05.27.10
Posted in Bioterrorism, War On Terror at 6:42 am by George Smith
Beggaring common sense, one reads of a high school teacher in New Mexico going over the top in his zeal to be involved in war on terror readiness:
It was supposed to be a lesson on how to respond to a bioterrorism attack but it quickly turned into a lesson on what happens when not everyone is informed about what’s going on.
During a passing period on April 26 in the courtyard of Rio Rancho High School, as students of teacher Justin Baiardo’s epidemiology class thought they were leaving for a field trip, seven students seemingly started to hemorrhage, convulse and dropped to the ground with what looked like blood spewing from their mouths. A young girl screamed. Emergency and first responders came to the scene. At least one coach tried to perform CPR on one of the non-responsive students. Calls to 911 were made and students sent panicked text messages.
Unknowingly to many students and some teachers, the entire scene was an “exercise.???
The students who collapsed to the ground — and one who “fell’ down some stairs — were actors coached by Baiardo to simulate a bioterrorism attack.
Baiardo said he wanted his students to experience an attack and use the lessons learned in his class. In order to achieve some realism, Baiardo kept not only his students in the dark but also the vast majority of the student body.
“I tried to cause a little panic,??? Baiardo said. “It had to be spontaneous. The reaction from my kids would not have been there if we told the parents beforehand. I wanted them to respond to a situation like we have been talking about it. [Being] spontaneous was necessary.???
Baiardo described the exercise as a way for his students to study how disease can be transferred through populations. He said the school’s principal was informed of the exercise and it had been in the works for weeks.
Predictably, there was some disagreement on its value, the teacher arguing that a bit of panic now and then is good as a learning exercise, others in emergency services arguing — not so much.
“[The chaos] that morning was intentional so as to mimic a true panic situation, a concept foreign to most individuals in this day and age,” wrote the teacher in a letter to the newspaper. “Controlled panic (fire drills, etc.) fails to instill the reality that a true panic situation might hold and judging by the apathetic reactions of many students during the simulation, I am concerned by the desensitization that I witnessed first-hand within the student population. Such is the pampered environment that we create for our youth in which they are never really exposed to true tests of resolve.???
Added the newspaper:
But Rio Rancho Battalion Chief Paul Bearce said he voiced reservations about the exercise. A week prior, a student approached Bearce about participating in the mock event.
“I knew it was going to be a situation where people were going to panic … When we found out the scenario, I voiced concerns. Students didn’t realize it was a scenario. My concerns of what I anticipated would happen — happened.???
Fire Rescue sent a rescue company to the school for an hour.
Anticipating people panicking and calling 911, Bearce contacted the dispatch center and told them to route reports of an attack at Rio Rancho High to him.
“We had concerns — we wanted to make sure no one got hurt and there was no mass panic,??? he said.
“A little panic can be healthy,” countered the teacher.
And, by the way, what disease actually causes people to fall down simultaneously with blood spurting from their noses and mouths? Something from a made-for-TV movie about Ebola virus horror? The Masque of the Red Death?
[N.B., folks: This is different from when you were a kid in grade school and someone vomited in the back of the classroom. And then one or two others followed suit from the stench and hysteria.]
Next week: Rigging a simultaneous white powder hoax and fake gunfire breaking out in the school commons as terrorists attack.
Permalink
05.17.10
Posted in Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 12:39 pm by George Smith
“The amount of ricin Ian Davison produced could have killed thousands,” wrote someone for the BBC over the weekend.
A picture is worth a thousand words in this case.
Accompanying the piece here was a photo, reproduced above, of neo-Nazi Davison’s castor powder mess in a jar.
General common sense would tell most people that a mess in a jar isn’t a weapon of mass destruction. However, when reporters write from a script – one in which they’ve looked up the theoretical lethality of ricin on the Internet, common sense gets tossed out the window.
A good time ago, the US had mills which processed castor seeds for their oil. In fact, Castrol, originally marketed as a fine racing engine oil was castor oil.
“For many decades the fine-scented castor oil flavoured the racing paddocks everywhere from Assen to the Isle of Man, from Brooklands to Monza,” reads the official history of Castrol at the company site here.
The byproduct of castor oil production is castor mash, or powder. It is obviously not a weapon of mass destruction, although it contains ricin.
In the United States, use of castor was also widespread.
A newspaper article from late last year reads:
Over the course of a decade, from 1959 until 1970, Plainview was considered the hub of domestic castor bean production with the local office of Baker Castor Oil ultimately contracting for 70,000 acres of production annually.
However, the crop’s success ultimately worked against it with practically no significant domestic production recorded after 1972. Since that time, the United States has been forced to turn to producers in India and Brazil to supply the majority of its needs.
Plainview Mayor John C. Anderson has a unique perspective on the local castor industry, having served as general manager of Baker Castor Oil’s local operations from August 1959 until December 1970.
“During most of that time Baker was the dominant player in the United States with about 75 percent of the castor oil production,??? Anderson recalled last week, “and the Plainview facilities accounted for virtually all of that.???
The oil derived from castor beans is used in a vast array of products, ranging from paints, varnishes and lacquers to lipstick, hair tonic and shampoo. Since it does not become stiff with cold nor unduly thin with heat, castor oil is an important component in plastics, soaps, waxes, hydraulic fluids and ink. It also is used to make special lubricants for jet engines and racing cars, and during World War I, World War II and the Korean War it was stockpiled by the federal government as a strategic material.
Bayonne, N.J.-based Baker Castor Oil Company already was a major importer and processor when it embarked on a plant breeding program in the late 1950s centered in Plainview in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“Baker needed a dependable domestic supply of castor beans since the government was building up its strategic reserve,??? Anderson explained. “Baker at the time was having to primarily rely on what was being harvested by hand in Brazil and India from plants growing wild.???
Not only were there concerns about production and price volatility, the imported oil had a tendency to turn rancid during transport, Anderson said. A domestic source would reduce transportation costs while substantially improving quality. And, Plainview was a logical choice since the harvested crop could be shipped to crushing facilities on both East and West Coasts.
One observes from the history of castor seed milling in the US and elsewhere, that the product is not particularly hazardous to workers. These companies did not produce large quantities of dangerous waste. Quite the contrary, they were very green industries.
But somehow this history has been long forgotten. In its place — a nonsensical one in which a toxic protein in the castor plant is always alleged to easily furnish white survivalist neo-Nazi kooks and others with a weapon of mass destruction.
Only theoretically.
