HALLIBURTON THEFTS - NEWS FROM AN X-CIA INSIDER (Updated May 29, 2008)
Introduction by Bob Chapman
International Forecaster
http://www.theinternationalforecaster.com/
A former high-ranking member of the CIA, now retired, who was a career employee, contacted us this week. Due to our reporting on Halliburton and their corruption we were given 46 pages of testimony on how Halliburton, the CIA, the Pentagon and Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld have been stealing billions of dollars. What we were presented will shortly be presented to Congressman Waxman’s Oversight and Reform Committee in the House. These pages of step-by-step criminal procedure are only part of a larger body of evidence being presented to Congress. What is presented is astounding in the scope of the crime and the billions of dollars being stolen by these criminals.
The text is raw copy never seen by the public previously. This is a long read, but it shows the depth of the official corruption within our government.
It is our desire that as many Americans as possible read this report. It is devastating.
The writer worked under Porter Goss until August 2004. V.P. Cheney forced Tenet out of the Agency and later this writer. The writer says Tenet was framed by Goss and Cheney.
We have not edited any of the text. It would be presumptions of us to do so.
The writer was assigned the rank of a Two-Star General when lent to the Pentagon by the CIA.
Introduction By Sue Arrigo
http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=137&contentid=5153
I collected intelligence in
On orders of my boss, DCI George Tenet, on Aug. 2001 I collected a moving van full of Pentagon documents showing Defense Contractor kickbacks to Pentagon officials. I removed them from the Pentagon and they were driven to the CIA. It took me about 10 days of time to get the Pentagon people to turn those documents over to me en masse. The ethical intelligence methods I used to do so are beyond the scope of this text. Alas, the CIA's intention turned out not to be to expose and correct the corruption, but to cover it up---as judged by later events.
Clearly I did not have time to read all of those documents in one week. My job was not to evaluate those documents and address the corruption, it was to run a "counter-intelligence" type of op to collect them. However, I did become aware of the depth of corruption during the course of the week and did read some of them. It is amazing what ended up in print because people in the Pentagon felt so immune from prosecution, esp. under Bush in the White House.
The main reason for collecting those documents, I believe in retrospect, was to allow CIA analysts to evaluate how to take business away from other US Defense Contractors and give it to Halliburton and Carlyle-related contractors. The mood at the CIA and Pentagon was "war is coming" because the Bush Family stands to make billions from it--so get ready. I did come across reports later which confirmed that the documents had been used in that fashion. That is, they were used to blackmail Pentagon officials into 'working on' the Halliburton-Carlyle team, or to judge how much to bribe them to switch to that team. So, on later reflection, I am afraid that my actions led to worse, not less, corruption. Certainly that corruption was not in the interests of the
I want to mention a conversation that I had with DCI Tenet after giving him these documents. The moving van full of them had just arrived at the CIA's headquarters in
As to the corruption that I came across at the Pentagon in Aug. 2001, I want to say a few words before going on to corruption in the
Case 1: The Ordering of Unneeded New Models of Fighter Planes
This case has to do with a particular kickback scheme that I read three Pentagon documents on. It involved an Air Force general on the JCS and a Defense Contractor, Boeing. He was due to discuss the Air Force's needs for new fighter planes at an upcoming JCS meeting. I went to talk to him after reading the three documents and asked him to recuse himself from giving that presentation. He refused. I then went to the Head of the JCS, General Shelton, and asked him to appoint someone else to give that presentation. It should be remembered that I had no mandate to address the corruption that I came across. I did not initially bring forward the documents when I made the request, but when he refused then I did show him the documents to make my point. He still refused to make the change.
I later discovered when back at the CIA that the Air Force General had gone ahead and made that presentation. From within the CIA I verified that he did receive the payment from Boeing that one of the documents had set forth in black and white. I reported that at the time to the Pentagon criminal investigation unit. It was rather like reporting it to the fox guarding the chicken coop. I then reported it to my boss Tenet after the Pentagon's investigation unit did not act on it to my satisfaction. That is, I found out that they had done precisely nothing with my complaint. But nothing happened as a result of my reporting it to Tenet either.
I then reported it to the GAO on a form designed rather for other problems it seemed to me--but that was the form that they insisted was the correct one. A man from the GAO did come out to the CIA and take down my complaint in person. He seemed to be sincere and thorough. I did read the report that he later wrote after he went out to the Pentagon to investigate. That report confirmed what I had said and gave an estimated amount for the amount lost to the
It did not however address the larger issue of whether those new generation planes were needed. The old planes were much, much cheaper and worked fine for their purposes. The new planes were untested and the new features seemed unnecessary to me--it was not as if we were going to be fighting the Russians and what we had was good enough to fight them anyway. Several Air Force Generals I called up on the phone to get their opinion agreed with me.
Later, I ended up on the JCS meetings myself in Oct. 2003. There was that same high ranking Air Force General still there in the JCS. He knew that I had tried to get him in trouble and he tried to get back at me in a great variety of ways. At one point he circulated the rumor that I was a lesbian--I had to laugh at that one. When I confronted him teasingly about it, he did not deny it. Had I actually been a lesbian his malicious rumor might have caused me grief. Later, he tried to pin a corruption scheme on me that I had nothing to do with but my boss at the CIA had not prevented, investigated, or stopped it.
While I was at a JSC meeting in early 2004, that same Air Force General had the gall to try to force through another unneeded plane contract for Boeing. I stood up at the meeting and said that the previous new plane had still not been delivered as it did not meet the specifications of the order and here he was trying to force the
I then went to the trouble of finding out how much each Pentagon official got paid in kickbacks on that new order. It averaged $22,000 for each vote at that Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting according to their bank accounts. These were not their regular
End of Case 1
Case 2: Halliburton Delivers Half Full Cartons to the Swing Shift
Roughly 7 of the Pentagon documents that I had collected over the 10 days dealt with this same scam. I had set aside some to read back at the CIA. It was not until I read the 4th one on this topic that I started to have a clear idea of what the full scam entailed. That was true of much of the van load of documents; an individual document was often not very incriminating. It appeared that the duty roster at the Pentagon was being rigged to ensure that only corrupt personnel would be on duty at certain times. That way not everyone in the receiving dept. had to be bribed or coerced. It was only the swing shift with its fewer numbers of personnel who were on the take. The scam ensured that other personnel never got assigned that shift in the Receiving Dept.
