams, and he says he has the FBI documents to prove it. One of Adams first assignments was investigating an extreme right radical, with connections to the States Rights Party and KKK named Joseph Adams Milteer. One week after completing the investigation, President Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas. Agent Adams located Milteer in Quintan, Georgia on November 27, 1963, but according to Adams, the Senior Agent in charge would not allow a proper interrogation. "I said, 'Boss wait a minute, we have an opportunity to elicit tremendous information from him' and he replied '5 questions and nothing more'." Years later, while searching the archives Adams learned that Milteer had threatened to kill President Kennedy November 9, 1963, just weeks before the assassination, and that FBI agents had allegedly lied about his whereabouts immediately following [the] threat. An FBI record states that after the assassination, "a jubilant" Milteer bragged to the informant, "You thought I was kidding when I said he would be killed from a window with a high powered rifle." Adams questions why Milteer appears in a photograph near President Kennedy's limousine before the shooting, but was never mentioned in the Warren Commission Report.

Note: For key articles from reliable sources on many still-unanswered questions about the John Kennedy and other major political assassinations, click here.

The whistle-blower website WikiLeaks on [August 25] posted what it said was an internal CIA report into the perception that the United States exports terrorism. The three-page document, dated February 2, 2010, asks, "What If Foreigners See the United States as an 'Exporter of Terrorism?'" The founder and editor of the website, Julian Assange, was arrested in absentia last week in Sweden on charges of rape, but the warrant was revoked less than a day later by Chief Prosecutor Eva Finne. Separately on [August 24], the attorney for the alleged victims told CNN rumors that the Pentagon or CIA was somehow involved in the sex crime accusations against Assange are "complete nonsense."

The CIA has tapes of [alleged] 9/11 plotter Ramzi Binalshibh being interrogated in a secret overseas prison. Discovered under a desk, the recordings could provide an unparalleled look at how foreign governments aided the U.S. in holding and questioning suspected terrorists. CIA officials believed they had wiped away all of the agency's interrogation footage. But in 2007, a staff member discovered a box tucked under a desk in the CIA's Counterterrorism Center and pulled out the Binalshibh tapes. A Justice Department prosecutor ... is now ... probing why the Binalshibh tapes were never disclosed. Twice, the government told a federal judge they did not exist. The tapes could complicate U.S. efforts to prosecute Binalshibh, 38. If the tapes surfaced at trial, they could clearly reveal Morocco's role in the counterterrorism program known as Greystone, which authorized the CIA to hold terrorists in secret prisons and shuttle them to other countries. More significantly to his defense, the tapes also could provide evidence of Binalshibh's mental state within the first months of his capture. In court documents, defense lawyers have been asking for medical records to see whether Binalshibh's years in CIA custody made him mentally unstable. He is being treated for schizophrenia with a potent cocktail of anti-psychotic medications.

Note: For lots more from reliable sources on the torture used by the CIA and US military in the global "Long War", click here.

For six years, Nicholas Merrill has lived in a surreal world of half-truths, where he could not tell even his fiancee, his closest friends or his mother that he is "John Doe" -- the man who filed the first-ever court challenge to the FBI's ability to obtain personal data on Americans without judicial approval. No one knew he was the plaintiff challenging the FBI's authority to issue "national security letters," as they are known, and its ability to impose a gag on the recipient. Now, following the partial lifting of his gag order 11 days ago as a result of an FBI settlement, Merrill can speak openly for the first time about the experience, although he cannot disclose the full scope of the data demanded. "One of the most dangerous and troubling things about the FBI's national security letter powers is how much it has been shrouded in secrecy," said Melissa Goodman, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union who helped Merrill sue the government in April 2004 and was one of only a handful of people outside the FBI -- all lawyers -- who knew Merrill had received a letter. The FBI between 2003 and 2006 issued more than 192,500 letters -- an average of almost 50,000 a year. The Justice Department inspector general in 2007 faulted the bureau for failing to adequately justify the issuance of such letters.

Note: For key reports from major media sources on the erosion of civil liberties by government, click here.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.