What the nuts who grind castor seeds to a mush can’t get through their heads (and — by extension — the news media which reports on them) is that castor powder containing ricin is not a practical weapon. It degrades, becomes rancid. It might poison a dog if they put it in the pet food. Or it even might accidentally sicken the maker, if he somehow mysteriously consumes it.
The grinding of castor seeds into powder is neither a refinement nor a purification of ricin.
Another discussion of ricin as a threat is here.
Sampling its most relevant part:
On the world wide web page of an American animal feed and fertilizer company, it said, “In 1857, “H.J. Baker & Bro., Inc., [built] the Baker Castor Oil Company in Jersey City, New Jersey.” “… Of great importance [was castor seed oilcake] … This material [was] the first fertilizer product offered …”
This being the case, castor seed oilcake and seeds containing ricin would have had to travel the roads of the country. If one searches further, reference to it can be found in municipal codes for the transporting of “hazardous materials” via trucking. Castor seed oilcake is a material that does not require a 24-hour emergency phone hotline listed on the shipping manifest. In the Texas city of Laredo’s municipal code, the materials, referred to as “castor bean,” “castor meal,” “castor flake,” and “castor pomace” are things deemed of the same hazard, or lack of it, as “dry ice,” “fish meal,” “fish scrap,” “battery powered equipment,” “battery powered vehicle,” “electric wheelchair” and “refrigerating machine.”
Castor seed powder was frequently used as fertilizer in this country. In the periodical called Timely Turf Topics, the publication of United States Golf Association Green Section, an issue from November 1942 reported that the country was using over 80,000 tons of castor seed mash as fertilizer annually. The Golf Association Green Section periodical was devoted to providing information to golf green managers on the maintenance of beautiful grass turf. During World War II, nitrates were diverted for the war effort, necessitating use of alternative fertilizers, of which castor seed mash was one.
In the November 1941 issue of Timely Turf Topics, the association grapples with the problem of controlling mole crickets in southern golf courses.
“It is reported that turf in some sections of Georgia and Florida has just experienced the worst infestation of mole crickets in a number of years,” reads the issue. “Attempts to eradicate them from turf by the use of well-known poison bait as well as by treatments with arsenate of lead, ground tobacco stems and castor meal have not been successful in several localities this fall.”
The point to be made is that people once worked with large quantities of the grind of castor seeds in this country without dropping like flies. Castor beans were considered a renewable resource, used as a source of lubricant and fertilizer. Even golf course gardeners worked with castor mash, noting that it wasn’t so hot as an insecticide, being ineffective against mole crickets.
There has been a collective loss of memory of such practical information in this country. In its place, emergency news erupts a couple of times of year in which ricin and castor seeds are discovered in someone’s possession, with everyone near it having to be decontaminated and their clothes thrown into a bag for disposal. Photos of hazmart workers in plastic isolation suits multiply. The real-time imagery is of the kind one sees in sci-fi movies devoted to various biological end-of-the-world themes.
But back to the BBC article on neo-Nazi Ian Davison:
The discovery of ricin at the home of Ian Davison convinced detectives that the white supremacist was a “serious terrorist”.
Found in a jam jar, the cloudy liquid had been extracted from castor beans.
An amount roughly equivalent to a grain of salt is enough to kill an adult, making it 1,000 times more poisonous than cyanide.
Experts admit the toxin is relatively easy to produce, but police are unsure exactly how Davison intended to use it.
The ricin discovered at his house in Burnopfield, County Durham, could theoretically have been used to kill thousands.
Common sense thinking left town for good years ago. And nothing seems capable of bringing it back.
Davison and his father were given ten year sentences.
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05.02.10
Posted in War On Terror at 11:08 am by George Smith
Updated
News of the New York propane cylinder car bomb immediately made DD think of Dhiren Barot’s Gas Limos Project in 2006.
Barot, who was in no way a successful al Qaeda terrorist, was nevertheless sent over permanently in England, convicted on the evidence found in his files in a UK anti-terror sweep named Operation Rhyme.
I wrote here:
Barot, locked up for life as a terrorist after pleading guilty in British courts in 2006, has been regularly portrayed as an al Qaeda “General” who concocted what became known as the Gas Limos Project, an outline for bombings using limousines packed with gas cylinders.
Barot’s files were put on the Internet by the London Met. They were removed after a year or so but copies saved by DD were archived at the Federation of American Scientists.
They are heavily redacted but Barot, who never made one of his car bombs, describes them in general terms.
One of Bharot’s difficulties in planning, one which his writing implies he was unable to solve, was how to achieve reliable detonation. At one point, he mused about using hand grenades.
Making sure your ad hoc jerry-bilt collection of materials explode is one of the problems apparently always faced by potential improvised car bombers. It’s not as simple as the movies make it look every day of the week.
“In the event of fire around the [gas cylinder], a dangerous event that can take place is termed as the BLEVE, this is an acronym, which stands for Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapour Explosion,” reads one of Barot’s files.
London newspaper’s made a similar connection today, writing about the Times Square incident in relation to an unsuccessful car bomb attack in the UK attributed to al Qaeda three years ago.
In the Telegraph, one reads:
The Times Square car bomb in New York bears all the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda attack on central London three years ago.
This article described a spectacularly inept but literally flamboyant attack in England. It was remarkable for one of the attackers setting himself on fire as he attemtped to ram his car bomb into the Glasgow airport.
It is described here in Jeep Man on Fire.
Wrote the Telegraph correspondent today:
The men left cars packed with gas canisters and petrol outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub on the Haymarket, between Leicester Square and Trafalgar Square, in London’s busy West End.
The first car, a green Mercedes, was parked with the headlights on in a bus lane outside the front entrance to the nightclub.
The device failed to fully ignite, and the fume-filled vehicle was spotted by a doorman at the nightclub.
A second car bomb, in a blue Mercedes, had been parked at the back entrance to the club but was towed away by parking wardens and found several hours later at a car pound in Hyde Park.
The general ideas behind gas cylinder packed cars have been with al Qaeda for some time. However, the concept of putting gas cylinders into cars is not unique to that group.
Dhiren Barot discussed several methods for putting ‘add-ons’ to his notional car bombs in the Operation Rhyme files.
One of these had to do with fireworks. (As well as fertilizer, inspired because it was used by — according to Bharot, “Timothy McVee.”)
Fireworks, Bharot tried to explain, could — by dint of the explosions and popping noises they make — heighten terror.
In the Times Square incident, the smouldering fireworks drew attention to the bomb.
At this point in time, officials have said they have no evidence the Times Square incident was associated with al Qaeda or more than a lone wolf incident.
However, the existence of a ‘gun locker’ in the car bomb, along with a sizable number of M-88 firecrackers — and potentially an amount of fertilizer — argues strongly for a domestic origin.