When I figured that out I immediately tried to get on that shift in the Receiving Dept. under an alias to see what would happen. It was not hard for me within the CIA to make up the alias and a military background and get it assigned to the Receiving Dept.. I then put in a sick notice to say that that alias had a daytime physician's appointment and would be reporting for its first duty at the Pentagon on the swing shift. Immediately upon getting that communication at the Receiving Dept., its duty officer sent off emails to 3 other people in the Pentagon asking them what to do.
One of those people was in Rumsfeld's office. That person emailed back and told the duty officer to give the incoming man the day off and start him on the day shift the next day. The duty officer did not write back to that man. He complained in other email to one of the other 2 he had contacted that he needed the body to move boxes. One of them asked him if there was a position that he could be put in to ensure that he did not "wise up". The duty officer did not reply promptly. He waited several hours between reading that message while sending out many other messages before he replied. Then he said that the man had already arrived, which was not true, and that he would give him the least chance to 'correct his understanding'. That official took it as a fait accompli and apparently took no further steps. That man I was later able to show was taking bribes from Halliburton as I will discuss below. He worked in the Pentagon at a job that had nothing directly to do with the Receiving Dept. The third man he had emailed was his supervisor in the Receiving Dept., the regular daytime head of it. That man was driving home when the first message was sent to him. He did not read it until the next day by which time the problem of the uncorrupted man showing up had evaporated. The next message I sent was just after the swing shift started. It regretted to inform them that the incoming man had been hospitalized until further notice.
At that point I was still reading the documents and drawing my own conclusions from them by reading between the lines. I thus initiated the next test of my understanding during that same swing shift. In this case, I sent an email to that same duty officer pretending to be a Halliburton employee. Since I had read his usual traffic in emails, I knew what he expected from Halliburton's shipping people. My email informed him that the shipment was delayed and gave a specific order number. I used a number from an order that I had reason to believe was crooked. The packing weight on it seemed too low for the goods that were listed on the invoice. I did not say how long the delay would be for sure but I hinted that it might not arrive until the morning. That triggered not 3 emails by the duty officer but 6! I was quite surprised by that. The goods were not perishable, they were military. It should not have mattered that they would arrive on the next day shift---except if they were missing part of the order! Again, one of the emails was to Rumsfeld’s office and got an immediate reply. That surprised me as it was after hours about 9 pm. This was not a military emergency--this was a delayed carton. The reply from Rumsfeld's office was that he should send a courier out to intercept the delayed carton or wait himself until it arrived and sign it in and deal with it himself, even if he had to wait until morning. The duty officer apparently had done the overtime many times before and was tired of it. In one of the six emails he sent he complained bitterly that the work was taking over his life and he was getting no sleep. I want to talk about other emails first before saying more about that one.
One of the 6 emails was again to the Halliburton bribed Pentagon official. He replied from his home. He advised that the duty officer call Halliburton and see if the carton had actually left its shipping office yet and ask them to send it a day later. He suggested that the Halliburton people in the shipping office sometimes said a shipment was delayed in shipping when in fact it was delayed in their office. The duty officer did not reply to that email. He complained, in the previously mentioned email about lack of sleep, that the people were always giving him the same meaningless advice. His email to the day time Head of the Receiving asking him if he could just set aside the carton until the next swing shift did not get a reply. The next three emails were to other receivers asking them if they could come in and work that night shift or the next day shift instead of coming in on the next swing shift. There were no immediate replies to those even though they had his tales of woe and lack of sleep in them. The carton did arrive, not unduly late, and that resolved that problem that night. But I had a lot of evidence.
By morning I had one additional piece of evidence; my boss Tenet asked me to stop looking into corruption at the Pentagon's Receiving Dept.. I had not told him that I was looking at that. That meant someone else had advised him that I was and had asked it to stop. I then set out to figure out who that was and why. It did not take me long to figure it out. I sent an email to a co-worker laying out what I had found and that I had been called off looking into why the military was having trouble getting supplies to the troops on time. I had never been given that assignment, but I had been called off investigating this receiving problem and by then I knew that the two problems were related from the documents. The word Halliburton was in my email. Shortly after I sent that email a CIA official knocked on my office door. That was unusual as there was bold black lettering on the door that no one should knock without the permission of the DCI. That notice was put up by Tenet because he was tired of people taking up my time. He wanted it all to himself and his chores. The man then barged in without waiting for a reply from me and stated loudly that I had been called off looking into supply problems at the Pentagon, not supply problems to the troops. Since the person I had emailed was in the next office, presumably it was for their ears that he was speaking so loudly. He then shut the door and walked off, again without waiting for a reply from me. That man was indeed someone I recognized.
At the CIA we jokingly called him "Halliburton's Representative to the CIA". Like his counterpart at the Pentagon he handled all of the delivery problems for Halliburton products arriving at the CIA. He was paid by a federal salary, just like that Pentagon man. But after looking into their backgrounds I could find no evidence that either had been hired by the CIA or the military through their personnel depts. Neither had done military training or trained at "the Farm" as a spy. The more I looked into that, which I had not been called off of, the more curious it became.
Finally one day months later I knocked on the "Halliburton's Representative to the CIA" 's office door. I was surprised when it opened to find not the office of a single man but a whole section of offices. I had worked at the CIA for over 30 years and thought I knew it inside and out. But a new section had been added onto the other side of that door. Over 40 people worked in it and they were all working for Halliburton while being paid by the
I immediately reported it to Tenet and he said, "Yes, I know."
I checked with the Head of CIA building security and he admitted that he knew too. I asked him what he was going to do about it. He said "Keep my mouth shut so I can stay alive and I suggest you do the same." That sounded like a threat to me, even though indirectly worded. I asked him who would kill me if I talked about it. He hemmed and hawed a bit. I asked him if he would try to kill me if I talked about it. He said no but others would. I went fishing and asked, "Do you think Halliburton will kill me for it?" He didn't say. Then I asked "Will the CIA?" He said, "Not likely, you are inside the CIA." Then I asked "CACI?" At that he agreed that they would likely try in defense of their sister enterprise Halliburton. I asked him if CACI had their own back door into the CIA that I should be afraid of them while I was inside the CIA. He acknowledged that they did.