Large amount of fertilizer component, video — domestic white guy (?) How unexpected.
Nope. Indeed was shades of Gas Limos project.
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04.15.10
Posted in Bioterrorism, War On Terror at 8:16 am by George Smith
ProPublica won a Pulitzer very recently for good reporting.
This next example, however, isn’t the same. It’s just a nuisance piece describing a book on fear furnsihed by another retiree from the CIA.
Writes Sebastian Rotella here:
During the years he dueled terrorists overseas as a top operative for the CIA, Charles S. Faddis came to see the world through the eyes of the enemy …
What he saw — despite a vast campaign to fortify the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks — scared him. In fact, he says it scared him so much that he has written a new book, Willful Neglect: The Dangerous Illusion of Homeland Security [1].
“Amazingly…as you tour this nation and examine the prime targets that beg to be defended from terrorist attack, what you find, eight years later, is that virtually nothing meaningful has been done,” Faddis writes. “True, large new bureaucracies have been created and shiny, new office buildings constructed, but in terms of concrete measures which will stand in the way of determined, evil men, there is very, very little.”
Rotella, incidentally, is a former LA Times reporter — one who left the ship, probably because of obvious Sam Zell/Tribune mismanagement. But that’s another story.
Back to Faddis.
Books like his have been a dime-a-dozen since 9/11. Everyone who comes out of the national security structure, or who works as a natsec consultant, seems to get charity-case book contracts for deadeningly repetitive tomes on how we’re still unprepared and everything is at risk.
And for years after 9/11 newspapers were filled with articles featuring literally hundreds of people proclaiming how easy it was for terrorists to infiltrate and attack — just about anything. There has never been a shortage of national security men working out in their heads what manner of badness terrorists can do, or walking and probing the countryside for vulnerabilities.
I’ve seen it firsthand.
I did a literature search on this a few years ago for purposes of outlining the nature of it. I’ll get to that in a minute.
Faddis’s book is probably not going to sell.
This is a good thing.
Americans have been burned out on fear. They’ve been abused by people who make simplistic arguments, who believe they should get some kind of award for making statements similar to this one, from Faddis:
[He] asserts, “long lines of railcars packed with the most dangerous substances on earth sit unattended all over our nation.”
What’s the answer then? Spend more money for armed guards on trains? Harden tank cars even more than they already are?
(Believe me, rail accidents are more likely to happen — and do happen — than terrorist attack. Chemical containers tend to be hardened so that they don’t all rupture catastrophically when a collision or derailment occurs. But sometimes they do and bad things happen. But it’s not often and there has never been a deadly Bhopal-scale disaster — not a rail car but a factory-size — release of toxic chemicals in this country.)
“When Faddis’ book was released in February, the reaction included accolades from nuclear safety watchdogs and from a security executive who met with Faddis to tell him the critique had been helpful,” writes Rotella.
Damned by faint praise, another harsh fact is that everyone has seen this stuff before, many times. At one point stories about attacking nuclear reactors, or being able to steal spent fuel rods which would cinder anyone getting near them trying to carry them away, were almost routine.
In real life, there isn’t anyone, who when presented with such a book as Faddis’, who won’t say ‘that’s helpful’ publicly.
What you don’t hear them say, sub-vocally, is: “Go away now. We’ve had enough.”
The method of writing a book on raging insecurity is lazy, even though Faddis did this:
For his new book, Faddis spent months on reconnaissance missions to likely terror targets in U.S infrastructure: dams, rail transportation, military bases, biological research labs and nuclear, chemical and liquid natural gas plants. He roamed along fences, visited authorized areas and otherwise tested security measures. Although his covert experience helped, he obeyed self-imposed ground rules and tried to maintain the perspective of an ordinary visitor.
The ProPublica article, for example, takes no account that there simply aren’t enough terrorists to take advantage of all the opportunities present in the book. Or that life, in general, is fraught with vulnerability. And that blowing up an office building won’t bring down the republic. Or that Biblical-scale disasters are, with the exception of Chernobyl, an exchange of nuclear weapons or WWII-style strategic incendiary bombing campaigns, almost purely only within the power of nature. You know — earthquakes, volcanoes, Katrinas — these sorts of things.
But hey, someone could walk into an office or federal building and just open fire! Or someone could crash a vehicle or airplane into the same! Or someone could take anthrax from a gold standard flask of anthrax spores at a top lab!
Oh, wait…
It also pays no mind to the idea that people and agencies are frequently resilient and valiant in the face of disasters. The only thing you have to know from guys like Faddis is that it’s a dangerous world and the government (and an entire laundry list of others) haven’t protected us well from the boogeymen who can do anything.
Remember, I said I’d get back to the vulnerability-everywhere meme, which was written about extensively years ago.
In August 2006, I reprinted this thing, a piece already a year old from Globalsecurity.Org:
The newsmedia, when dealing with potential problems, like the threats posed by terrorists . . . has an extremely poor track record. It does not ask hard questions of anyone. It simply acts as a conduit for the delivery of nightmare claims. Employing a Nexis search, [I] was able to quickly find around one hundred stories devoted to spreading permutations from the last two years containing some fashion of the assumption or assertion that “it’s easy for terrorists” to bring on calamity using a multitude of plans and practices.
Rail road yard security is a joke, it’s easy for terrorists to walk right in. .50 caliber sniper rifles, powerful enough to shoot down airplanes…are easy for terrorists to acquire [but even easier for Americans to get]. It’s [still] too easy for terrorists to get across the border. A new driver’s license bill is bad because it makes it easy for terrorists to have them. A blackout reveals how easy it might be for terrorists to knock down the electrical grid. Colorado is vulnerable to terror because federal focus on big cities has made it easy for terrorists to strike in landlocked states. It is easy for terrorists to contaminate water so [a scientist’s] new sensor system is a necessity. Be alert for farm terror because it is easy for the enemy to strike there. [A state] [leads or lags] in bioterror readiness and it’s a matter for concern because it is easy for terrorists … Assume a bioterror attack is coming because it is easy for terrorists…
By themselves, they occasionally appear lucid and reasonable. Pile them together and the aggregate is astonishing. The message is everything is vulnerable and terrorists are capable of anything. Because of one terrible day and the cliche “9/11 changed everything,” devastating terrorist strikes have been theorized as transferable to almost any imaginable attack scenario.
After I read a stack of these articles, I thought for a moment I was in the wrong business and should devote a couple months and publications to predicting the ways in which terrorists could attack. Terrorists could imitate the methodology of the Washington sniper and his accomplice. Why haven’t they? Terrorists could go into the forests and high chaparrals of southern California during fire season and ignite calamitous blazes, making national news and sewing panic. Local arsonists do it. It would be easy for terrorists. Gang members from central Los Angeles shoot into cars on the freeways. Surely that would be easy for terrorists… [Anti-terror celebrity Richard Clarke did do this in a long piece for the Atlantic Monthly. Clarke is actually now in the business of writing books about what terrorists can do, like clockwork, every two years. He alternates between fiction and non-fiction, the only difference between the two being there is more dialog in the former.]
It’s a good game. It needs to take no account of what terrorists are actually doing, no knowledge of what tough to get human intelligence sources and materials may show, or historically — what preferences, capabilities, experiences and limitations terrorists carry with them. It can assume that there are more terrorists expertly trained in many degrees and methods of mayhem and working themselves into place than there are actual terrorists. For the anti-terrorism effort, it is only necessary to assign a simple universality to fragility and vulnerability and degrees of omniscience and unlimited resources to the adversary. It is easy, so to speak, to think of things that are easy for terrorists to do.
. . . If one looks at an article published for the August/September 2005 edition of the American Journalism Review, one found a lamenting over the lack of good reporting on homeland security. But in the first few paragraphs, the article promptly fell into the same type of reporting it purported to criticize. The review delivered a titillating and speculative disaster porn scenario, trotting out a reporter to furnish claims about how easy it would be for a terrorist to kill — again thousands — by sabotaging a tank of anhydrous ammonia at a chemical plant.
“This particular killer goes for the eyeballs and turns skin into a gooey mass. Respiratory systems are paralyzed by excruciating pain,” wrote the publication. “…thousands of people would have died. I have no doubt of that,” said a journalist who was a source.
And “To attack [America’s electrical] grid, a terrorist need only study publicly available trade journals, which explain where new facilities are constructed,” again cried an op-ed piece in the New York Times on August 13, 2005. “A terrorist could then disable a particular system by destroying the computers and relays housed in the poorly protected building.”
Article after article can be found warning of dire consequences. No publication is too small, no facet of life too obscure.
The publication Arkansas Business, for example, furnished warning about attacks on rice.
“It would be very easy for terrorists to introduce anthrax or even something as simple as rat poison into rice being exported to the United States,” said a rice businessman for the paper.
“A shipload of contaminated rice, distributed throughout the nation, would be a security nightmare, creating not only a panic but possibly an economic meltdown.” (The subtext: Buy American grown rice, as only it can be guaranteed to be inspected, pure and clean.)
In any case, the hot button issue is again anthrax, the ultimate weapon, as has already been read, possibly to be blown through cities, worked into beef, poured into fruit juice, or also distributed in bags of rice.
And if not anthrax-tainted rice, how about lunches for school children?
At the end of July 2005, USA Today ran with the brief “School lunches a terrorist target? USDA calls meals ‘particularly vulnerable.'” “Currently, authorities are looking at how a popular lunchroom staple, chicken nuggets, may be susceptible to tampering,” wrote the newspaper. “Federal officials have distributed a food safety checklist to school lunch providers, who must show evidence of a food safety plan…”
Catastrophe-causing poisoning materials for terrorists are apparently available off the shelf everywhere, too, their capability facile.
“Robert Buchanan, a senior science adviser with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, said mounting an attack on the food system would not require a great deal of knowledge or sophistication, and the result could be catastrophic,” wrote the Birmingham Post-Herald in July 2005 in the article, “Experts say food supply could be hit.”
“The number of biological or chemical agents that could be used in an attack [is huge],” said the government advisor to the reporter. “I’m amazed how many agents are available over the Internet.”
[W]hile such news often departs from reality, it generates its own truth and consequences by filtering into reports delivered by expert government, corporate and academic agencies. The action of this process as well as the close uncritical embracing of it dissipates organization into thousands of efforts going in different directions, reducing security to a chaotic scramble for money by crowds of experts and officials, all trying to paint scary scenarios because the more forbidding the manner of doom the easier it is to command attention.
Such collections of news stories and claims frequently lead to hearings, policy, entrenched beliefs, and funding of no immediately visible benefit to average Americans. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to put forward the distinctly not radical idea that given the recent national and local failures in the face of catastrophe, the needy would still take it in the shorts if all that was claimed to be very insecure to terrorists was made secure.
I concluded that the packaging and delivery of doom and terror stories comprised rigidly casted scripts which destroyed careful deliberation. They inspire a belief that everything must be secured and that nothing is secure. They lead to the perception or even conviction that the work of battening down the nation will never be over.
They fostered belief that it is rational and healthy to be in fear because everyone is threatened, “the world is not a safe place,” and maniacs can and will attack fruit juice, school lunches in Iowa, chicken nuggets or tubs of cafeteria spaghetti.
“[Faddis’s] book reviews a litany of security flaws in the bio-weapons research world revealed by the 2001 anthrax attacks, which were allegedly the work of a disgruntled scientist, and criticizes the dramatic increase in the number of labs handling lethal substances,” writes Rotella.
No, actually, the DoJ/FBI Amerithrax investigation and report did that. And we’ve all seen this but despite the fact that the worst bioterrorist in history was an American insider, the bioterror defense industry — of which he was a key part — continues to expand.
Geezus.
Here you have another perfect example of misguided book publishing, one which asks the gullible to believe we need another where so many have already been.
I’m betting life’s going to punt on Charles S. Faddis’s Willful Neglect: The Dangerous Illusion of Homeland Security.
It will, suitably, subject it to an earned ‘willful neglect.’
Permalink
03.17.10
Posted in Extremism, Predator State, War On Terror, Why the World Doesn't Need US at 9:17 am by George Smith
There are fewer more poisonous articles than those which lash nabbed terrorists together in search of a trend or a growing problem.
“Recent cases show challengeds of US terrorists,” reads the latest, from Associated Press.
Reporters Eileen Sullivan and Devlin Barrett lash together a collection of designated bad people in the news and consults a variety of experts to read the future. The future, in these stories, being always rotten and getting worse. No context in terms of what problems the US faces by comparison, or the amount of miscellaneous mayhem that goes down every month on US streets, is furnished.
It reads:
One was a drywall contractor and father, another a petite woman who cared for the elderly, another a U.S. military officer. The most alarming thing about a string of recently arrested terror suspects is that they are all Americans.
And there’s the crazy guy who shot and wounded guards to the entrance of the Pentagon and the man who wandered around as a construction worker nobody at nuclear plants in the US and then went off to crawl the dunes of Yemen for years. The crazy kid is left out because he was not a Muslim. Same for the poor man’s Ted Kaczinski who flew his airplane into an IRS building. And the deadliest bioterrorist in history, against which individuals like Jihad Jane seem silly — Bruce Ivins — is also not here.