Now back to my knocking on the Halliburton company offices at the CIA. A security guard immediately asked me for my Halliburton ID. When I did not have one, he asked me if I had an appointment to see someone. I mentioned the name of the man who knocked on my door and that man came out to greet me. He invited me into his office. The furniture in it was better than the DCI had upstairs though this was on the ground floor. We chit chatted a few minutes and then I got down to business. I asked him if Halliburton intended to short the troops on their supplies on purpose or was incompetent. By then I had the evidence in my office that Halliburton was shipping only half of the invoice contents in many of its cartons. That was true in the war zones as well. It had set up the same corrupt system of swing shift receivers on at least 3 continents. They received the cartons and signed that the goods were all received properly. Then the shortages later were chalked up to thefts or war damage, etc. He looked at me awhile before he replied. Then he said, "I know nothing about it". I then laid copies of some of the documents that I had on his desk that proved that Halliburton was doing that. He said he would look into it and called security to usher me out of the office.
Later that day, (it was after Christmas in 2001) I reported to Tenet that I had found evidence that Halliburton was short shipping to the Pentagon and war zones. He at first said, "That is nothing new." And then realizing that he had just admitted knowing about it without correcting it said, "Have a report about it on my desk before Christmas." He had been saying that probably for weeks and now under the stress of my asking him about this corruption, automatically repeated that comment. Christmas had passed about 3 days before at the very least. When he caught his mistake a moment later, he said "I just can't get rid of that problem." I then asked him what he had tried to do about it. He did not reply. Instead he sent me to speak to another man he said that he had put to work on the problem.
Yes, you guessed it--he sent me to speak to "Halliburton's Representative to the CIA". I had just come from his office that morning and I said so. Tenet played ignorant of the fact that the man worked for Halliburton. I reminded Tenet that I had been asked to show my Halliburton ID to even get to his office. He offered to call down there to make sure I could get in when I went. I told him that it was his responsibility to correct Halliburton's short shipping and its invasion of the CIA, not Halliburton’s. He said that he couldn't because his "hands were tied behind his back" by the White House. I made a mock walk around to the other side of him to look for his hands tied behind him and said "That is not what I see." He said "There is nothing I can do about it." I picked up his phone and handed it to him and said, "You can start by calling Congress, the FBI, and the New York Times. They would believe you, if you did so." He declined to make those calls. I told him that the head of the CIA should be a man of courage. But he never did make the calls.
I went to my office and started making calls. First I faxed the documents I had over to the GAO. I needed to have copies of them outside of my office before it got raided. They were not national security secrets, they were Halliburton short shipping papers. One of them was even a memo on Halliburton stationery discussing the short shipping policy and how well it was working to make profits for the company. It appeared that each time they got a call complaining that an order was short or missing that they considered it another new order. I say that because the documents I had showed that they created a new order number that did not refer back to the order number of the missing goods or mention that any goods had been missing. In that way they never lost by having to make good for the part of an order that was missing. When I called the GAO to make sure that they received the documents they checked them carefully to make sure that they were all legible. There were over 100 pages of documents and it took them awhile. After they finished they agreed to look for the GAO investigator who had come out to speak to me before. But before they could get him on the phone to me, there was a knock at my door and in barged "Halliburton's Representative to the CIA". He yanked my phone out of the wall. Then he had his security guards ransack my office and take every shred of paper out of it. Then he had me bodily hauled off to a prison cell inside the Halliburton offices at the CIA. It was in the basement. There I was intimidated and my life was threatened. I wondered if it would be ended. It occurred to me that the CIA head of building security might not know that Halliburton had its own torturers and assassins. I decided to cooperate. I promised not to investigate Halliburton for the rest of the year. I figured I could keep my promise for the about 2 days left in the year. The date was probably Friday, Dec. 28, 2001, now that I look at a calendar. Somehow they accepted my promise and let me go.
I immediately went up to Tenet's office and complained and showed him the bruises that they had given me. He said, "There, there, everything will be all right in the morning." That was not true. Halliburton was still stealing the
I believe that the GAO still has the documents that I sent them buried in its files. They started an investigation into it and then it was "interrupted". But I believe that they are willing to go forward with the investigation now, if asked to. I believe that you’re asking them to do that would be enough to accomplish that. The GAO has done a lot of good work. You could write a letter to its Head and ask them to restart that investigation.
End of Case 2
Case 3: The White House Conspiracy to Cook the Books: Halliburton, Carlyle and the CIA
When I returned to the CIA in the New Year in 2002, I had to put my office back in order. As I did that I thought about what I had done wrong and decided to try not to end up with a stripped office the next time. So, I decided to tackle the problem from a different angle, one I hoped would be tamer. Thus, I went down to the "Halliburton's Representative to the CIA"'s office and profusely apologized to him. Then I did something that I knew Tenet would not like, I offered to give him some of my time. Tenet had not protected me from his apparent 'boss' judging by his behavior and the man's office furniture. So, I figured that I needed to kowtow to him appropriately on the surface. My offer would also get me inside of his office with a Halliburton security clearance. He accepted my offer of 10 hours a week of my time. Then I went and told Tenet. He was furious with me but he did not oppose it in any meaningful way. I did not get the title of Special Operations Advisor to the DCI by letting red tape and meaningless 'No's' stand in my way. It was a title I had been given just prior to the 1991 Iraq War and I had a lot of experience in getting past No.
My work for Halliburton ran only until late May 2002, about 4 and a half months. In that time I learned a very great deal about Halliburton and how it works. Thus, I find that it is unlikely that I can write it all down in less than a full length book and do it justice. But I still want to give some of the overview and highlights of what I learned.
First off, it was not true that Cheney stopped running Halliburton. That is a complete myth. He called in orders to the man I worked for almost every day and sometimes twice or more times a day. He remained the functional head of it in all but name. No one at Halliburton had the power to override his orders.
Second, it is not true that he divested himself of the profits of the company. He merely hid how they got to him through a series of shell companies. Some call that "creative accounting" at the CIA. One of my jobs became to liaison between the Halliburton "creative accounting dept." and the CIA's "creative accounting dept." They had incompatible computer software. As I had overseen a software development change in the CIA's creative accounting computer, I was in the position to oversee the software development to make Halliburton's software compatible with it. I have a Master's Degree in Mathematics and advanced training in software to the extent of having written a compiler by myself. So, I am a person of many talents and have had many uses of them within the CIA.