Just not the right religion.
And of the terrorists selected for this story, only the US Army-minted Nidal Hasan proved truly capable — killing thirteen.
One might venture to say the number still seems quite small in a country as diverse and vast as the US, particularly when considering the poor state of mind imposed on nearly everyone by current economic conditions.
” ‘These cases, [one counterterrorism expert] said, ‘underscore the constantly evolving nature of the threat we face,'” reads the AP piece.
Another way to look at it, logically, is to see that it’s a rather bad argument for endless war and increasingly oppressive snooping, vigilance and intolerance. And that next to everyday problems like rising unemployment, broken government, and the failure of the United States to effectively educate and lead as befits a country of its history and size, these are only small annoyances which — by their exaggeration — point to a self-imposed increasingly bleak future.
A drift into terrorism is “a combination of psychology, sociology and people who, just for cultural reasons, gravitate” [to Islamic extremism] … We can’t assume we’ve got months and years,” Michael Chertoff opines.
Chertoff can always be counted on to reliably deliver the noxious disguised as wisdom. Just last month he was part of a program which CNN ran repeatedly over the course of one weekend, a feature presentation selling the idea that cyberattacks will deliver the new WMDs.
Chertoff’s observation on US terrorists implies one ought to take up the very bad idea that we need to quickly develop the right amount of observation and surveillance, marked up against a scientifically approved list of social character markers, so that these troublesome people can be ferreted out sooner — before too many of them show up and the streets run red with blood.
I know there are more of them out there,” says someone named Jack Tomarchio, another former Dept. of Homeland Security employee.
In these stories the most toxic quote always seems to be delivered by the ubiquitous Bruce Hoffman, a “terrorism expert at Georgetown University.”
“The spate of cases over the past two years shows the conventional wisdom about who is a terrorist is dangerously outdated,” the AP says Hoffman informs.
“There really is no profile of a terror suspect; the profile is broken … It’s women as well as men, it’s lifelong Muslims as well as converts, it’s college students as well as jailbirds.”
These words work to create the impression that terrorism is sort of like a hard to diagnose disease or a trace poisonous gas, floating through the air, capable of infecting or tainting anyone at anytime depending on a panoply of inner weaknesses. And that the only way to stop it is to go to the source and deliver a regular prescription of root terrorism-killing antibiotic or antidote — the burning and stamping out of Muslims who look at the US with anger from other countries.
It is the most meretricious thing, a prescription for endless war, more threats to blow out of proportion next to more urgent problems diminishing the quality of life and blighting futures nationwide. Except for those in the business of explaining and countering terrorism.
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03.15.10
Posted in Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 7:46 am by George Smith
“What and when MI5 knew about torture” is the headline of a story in the Guardian here.
The introduction reads:
Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of MI5 throughout most of the years of the so-called war on terror, insisted yesterday she had not known that Khalid Shiekh Mohammed was being waterboarded.
In a response to the appeal court’s judgment that MI5 officers had a “dubious record” on torture, she sought to blame the US and maintained that only after she retired in 2007 did she discover that the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks had been waterboarded 160 times. “The Americans were very keen that people like us did not discover what they were doing,” she said. Critics, though, said it was stretching credulity to claim surprise.
However, British intelligence and anti-terrorism police regarded information extracted under torture as worthy of consideration, no matter the source or procedures used to extract it.
This pertained to the the infamous London ricin trial in which the government’s chief informant was an Algerian named Muhammad Meguerba.
When this writer was contacted by the UK defense for the accused Algerians in the “ricin case” in 2004 — a group that had been dubbed an infamous “UK poison cell” linking al Qaeda in Iraq with the west by Secretary of State Colin Powell in his infamous speech to the UN — most of the UK government’s case was said to rest on the information provided by Meguerba.
However, as time went on, Meguerba’s material could not be brought as evidence. And this was said to be because it had been made in a confession extracted under torture while in Algeria, a confession that was later recanted.
A London jury eventually concluded there had been no UK poison ring, just one loner with wild plans — Kamel Bourgass, a very bad man who had been convicted in a previous trial of murdering a Manchester police office during his capture.
The Guardian piece continued:
Eliza Manningham-Buller spelt out her position in written evidence to the law lords in 2005: “In some cases, it may be apparent to the [security and intelligence] agencies that the intelligence has been obtained from individuals in detention … though even then the agencies will often not know the location of details of detention,” she said.
Though she added that detainees could “seek to mislead their questioners”, she said: “Experience proves that detainee reporting can be accurate and may enable lives to be saved.”
She referred in her statement to the “ricin trial” and the Algerian supergrass in the case, Muhammad Meguerba. “Questioning of Algerian liaison [security service] about their methods of questioning detainees would almost certainly have been rebuffed and at the same time would have damaged the relationship to the detriment of our ability to counter international terrorism,” Manningham-Buller said.
Lord Bingham, the senior law lord, said in the ruling that intelligence extracted by torture was not admissible in British courts: “I am not impressed by the argument based on the practical undesirability of upsetting foreign regimes which may resort to torture.”
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03.02.10
Posted in Bioterrorism, War On Terror at 7:52 am by George Smith
When the US government closed the anthrax case recently, the committee to clear Bruce Ivins and all the conspiracy theorists again emerged from the closet. Because the case took so long and the bioterrorist was at the center of the US biodefense research community, careers and reputations were made and lost on it.
The Department of Justice and FBI released a 96-page executive summary of the case. It contains a good picture of the flask of anthrax death, the gold standard for bioterrorism. In recapping, the scientific work teased out the unique mixture of genetic fingerprint – morphological variance, it’s called – in the mailed anthrax, and matched it with the flask of spores in Ivins’s control.
Ivins was not the only person with access to the glass of horror. However, the bureau eventually cleared Steven Hatfill because he never had access to the area of Ft. Detrick where it was stored when he worked at the institution two years prior to the attacks.
As the FBI continued its investigation, closing in on Ivins’s lab, the scientist made a number of attempts to throw them off the case. At one time Ivins indicated in analysis that a freshly made culture plate of the mailed anthrax looked like that of a colleague’s when it actually looked like his own. In another, he furnished a purposely misleading sample to the FBI.
The rest of the piece by your host can be read at el Reg today here.
The story will never finish cleanly. There are too many who not only don’t trust the US government but who also cannot abide the fact that anthrax was made by one of their own.
Jason at Armchair Generalist dissected a NYT op-ed on the same issues yesterday here.