In this context I want to mention that in 1983 the CIA sent me to investigate the NYPD Internal Affairs computer. The NY Police Dept. was alleging that they were unable to print out data that a regulator wanted to examine because the KGB had hacked into their computer. I was able to show that the KGB had not done that. The problem was that some people in the NYPD were corrupt and wanted to hide the data that would prove that. If you watch the movie based on a true story, Serpico, you will see that the NYPD was heavily on the take in at least certain years of its existence. That is just to say that I had some espionage grade experience in looking for corruption in computer files and software.
I only mention it in passing to assure you that no one at the CIA thought that it was inappropriate for me to be overseeing software development for the CIA or Halliburton's creative accounting computers. I thus had the opportunity to write software programs to answer some of the questions that I had. It was safer for me to investigate that way than by sending emails. Anyone can read and understand your emails with an unencryption program. Not anyone can understand your computer programs especially when you write them in a computer language extension that you create specifically for the task. When the consequences can be severe, it is worth some extra effort. I was able to run that software on both Halliburton's and the CIA's creative accounting computers. On the surface of events, I had offered to improve security of Halliburton's financial data and was doing so. But while one is doing so, one has to test the security of the data. And that means that one comes to understand how that security was set up and why it was set up that way. That depends on what a company needs to hide. And that depends on what they know they are doing illegally and who they think might be trying to uncover it.
Some schemes to hide that corruption are extremely clever. The CIA's library has a wealth of How-to books on the subject. And new methods are always being devised. The Halliburton and CIA software was incompatible because their software developers had used different ways of hiding the corruption that were incompatible. It was as if an axe murderer hid the axe under the woodpile to say he had not done it and his brother gave an alibi for him saying that he had been out chopping wood at the time. In this case, Halliburton's methods exposed the CIA's wrongdoing and Carlyle Industries at the same time. That was because Bushes had used the CIA's creative accounting theft methods. Bizarrely, the CIA's accounting methods caused no problem for Halliburton. It was because I was able to help the CIA by overseeing the making the two systems of cover-up compatible that Tenet was unable to object to losing my time. So, I became an expert in how the CIA and Halliburton decided to jointly cover-up their financial illegalities.
Defense contractors since before the Civil War have been padding their bills, delivering shoddy goods, under delivering, etc. The methods to cover it up are basically to say A=B when they do not equal each other in quantity, quality, longevity of usage, or cost. The ways of preventing others from uncovering that A and B are not equal is to use corrupt experts or others who 'certify' that A=B without letting the taxpayer see for themselves. The cure is transparency and letting everyone look at A and B and make the judgment. Computers are good ways to fool most people because most people are not willing to spend the time to "look inside of them". Computers can be made to print out one set of books for the regulators, another set for the Defense Contractors, another for the Pentagon, another for the taxpayer, ad infinitum. Really they are like black box voting. You tell them what you want them to say and they can print it out for you. But most criminals are not smart enough to know how to do it seamlessly. They are not technical and patient enough, so they have to rely on other people to do it. That means that their illegality is never 'secret'. The Clint Curtis testimony at Congressman Conyer's hearing in 2004 on hacking the vote showed that fatal flaw in the criminal's planning. Clint Curtis showed that it was possible to write self-destructing code to hack the vote; but it also showed that his having been asked to write it was not kept secret. Thus there are many, many people who wrote the software to cover-up the CIA's and Halliburton's dirty secrets. It takes a lot of people to write software. The CIA's creative accounting dept. had over a hundred of them, not all working at
The reason that I am pointing out that there are a lot of people in the know about Halliburton's corruption is that I think that that makes a difference in how this case is handled. This is not a murder case were the only person at the scene of the crime still living is the murderer. Of the 40 people working at the Halliburton offices at the CIA, about 8 of them were software programmers for their creative accounting computer on site. Halliburton's head offices employed many more of them. I was involved in conference calls with them in which 60 programmers were in the audience listening to the latest CIA plan of how to cover up the illegalities in the Halliburton computer. It was generally agreed that Halliburton did not have the expertise in cover-ups that the CIA had. Thus making the two systems compatible meant that Halliburton had to do 90% of the changing towards the CIA model of doing it. The CIA had to do the other 10% roughly. It was not quite that simple because there were many other third parties involved in the change including Swiss banks, other govts. and corporations. All told the process took a few years of full time work by over a hundred programmers. Not all of them were completely witting. But many were and a significant number of them no longer work for Halliburton or the CIA. Programmers change jobs readily. They are not like CIA operatives who can only work for one country after having invested a lot of time in training that cannot be transferred. Those programmers that leave take the strategies for covering up corruption with them elsewhere. No one at Halliburton recalled them and retrained them out of using their old methods. That means that they kept on making software at other companies that exposed the CIA's and Carlyle's financial crimes, if their excuses and records were compared with those. That means that the CIA's front companies, Carlyle, and the Bank of International Settlements in
That situation is worse than I have explained to you properly yet. There were many Defense Contractors who in secret made their own creative accounting cover up software. The CIA tried to get all of the Defense Contractors to come to a conference to upgrade to use methods which would be compatible with the CIA's and Halliburton's. That was after those 2 ironed out their differences. That conference was offered in early 2004; that is how long it took for the programmers to make a reasonable software merger. The conference had to be cancelled 'for lack of interest'. The Defense Contractors heard via the grapevine that many millions of dollars had to be spent to make their systems compatible and refused to come. I believe that no serious effort has been made since to make the systems not incriminate other companies when they print out a false set of books.
That means that investigators should take 3 or more separate investigations of companies that had business transactions and start comparing the books. The CIA in trying to get Defense Contractors to come to that conference put out all sorts of true information to frighten them into coming. That included the information that it had run tests of multiple companies books being compared and that even looking at one month of data was often enough to prove that the books were cooked. I was not directly involved in overseeing that project after the 4 months were up. I had left the CIA in late May 2002 and was not forced back into it until Oct. 2003. Even so, in early 2004 my opinion was sought on how to get ALL Defense Contractors to that conference. I thus had an opportunity to spend almost 2 days reviewing the tests that the CIA had done. Remember that it was the CIA and Carlyle Industries that could easily be exposed by simpler cover-up technologies so they had a lot of incentive to study the problem thoroughly. They found that even if they just focused on the Defense Contractors making 80% of the Defense dollars spent, they still had 24 different software cover-up schemes to make 'compatible'. When they looked at how to make themselves compatible with the top 90% of the Defense dollars that figure went from 24 to 134. They considered the cost not worth it to shepherd 134 companies through redeveloping their software. So, the conference they were intending to host just invited the top 80% dollar companies. They did not have to be making military products to have financial transactions and cover-up software that would prove the books of the CIA front companies were cooked. Even a company like Pepsi being investigated could cause them a problem, IF THE COOKED PRINT OUT WERE COMPARED IN DETAIL AT THE LEVEL OF A MONTH OF TRANSACTIONS. The CIA decided though to limit its invitations to actual military equipment makers! They did not even include the makers of torture equipment, civilian stun guns, and espionage bugging equipment. They were seriously betting on investigators not comparing the records of separately held companies.