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02.24.10
Posted in Extremism, War On Terror at 10:14 am by George Smith
Like peroxide bombs, whenever the oafish failed al Qaeda man, Najibullah Zazi is in the news, hits at DD blog go up.
And he’s been in the news this week. Because he’s admitted guilt and is telling it all, and probably making some up, to authorities — perhaps so he doesn’t spend ALL of the rest of his life in some dungeon.
The government is naturally interested in tracking down confederates and finding out the precise nature of his doings in Pakistan.
“A man who admitted plotting to bomb the city’s subway system wanted to do so with the help of at least two other bombers during rush hour, when the most people could be killed, police said Tuesday,” according to news wires.
” ‘This was particularly disturbing,’ ” police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said. “It was [Najibullah Zazi’s] intention to be on trains during rush hour period and to kill New Yorkers. No question about it.”
Whether Zazi could have actually done so remains an open question as he has told authorities he flushed his explosive ingredients down the toilet when the noose began tightening upon him.
Zazi’s news history indicated he was fairly clueless, casting about on the Internet for methods on how to make explosive from beauty parlor supply store chemicals. DD would estimate that barring evidence showing the actual existence of it actually being in his hands, rather than just a collection of necessary materials, there was a better than even chance he was going to fail.
If so, he would still have been a really big nuisance, much like the underpants bomber.
But being a nuisance and the wrong religion today are the only ingredients needed to tip the US into frenzies of counterproductive action.
DD wrote about this extensively last year.
Excerpted:
One country stands alone in DD blog web statistics: Pakistan. The only thing net surfers from Pakistan land on at dickdestiny dot com are posts which reference peroxide bomb plots, jihadist recipes and documents for making poisons like cyanide or ricin, dirty bomb schemes, and other cases involving incarcerated members of al Qaeda.
The interest is invariant and monochromatic. Because it is this way, from the viewpoint of DD blog, Pakistan always look like it has a subset of young men interested in nothing but jihad and terrorism — a close fit with the real world. And because there are no other colorations in this interest, it can be observed for a trend.
It’s a bleak picture, considering the figures represent people only interested in terrorism and reading of it.
While the numbers are small, they are regular and constant.
They show DD that various things — the escalation of Predator drone bombings/assassinations in 2009, the expansion of the US embassy, more CIA operation in the country and greater treasure thrown at the Pakistani government — are not making Pakistan nicer or less filled with potential trouble. The level of animosity as shown by local interest has only increased, sometimes surprisingly so. If this is the US government’s ongoing strategy for Pakistan, there is polling proof here that it is not working. In fact, it is having the opposite effect: More really angry young Muslim men.
The only good news here is a point DD has made previously.
Since the beginning of the war on terror, the US mainstream media has created an artificial reality concerning it, one in which terrorists are assumed to be MacGyver-like characters, capable of making WMDs from just about anything — very easily.
All they need is to access the Internet, to download information which will make the manufacture of poisons and explosives only a little harder than adding tequila and crushed ice to margerita mix.
And because the media and our government and private sector experts have propagated this meme on a regular basis, “Peroxide Bombs, Easy to Make!” and other texts like it have serendipitously floated to the top tier in search requests on the subject, making them virtual tools with which to gauge interest.
Fortunately for us, we live in world constrained by physical reality, not by what others wish it to be or think it is in the press. If we did not, reason stands to tell us bomb and poisoning plots would be commonplace in the west, not the recent historical pattern in which a handful of failed and aspirational plots are uncovered, marked by rare but globally well-known success.
Zazi, having allegedly been ‘trained’ Pakistan and motivated by the US war in Afghanistan, is a ringing example of the phenomenon described above.
“Trends in Terror Prep Net-surfing,” the story with Google metrics outlining the nature of it is here and also mirrored here at GlobalSecurity.
With lots of graphs and stuff.
Google Analytics statistics on hits for peroxide bomb and related searches from Colorado to this domain before and during the unraveling of the Zazi plot in the news last year. Aurora cluster driven by news that this was where Zazi was attempting his machinations.
The Story of Oafish Zazi — from the archives.
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02.17.10
Posted in War On Terror at 9:16 am by George Smith
The current United States can be defined as an immense accumulation of not terribly acute or attentive people obliged to operate a uniquely complex technology, which all else being equal, always wins. No wonder error and embarrassment lurk everywhere … Every employee a machine’s toad. — Paul Fussell, BAD, 1991
Today’s lead story on American airline security innovation was made for Paul Fussell. In 1991, he could not have forseen the War on Terror. But he could easily have predicted the many reactions to it in US life.
For one, the making of air travel more and more odious for the sake of an increased appearance of security.
“To the list of instructions you hear at airport checkpoints, add this: ‘Put your palms forward, please,'” reports CNN here.
“The Transportation Security Administration soon will begin randomly swabbing passengers’ hands at checkpoints and airport gates to test them for traces of explosives.”
“The point is to make sure that the air environment is a safe environment,” Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said to CNN. “We know that al Qaeda … terrorists continue to think of aviation as a way to attack the United States. One way we keep it safe is by new technology [and] random use of different types of technology.”
Then CNN (and one imagines every other news agency) trots out ‘security experts’ to get their opinion.
Keep in mind, readers, that in the US it takes only a quick Google or shake of the digital Rolodex to find an expert who will tell you anything and everything are good ideas.
“Security experts consulted by CNN said swabbing hands is a good move … ” added CNN.
Privacy experts, of course, want to ensure TSA workers will not discriminate when swabbing. The testing must be truly random and senseless.
In the US, this means a ridiculous application.
Invariably — babies, quadriplegics, your grandmother, teenage girls, people in wheelchairs or with walkers or handcuffed to security men, the Chinese ping pong team — all will be tested.
You can furnish some other examples, DD is sure.
“The TSA has more than 7,000 explosive trace detection (ETD) machines and has purchased 400 additional units with $16 million in federal stimulus money,” reported CNN.
In 1991 for BAD, Fussell explained the US had become defined by realizing that stupidity is a national characteristic. As a result, everything henceforth and to this day must be delivered in either a thin skin of fraud or some other made-up bit of rubbish fashioned to make people think a thing is great.
In this manner, readers are delivered the implied idea that the stimulus money has been doing good in the making of going to the airport even more unpleasant.
“It’s a ‘very good idea,’ said [some] security expert [named] Tony Fainberg,” to CNN.
In early January I wrote about the underpants bomber, who has brought this on, at The Register.
Thus:
[The] dilemma is clear.