That means a strategy for uncovering the proof of corruption at Carlyle Industries is for investigators to compare its books with companies that it had business with (outside of Halliburton and CIA fronts).
However, the CIA had also proven that there were computer book making scams which exposed Halliburton. That is like the mother of the murderer trying to give her son an alibi by saying that he is allergic to gas fumes so he wouldn't have gone into the victim's house. It still points to the axe in the wood pile. Plus it is not a very plausible alibi in the first place which is even worse. How did the mother know the victim used gas to heat with if her son had not been in the victim's house? Why did the son look to see what type of heating she had--was it to try to explode the house to cover up the crime, or was it another way that he thought of to kill her? Let me explain it now in terms of the computer software cover-up programs.
Suppose that Halliburton sold on its billing books a product=A in Lot Size=100, in Quantity=X at Price= Y to the Buyer=Pentagon on date=MM/DD/YYYY. Most invoices have all that data on them, IF THEY ARE CIVILIAN INVOICES. The Pentagon helps the Defense Contractors cheat by not requiring all of that information on their invoices. The price and lot size is often left off. The Quantity refers to the number of Lots in the box, not the number of Items in the box! That is to make it so that the average receiver cannot tell by looking at the contents of the box if it is all there. Instead they have to look at the side of the box which tells them how many lots it should contain. One can package the same gismos in clear plastic sacks in 1s, 2s, 3s, 10s, or 100s and the receiver will 'assume' that each plastic bag is a 'lot’s worth.
By leaving the price off the invoice the receiver is unable to judge easily on his experience of the price of goods whether a shipment is shorted by looking in the box. The CIA did an experiment in which it tested receivers at some of its front companies whether they knew the price of the goods going through their hands. It tested receivers who got accurate information on invoices, those that got artificially twice the price on them, and those that got half the price on them and those that got no price information at all. The results of the study showed that the receivers by the end of 3 months usually had a pretty accurate idea of the price of the military goods, even if the price was not marked on the invoices or boxes. They figured it out by talking to others including those who made the deliveries. They figured it out fastest and most accurately when the goods were overpriced. That was because they wanted to prove that those goods could not possibly cost that much. That was why the CIA switched to a different method from the most obvious one which is just to overcharge. That overcharge method was the one that had been favored by Halliburton originally. It is the one that most businesses try first and use until they are caught doing it and forced to stop. But no price information also incited the curiosity of receivers and although they learned the information the slowest of the groups, they did eventually have a pretty accurate idea of it. The strategy that caused the receivers to be the most inaccurate was to keep shifting the prices around like random noise; one day it costs 20 dollars, the next week 10 dollars, and the week after 30. That is what sales are designed to do---to confuse the consumer's price intuition. So, the CIA's front companies had gone to using that most sophisticated of the ways to throw the receivers off.
A company using the gross overcharge method caused the receivers to investigate and learn what the real price should have been and that undercut the CIA's method. This is just one example of the difference in strategy directly applied to the receivers. But one could apply that same idea in cooking the books. One could over-inflate the amount on a line of an accounting ledger, undercut it, omit the line, add a line, or vary the amounts on similar transactions. The CIA, as if it were a professional crime institution, had also studied how accountants catch on to the books being cooked. They had then studied how to print false books to try to prevent them from catching on. They concluded that varying the price randomly around the number that they wanted kept the accountants from seeing the patterns of the corruption as well. For example, if the accountant came to have a firm belief that 1 lot of Product A cost 200 dollars, then if a carton of A had a cost with a 300 at the end of the number, the accountant become suspicious that the lot sizes had been changed.
So here was the CIA varying the prices of the goods that its front companies sold almost every month. But suppose that it is selling those goods to Halliburton when it was using a cost inflation idea of cheating. Halliburton had an incentive to inflate the cost of its purchases in order to justify the high cost of what it sold to the military. So, it had been fairly standard practice for it to take the highest price that the CIA front company ever charged it for that product and put that on its books for regulators as its cost. Comparing the two sets of books then shows that there is a problem--in this case it looks like Halliburton is cheating.
So, Halliburton sometimes changed strategies to a more sophisticated way of cheating. That way of cheating took the real price that the CIA front company charged them for a product and doubled the charge on its books. It then thought it could claimed that the CIA front company had 'accidentally' only recorded exactly half of the charge. It figured that it could say that the front company had promised it a 50% discount but that it had never delivered on its promise. The CIA front company would then look bad for 'billing' Halliburton at the regular cost but pocketing half of the billed price into someone's pocket. The CIA creative accounting people did not like that plan. It was something that Halliburton had already done on multiple occasions. The CIA had lots of fronts with lots of customers and worse problems it wanted hide than merely jacking up prices. Some of its fronts were fictitious and made no products at all. Some of its fronts had some real customers and many fake customers in order to launder money. The CIA software people in the creative accounting dept. wanted to make the CIA's crimes 'undetectable'. The Halliburton people wanted just to 'sneak by' until caught.
End of Case 3
Case 4: Halliburton's Rigging a Back Door in the Pentagon Accounting Computer
Let me make things clearer with a real world example from early 2002. It was brought to my attention that Halliburton had already awakened the ire of a govt. investigator. We have already seen that Halliburton had already both over billed and short shipped. The buyer was the helpless taxpayer.
The investigator worked at the GAO and had access to both Halliburton's bills and the Pentagon's payment of those bills. But there was a problem. Those bills and the payments did not match up. In spite of the bills being grossly inflated in the first place, the payments exceeded the bills! That was not by a little, it was by about 35%!