Human error being always guaranteed, on both sides, no amount of technology – whole body scanners, electric noses, bomb-sniffing machines and expanded computerized watch lists (particularly in the hands of the US, where laymen have been conditioned to view them as magic wands) – can wholly stop men with improvised chemistry experiments in their private places. Yet no public official, under risk of being fired, can speak of this obvious thing.
In fact, one might theorize there’s a practical limit achieved in which the complexity inherent in the accumulation of security systems and data and the limiting human capital required to operate and sift it erases any theoretical benefits and gains beyond a certain point. And that’s a place on the graph we are already past.
The complete article is here.
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02.09.10
Posted in War On Terror at 12:01 pm by George Smith
Bed-wetters and office clowns not sought.
The next story took over a year to develop and carry out. I was writing for a newspaper’s features section but didn’t tell anyone about it until the work was finished.
It remains a great read, one I’m still very proud of. And it’s relevant to our current national security problems over a decade after publication.
“Name five CIA experts on anything. I can’t do it,” said a former CIA analyst to the New York Times [on one Sunday] (“Langley, We Have a Problem,” Tim Weiner).
I write on substantive national security issues for the think-tank GlobalSecurity.Org and get quoted on them. While I’m not secret and classified, I did and do what CIA-men are supposed to do well but often don’t seem to.
On the old blog, this story steadily gained in readership over the past couple years.
And so I’ve elected to reprint it on the new blog, migrating it here for the eventual day I abandon Blogger.
Today, it’s one of the more frequently read pieces by people who apparently are searching for information on how to get hired by the CIA.
Good luck with it. I’ve no idea if the procedures described here are still in place. More’s the pity if even a few are.
Anyway, can you imagine DD ever working for the CIA? [Insert crazy horselaugh.]
(1992, Allentown) So you want to be a spy? And you’re sure the place to go is the CIA!
The CIA is interested in hearing from you. It interviews thousands of Americans for jobs as spies, intelligence analysts and technical specialists every year. But because of its classified mission, hiring methods are unusual and Kafka-esque, taking at least a year to complete and bound in smothering bureaucratic process, comic ineptitude and secrecy.
Although the number of people employed by the CIA is classified, it regularly recruits on college campuses and through the job listings in major metropolitan newspapers. A recent series of advertisements aimed at minorities in magazines like Ebony drew spectacular media attention, but the typical CIA ad is bland and unassuming, easily blending in with countless other corporate calls for highly-trained, college- educated Americans.
A year ago, one such ad ran in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Candidates were encouraged to send resumes for consideration to a post office box drop in Pittsburgh, one of the agency’s regional personnel clearinghouses. Candidates would be required to undergo a rigorous physical examination and polygraph test, the ad warned ominously.
I forwarded my resume to the CIA mail drop, listing my qualifications as a scientist and journalist with the reasoning that these talents would be useful in analysis.
Apparently, the CIA’s personnel staff agreed. They got back to me in about a month and in so doing, began a unique series of communications.
Candidates, you see, are not contacted directly by the CIA. Instead they are delivered mail that requests them to contact an agency worker by telephone within a certain time frame. The contacts are often anonymous. For example, prospects whose last names began with “S” were asked to phone “Bobbi – Program Officer” at the CIA’s Stafford Building in Tyson’s Corner Center, VA.
The initial interview with the CIA usually involves a type of cattle call. About a year ago, 30 of us met in a room at The Valley Forge Convention Center. There we underwent preliminary screening from a CIA team led by Pittsburgh-based representative. The team included workers from the agency’s directorates of intelligence, operations and science and technology, including one agency employee who looked over my resume, saw that I worked at a newspaper and added that he had come to the agency as a newsman, too.
It was the job of this spy and his colleagues to weed out potential crazies and issue to the remainder the agency’s personnel Holy Grail, the 30-page Personal History Statement (PHS).
The PHS is an inventory that scrutinizes all aspects of the job candidate’s professional and private life. It becomes the basic curriculum vitae used during hiring and the template for the CIA’s security team during its investigation of potential agents.
“Don’t leave anything blank,” warned one of the spies balefully at the convention center. “I didn’t think anyone would really sit down and go over the whole thing when I started, but believe me, they do.”
The PHS requires the spy-in-waiting to designate references in a number of categories, including family members, professional acquaintances and personal (not family) acquaintances who have lived in close proximity to the candidate for a year or two.
“This is so the agency can call up your neighbors and ask them if there’s loud music and blue smoke coming out of your front door on the weekends,” one of the CIA handlers cracked.
The candidate is asked to document any record of criminal activity including theft, traffic violations, sexual deviance and perversion, unlawful drug use or undue publicity surrounding a divorce or civil suit. There is a battery of medical inquiries probing the candidate’s injuries and hospital visits, mental stability, prescription and non-prescription drug use, gastro- intestinal health and nocturnal micturition frequency. (The last seemed aimed at uncovering whether the candidate had an enlarged prostate or was a chronic bedwetter.)
The candidate is warned that the veracity of his statement is liable to be tested by polygraph.
Accompanying submission of this dossier to the CIA are any collegiate transcripts and a long writing sample dealing with any topic of interest to intelligence workers. For example, writing about home grown pilot plants designed for the production of biological warfare agents in Third World countries is appropriate if you’re applying for a job as an analyst.
All candidates were warned not to inform anyone except close family members of their CIA screening. The CIA encouraged the use of a cover like “the government” or “Department of Defense” when notifying those who needed to be designated as references.
A few months after submission of the personal statement and transcripts, the candidate is likely to get a phone call from CIA security who identifies himself only as a member of “the Agency.”
His job is to verify and embellish some of the information included in the PHS, specifically those sections dealing with criminal activity and homosexuality.
In my case, the agent was particularly interested in a reference to recreational marijuana use in college.
“How many cigarettes would you say you smoked?” he asked. He was also interested in whether or not I had sex with men.
Satisfied, the agent continued by inquiring about drinking.
“The Agency’s position in these matters is one of abstention enforced by testing,” he said. [Sure, bro’. ] That concluded the interrogation.
“You have a nice day,” said the spy before hanging up.
Most of this preliminary screening is in response to much publicized problems the CIA has had in the past with the penetration by the criminal or mentally ill. James Jesus Angleton, the feared head of the CIA’s counterintelligence wing and one of the most powerful men in the agency during the height of The Cold War, left his office in disgrace, having acquired a reputation, documented by journalists Thomas Mangold and Seymour Hersh, as a paranoid alcoholic and pathological liar.
If the prospective employee’s personal statement and transcripts survive the initial evaluation, he or she is given a series of aptitude and psychological tests.