The GAO investigator was the same man who had come to talk to me in my office. He remembered me and that I had tried to contact him at the end of 2001. So, he had asked to speak to me by calling the CIA. The CIA would not let my phone ring whenever he called. But by happenstance one of the many times he tried to call me I picked up the phone to try to call someone else. So, we connected. I agreed to meet with him outside of the CIA and later that same day we met at a restaurant in
He had with him copies of all of the materials that I had faxed over to him. He started by asking me questions on them and taking notes. He was particularly interested in documenting where I had picked up each document. Then he asked me what I knew of the Pentagon overpaying Halliburton. It had been 2 weeks since the CIA's creative accounting dept. alerted me to that problem. By then I knew a great deal about how that Pentagon over billing occurred.
Rumsfeld had let Halliburton set up offices inside the Pentagon just like Tenet had let them at the CIA. That was the result of secret executive orders signed by Bush, Jr.. I had by that time a copy of that executive order and handed it to the GAO investigator along with many other documents that I brought to that meeting. National security was being trashed by the Bush Administration and what I did had the potential to help restore national security. None of the documents would have helped the Russians, the Chinese, etc. wage war against us. I had had that independently verified by CIA analysts before I handed over those documents. Correcting the theft of funds would help
One of the documents that I handed over was the list of Halliburton personnel at the CIA and at the Pentagon. Their physical offices were together in each location with their own security personnel. I verified that with my own eyes the next time I had occasion to go to the Pentagon 20 minutes drive away. In addition, I handed over a document that listed their job title from their CIA or Pentagon badge application which is all that personnel in those locations had on them. Even a visitor to the CIA had to fill out such a form. The amount of checking on that person's background to get that badge is a call or fax to the FBI to make sure that they are not on a wanted list. The CIA also checks their name and Driver's license against its 'suspected foreign agents' and after 911 its 'suspected terrorists' list.
But no one called to verify that they were not felons who had served their time already. Thus, when I checked I found that "Halliburton's Representative to the CIA" who was then already my boss for 10 hours a week was a felon who had served time on a felony conviction of fraud. Not unsurprisingly then, one of the top men at Halliburton's Pentagon Suite was his partner in that crime who had also been convicted of a felony.
Their felony crime was stealing new vehicles bought by the US Army in large numbers while they were en route to be delivered to the Army. They had then been sold overseas and the profits pocketed.
His Pentagon badge listed him as an 'accountant'. I could find no evidence that he had been to business school unless one counted his jail time as that. His resume that I found elsewhere where he served as a board of Director on a company listed a business school during the time he spent in prison, about 4 years. I called up that business school and asked if they had a 'prison outreach program'. They said no. I asked them if they had a graduate by that name and they declined to comment. But when I faxed them a copy of the man's resume after a cover letter on CIA letterhead saying that he was posing as a graduate of their school they issued a denial that he had ever enrolled. I gave all those papers to the investigator.
Then I gave him the proof that Halliburton's CEO Cheney had known that they were felons by the fact that he had blocked a background check on them when they went to a White House function that he hosted.
In addition, I gave that investigator the proof in the form of several documents together which showed that this Halliburton felon posing as an accountant had caused the Pentagon to overpay Halliburton. I want to go through that evidence in more detail because it is instructive.
My memory might get some of the details wrong but the gist of what I say would be correct, according to the science of memory (See the book Memory, Trauma, and the Law by law professor Alan Scheflin).
The evidence that that Halliburton felon was the man responsible for the overpayments by the Pentagon was 4-fold.
First off, I had a memo from Cheney to him that was handwritten and addressed to him personally which directed him to "make sure that the Pentagon pays us all that it owes us and then some". The memo appeared to have been hand delivered. The CIA's forgery dept. verified the note as Cheney's handwriting and not a forgery. I try to do careful work. So their statement to that fact was a document that I handed over with the original of that memo.
The next piece of evidence was a letter sent by that felon to a friend and co-conspirator, in this case my Halliburton boss. In that letter he bragged "I am getting more than we bargained for out of the Pentagon". It went on to encourage him to meet with him to 'find out how'. I intercepted this letter before it got to my Halliburton boss, copied it and then put it onto his desk. I was thus witting to the fact that they were going to discuss that topic at their next meeting.
The third piece of evidence was a tape of their conversation at that meeting. On that tape the Pentagon felon bragged with delight about how gullible people were at the Pentagon. He spoke about his going into the Accounting Dept. of the Pentagon and making friends with some of them. He managed to bring his own programmer in to "check the bills from Halliburton" on the excuse that they had not been paid on time. Then his programmer had managed to insert code by calling up the Halliburton computer from the Pentagon's Accounting computer to "check if all the outstanding bills had been paid". That code put in a back door into the Pentagon's Accounting computer so that Halliburton could later change the amount that the Pentagon would pay whenever they wanted. The reason Halliburton had gotten caught was that someone forgot to change their billings up to what they had put in the Pentagon's computer.
The fourth piece of evidence that I gave him was my boss having one of his programmers insert that same code into the CIA's Accounting computer. I waited until he did it and then I collected the evidence, the code. The code from the CIA's Accounting computer with a couple of lines before and after it to show where it had been inserted was the fourth piece of evidence. That evidence was on a computer disc. I had one of the accounting people sign it as coming from their computer.
I had first taken all that evidence to my boss Tenet to give him a chance to correct the problem of Halliburton ripping off the American taxpayer via the CIA and Pentagon. He looked at the evidence and said, "Well, you certainly have done a thorough job as usual." Then he offered to send the evidence over to the White House to 'correct the problem'. I immediately picked up the evidence off his desk and walking out of his office said that I could do that myself. I did send a copy of the evidence to the White House. I did that after I met with the GAO official. The White House managed to block the investigation. But the evidence was not destroyed. Why have I waited all this time to tell others about that evidence until now? Because before I feared that the White House was strong enough to destroy the evidence.
I could go on about this case but without the evidence it is perhaps futile to do so. And with the evidence it is unnecessary. I thus hope that others with a stable address will write to the Head of the GAO and demand that this case be unblocked and prosecuted.
End of Case 4
(Submitted to the Committee on Saturday May 17th, 2008)
Case 5: Was Rumsfeld Criminally Negligent in Protecting US Troops and National Security?
This is another case that grew out of my moving documents from the Pentagon to the CIA on DCI Tenet's orders in Aug. 2001. The cases that I am giving you are not a complete set of those that I was involved in. But I am selecting them to give you as complete an understanding as this overview format can. This was a case that I started addressing while collecting the documents in Aug. 2001. It was brought to my attention by a Colonel at the Pentagon who handed me a stack of documents ON THE CONDITION THAT I WOULD READ THEM THAT NIGHT. It was a pretty big stack, over an inch high. It took me until 4 am in the morning before a had a firm grasp on the case he had handed me.