Those in eastern Pennsylvania were again contacted and issued a ticket/summons for the tests, which were administered one summer Saturday morning in the physics building at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
The testing at Penn, an all-day affair, included a series of vocabulary, simple math, reading comprehension and abstract thought multiple-choice quizzes, similar to a college aptitude test.
Also included was the California Psychological Inventory, devised by Dr. Harrison Gough, psychologist. Our copy, which had a copyright date of 1956, asked for true/false responses to a number of statements, including:
“I have wound up in trouble because of my involvement in unseemly sexual activities.”
“In high school I was often sent to the principal’s office for ‘cutting up.'”
“I sweat in even the coolest weather.”
“I believe it is every citizen’s duty, as part of the community, to keep his sidewalk and lawn neat and clean.”
“I must admit, I think people are fools who don’t think the American way is the best there is.”
“I often think people are watching me.”
“I like tall women.”
“I must admit, I don’t mind being the ‘cut-up’ at the office party.”
One can only wonder what the two women who took the psychological inventory that Saturday answered to the question about liking tall women.
It seemed curious that the agency was using a test from 1956 — when presumably very few women applied for jobs in intelligence and when being a “cut-up” in high school was one of the worst things you could be accused of – to screen young professionals in 1991.
Two other tests included a work environment survey and a current world events test, both tailored for the CIA.
For example, the work environment survey asked whether the candidates would accept a job in a foreign culture or where conditions of extreme physical hazard (presumably a war zone), unpalatable food, no sanitation or debilitating disease prevail. It also focused on whether candidates would be willing to work anonymously and without recognition for long periods of time for people they find personally repugnant.
The hardest test was the current world events quiz. It presumed a comprehensive knowledge of world politics and personalities that might only be gained from religious study of The Washington Post or a background in international relations. Actually, I thought I did rather well on it.
After the testing, a couple more months passed.
Candidates were then informed by mail whether they had been bound over for interview at CIA headquarters in McLean, VA.
During this 9-month long period, no one from the agency had spoken to me for more than five minutes.
Finally, another letter arrived. It included an appointment date with “Agency Officials” interested in discussing possible employment.
The interview was set for the week after Thanksgiving in the Directorate of Intelligence’s Office of East Asian Analysis. “Ellie” was my contact. A room was reserved for the night before at The Days Inn in Vienna, VA.
It was a 15-minute drive to the CIA the next morning. The unmarked compound is not far from Langley High School. You can tell you are there by the barricades of concrete and obstacle-wire surrounding the wooded campus.
The entrance block-house guard was supposed to check my photo driver’s license, but he handed it back and waved me through without taking a look.
The Directorate of Intelligence is a modern looking edifice of cement and green glass. At the entrance were a score of smokers bearing the same furtive, hounded look seen at other corporations where smoking within the building has been banned.
Just inside was a marble hallway containing a likeness of William Casey.
Getting to the Office of East Asian Analysis entails a check-in at reception, where I presented my papers. After a few minutes, “Ellie,” a middle-aged woman showed up to escort me.
I was issued a green piece of paper and a pass card used to get through an electronic Pinkerton security turnstile. A security man gave my briefcase the once-over. Overhead was a sign stating that passage beyond the portal conferred agreement to a search of your person, your belongings and your car at any time.
The agency has been sensitive to accusations that it’s possible to walk out of the building with highly classified materials ever since 1978, when William Kampiles walked off CIA grounds with technical manuals for the super-secret National Reconnaissance Office’s KH-11 spy satellite. Kampiles, a junior clerk, was sentenced to 40 years in jail for selling the manual to the Soviets. During the same period, 16 other KH-11 manuals disappeared and were never traced.
While I was coming in, many were coming out. No bags were checked. Later, when I left, no one asked about my briefcase.
Upstairs in the Office of East Asian Analysis, National Geographic-like photos of China adorned the walls. Documents marked “SECRET” littered the desks.
Maddie, a personnel administrator, was holding court.
In her office, I asked her if the recession had affected hiring. It had, she said. “I don’t like the word ‘down-sizing’,” she said with a glassy smile. “We call it ‘right-sizing.'”
Maddie said she couldn’t say whether the agency’s “right- sizing” involves cuts in 60 percent of prospective hires, as had been recently reported in national newspapers. But then she changed her mind and commented, “That’s a little high.”
This has created problems for the agency, she said. Since attrition isn’t removing veterans at the expected rate, it’s been difficult to bring in new people she added. Complicating matters is the polygraph and security check. “Eighty to 90 percent of the people to which the agency makes an offer fail it.”
As for where I fit into things, interest was from the China Division: Industry & Technology branch of the office.
“The section head’s not here today,” said Maddie. “But Stan will speak with you.”
Stan turned out to be an airy, blond-haired analyst with a master’s degree in international relations from American University. (Today, Stan works at a company that specializes in business intelligence. When its partners aren’t out on the golf links they will — essentially — spy on your corporate competitors and provide research assessments or teach your firm how to do corporate counterintelligence.)
“What did you say your name was?” he asked as we walked down the hall to his boss’s empty office.
Stan didn’t have my resume, my PHS or any information on my scientific background, the reason I was being interviewed, so he didn’t ask any questions, preferring instead to talk about himself.
How many scientists are currently working in the office, I finally asked.
“None,” said Stan. “That’s why we’re trying to look at some.”
The agency, Stan said, made up for this lack by sending analysts to seminars on topics the various departments may have to deal with, such as ballistic missile technology. Stan said he was glad he had finally learned what an accelerometer was and how integral design is to ballistic missile development.
I asked Stan about the polygraph screening and nature of the psychological testing.
He laughed nervously but said, “Everybody has to go through it and it’s not any fun. But security believes very strongly in it and the agency works hard to get candidates through the lie-detector. We allow them to take it three times.”
At the end of the interview, Maddie asked me to take some “stuff” over to the Stafford Building for her when I went there to collect travel expenses. A moment later she thought better of it, but supplied me with directions anyway.
Outside the Stafford Building later in the day were more harried smokers. Inside I asked for gas money ($20) and mileage. A CIA worker insisted that this be compared against the price of the lowest airline ticket from Philadelphia. I argued that this was ridiculous, to no avail.
As predicted, a telephone call to a CIA airline-ticket specialist came up with a figure far in excess of the gas money. The agent then gave me a little more than $200 of the taxpayer’s money, a generous per diem, and mileage allowance. The hotel room had been paid in advance.
A call to Maddie’s office a few days later elicited the information that there were no job openings and no hiring plans.
When I asked why, in that case, the testing and interviewing, no one had an answer except to say “the agency has to plan for every contingency.”
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