Since I was in an office at the Pentagon, it was easy for me to immediately start investigating it. The hour was late, but that was a good time to look for and collect the computer files and other documents that I wanted to go with the Colonel's documents.
By morning, I had had no sleep, but I had collected much evidence and laid it in the inbox the desk of the Pentagon's Criminal Investigation Unit's Head. The amount of evidence was over 2 inches high of documents and 4 computer discs, one of which was from the accounting office.
The Colonel who had handed me that case then spent all morning in that office giving that Head his eye-witness testimony on the case. That testimony covered only one fourth of the case, and I sent in another 3 Pentagon officials in the afternoon to flesh the rest of the case out. Having the rank of a 2-star general was essential to that effort. It would not have happened had I not out ranked the Head of the Criminal Investigation Unit at the Pentagon as he was loath to investigate. It would also not have happened had I not personally breathed down his neck repeatedly during the day by going in person to check how he was doing. Each time I came by I insisted that he give me a full briefing on his investigations so far. I did that 4 times over the course of the day.
I did not dictate the content of his investigation, but I did insist that he be vigorous in it. I mention this practical framework of the case because I am mainly interested in the larger issue that these cases were not getting resolved. Thus I have so far in this case given none of the specifics of the case to avoid distraction by them. The Colonel giving me the case had been to that Criminal Investigation Unit several times previously to file complaints. He was never satisfied that they were investigated. I was able to confirm that. Each time the investigations were dead ended. It was clear to me by the end of the day that the Criminal Investigation Unit of the Pentagon was professionally dedicated to covering up corruption, not investigating or correcting it. I later took some steps to make sure that that was not due to Russian, Chinese, or foreign interventions to harm US National Security. That I did have a mandate to do from the CIA wherever I went on assignment. That mandate had been put in place by an executive order of President Clinton. It was could not be over-ridden except by a duly elected President. Thus, I had some discretion to act outside of the direct orders of the Director of CIA, Tenet, or the Chief of the JCS. But I could not press that beyond the limits at which it would break due to political practices. In the process of that investigation of possible foreign influence behind the corruption, I ran across a wide-reaching high-level conspiracy to defraud the
The documents that the Colonel had handed me were on the development and purchasing of a new free-standing artillery unit. If you have not already seen the painfully funny movie/documentary, Pentagon Wars (1989) on the Pentagon's approval of the Bradley troop carrier, I recommend that you watch it. This case was remarkably similar. The weapon, a piece of artillery, did not work as well as an older brand and it was dangerous to use. Two men had died in the testing of it. But the Pentagon kept on ordering it. The Colonel knew that the problem had to be kickbacks as there was no other rational explanation of it. But without that proof the case was had been repeatedly closed as 'unfounded'. He did not have the espionage background needed to able to collect that evidence. As a result he was stymied.
By morning I had been able to lay financial transactions on the top of the inbox. They showed that at least 2 generals had accepted kickbacks straight into their
A CIA officer accepting that amount of money from the KGB or a foreign source would likely have had a bullet put through his body by the CIA, or been tried for treason. Yet, at the Pentagon these kinds of actions were largely tolerated, as if they did not undermine National Security. That was not at all the case. In order to fight a war effectively the equipment has to work and be safe to use. Selling a secret a foreign power might or might not make a difference in the outcome of a war; not having good equipment was sure to make a difference. In this case, the company making the artillery was a foreign one and the generals had been paid from a foreign bank. It certainly should have raised a red flag in anyone's mind. The CIA should have immediately been called in to investigate. But they had not been. Some months previously the Colonel had put in a complaint to Rumsfeld about the lack of investigation by the Pentagon's Criminal Investigation Unit on this case. In it he had cited the fact that the company making the artillery was a foreign one and raised the issue as to whether it was a deliberate attempt to sabotage US National Security by selling them 'worthless junk'. He had asked Rumsfeld refer the matter to the CIA. That had not happened.
By afternoon, I had the financial records to show that 5 generals had gotten large kickbacks from that foreign company in the week after the vote. In addition, I had the signed confession of one of those men. I did not use threats or torture to get it. I did use friendly persuasion. Not only did he confess, but he admitted in writing that there was a conspiracy to ensure that that group of generals got the kickbacks. They had met not just once, but at least twice to conspire on how to ensure that the order went through. Rumsfeld had cancelled a competing meeting that dealt with National Security issues without explanation. That allowed 2 further generals to attend the second meeting. There were 6 generals at that second meeting, if I remember correctly. The next day they quietly resigned in the face of the investigation. One of them told me privately but refused to put it in writing that Rumsfeld had cancelled the competing meeting 'in order for us to organize and get that artillery approved' for Pentagon purchasing.
The next day, that Colonel brought me 10 similar cases, since I had solved that one to his satisfaction. It was my last day at the Pentagon on the assignment to pick up the documents Tenet ordered I collect. I did not have time while at the Pentagon to solve them, so I undertook to mentor the Colonel in how to collect the evidence of bribes. During the course of that day he managed to collect evidence well enough to resolve one of those ten cases ad hoc. The guilty party also quietly resigned. He had also been bribed by a foreign company. At least in that case the product worked. It was not a case of the Pentagon ordering the product. It was a case of the guilty party selling them on the black market from his office inside the Pentagon to other Pentagon officials.
The product was a foreign lap-top computer. Military secrets were almost sure to be put on them given the location that they were sold on. They had not been vetted by the Pentagon to ensure that they did not have a back door on them to transmit information back to that country. They were popular at the Pentagon for their advanced conference video call capacities. I took one of them back to the CIA with me where it was verified that the laptop did have the function of acting like an advanced bug to steal files, audio, and photographic images. The optics on it were advanced enough to read documents off the desk of and wall behind the user! It automatically turned itself on and focused on text. Even before I verified that the laptop had been designed to steal military secrets, it was clear from the outer circumstances that that was likely to be the case. Otherwise, why not sell it in some other location? The laptop cost a lot more with those advanced spy systems on it then a regular user could afford. That was why it was only offered for sale inside the Pentagon--the foreign country was paying so that it could be sold very cheaply and out compete other laptops at the Pentagon. About 500 of those laptops had already been sold at the Pentagon. The Colonel had pressed the Criminal Investigation Unit to investigate those black market sales. They had not, nor had the matter been referred to the CIA for investigation.
The Criminal Investigation Unit was not willing to press charges even after being presented with the evidence that the Pentagon official had taken a foreign bribe! I could not press the issue any further because Rumsfeld had over ruled me. He had already sent the Head of the JCS down to the Criminal Investigation Unit's Head to tell him not to prosecute the 6 Generals. I had called Rumsfeld while he was in his office to protest that--he refused to take my call. Rumsfeld nixed prosecution of our cases but we still managed to get the resignations. Rumsfeld blocking the prosecutions gave an ongoing green light to corruption at the Pentagon.
I did collect the evidence that Rumsfeld sent General Shelton, Chief of the JCS down to prevent the prosecution of the 6 generals. I collected a copy of Rumsfeld's phone call to
In addition, I collected evidence that that Head of Criminal Investigations had not prosecuted a number of other corruption cases in which the evidence of guilt was abundant and solid. Furthermore, I had collected a van load of corruption related documents which proved that corruption was wide spread at the Pentagon. My orders from Tenet were to deliver those documents to the CIA. There was nothing in those orders that prevented me from Xeroxing as many of them as I could without delaying that delivery past the time that Tenet had requested delivery.
I had been in the espionage business collecting documents for over thirty years. When doing so will aid National Security, one has a duty to collect them and try to deal with them in a way that accomplishes that goal. It should therefore not surprise anyone, that I had ALL of them Xeroxed during the course of the 10 days that they were collected. That is, although it was clear to me that I could not get the corruption appropriately dealt with at the Pentagon, I still had hopes to one day be able to somehow succeed.
There were a number of moving vans removing documents from the Pentagon on that day. I had already stated that this was only one of three categories that Tenet ordered me to collect. I thus had the cover to load one van full of the copies of the corruption documents. The question was where to send it to get the corruption cases prosecuted. I did not have a good answer to that. I sent it to an Army base where I trusted the integrity of the commander to secure it, until I did have a good answer. I believe it is still intact at that Army base.
The cases, many of them, have grown old. But as I looked into the matter of how to get them prosecuted, the facts were not encouraging. The White House was against it. My boss Tenet was against it. Rumsfeld was against it. The Head of the JCS was against it and the later replacement not for it either. The Justice Dept. had not investigated the obvious Halliburton corruption and put them out of business and some of their personnel in prison, as it should have on the evidence. In short, there was no mechanism by which to get them prosecuted because the corruption was being protected from the top.
That dismal state of affairs is barely better today than it was in Aug. 2001. So, why bring any of these cases to your attention at all? I believe that that state of affairs will change soon. I have hope that the
I have no doubt that when the legal system starts to prosecute corruption appropriately, that the Commander of that
Because I wanted to make progress towards a day in which those cases would be handled appropriately, I handed the evidence over on Rumsfeld blocking the investigations. Before I left the Pentagon I sent that evidence by courier to the Director of the FBI. Rumsfeld's corruption was happening in the
That artillery case should still exist in the files of the Pentagon. That case is relevant evidence in the larger case of whether the US Administration is criminally negligent in not prosecuting corruption cases. I allege that it is and that its failure to do so has led to the death of US troops from faulty and shoddy equipment. The two men who died in the testing of that artillery should not have died. Earlier tests of the artillery had shown that it 'jumped' to the left when fired nearly 20% of the time. It was a very heavy piece of equipment. On the earlier tests it had injured about 25 men and sent a handful of them to the hospital. When the heavy gun jumped as the man looked through the sighting, it had caused brain concussions and knocked men unconscious. Other serious injuries were the result of the artillery falling over onto the person firing it. In one of those incidents the artillery had caused massive hemorrhaging into the soft tissue of the leg. The man had had to be hospitalized. If I remember correctly, he had had to undergo emergency surgery to repair a rupture to his femoral artery. That crush injury to his artery was so severe that in the medical report I read the surgeons had considered amputating the leg.
Engineers evaluated the artillery and decreed it 'unsound'. They cited that it was poorly designed and poorly manufactured. It was made in a foreign country where manufacturing processes were substandard as a general rule. They had written that the artillery was unstable on its base even when not being fired. And speculated that it jumped to the left because the quality control at the factory was so poor that the bore was not straight. There was not a single reason, not even a cheap price, to recommend it for purchase by the Pentagon based on the objective evidence that I read.
Yet the tests of it were continued even after it was clear that it was shoddy equipment and unsafe. That happened because obvious corruption was not corrected.
Up to this point in this case, I have omitted all the defining details of those two combined cases in which it was clear that Rumsfeld should have referred to the CIA for investigation and should have had prosecuted for corruption. Now I will fill in some of those details.
The maker of the artillery was part of the Carlyle Group. That was a clear conflict of interest for a sitting President to be making money off of weapons that they were being sold to the Pentagon. It was not until I returned to the CIA that I was able to confirm that the US Administration was making money off the sale of that artillery. The money made from the sales of the artillery did have a pathway to the Bush accounts. It took me longer to collect the banking records which linked the sale of the weapons to the Pentagon to the exact payment amount into the Bush accounts. It was while I was writing software to query the CIA's creative accounting computer that I came across the transactions. CIA shell companies were used to hide the funneling of the money from the artillery manufacturer to Bush's accounts. 9.6% of the Pentagon's payment for the artillery ended up in Mr. Bush's private accounts. About 2.4% ended up in Rumsfeld's account.
Rumsfeld had, according to the Pentagon documents I later obtained, taken several steps that indicated that he endangered the men's lives wittingly. His signature was on a memo that directed many more of the artillery ordered and 'retested' even though one man had already died from being crushed beneath it when it jumped to the left. If I remember correctly, the number ordered was 1,000. It certainly seemed excessive for testing purposes, given that nearly 20% of the previous batch had "jumped' to the left. The sight for the artillery was on the left so there was no way to reasonably fire it without being at risk of bodily harm.
It was clear that Rumsfeld already knew about the first death; he had signed a previous memo ordering people not to talk about it. In addition, he had taken steps to ensure that the first death was not properly investigated. I had been told by a Pentagon official who overheard it that Rumsfeld had told a member of his staff to list the death as an "off duty" death. The official was one of the three I sent in the afternoon to give his statement. Further proof of that was that the form was signed by a member of Rumsfeld's office. Normally, that form should have been signed by the dead soldier's commanding officer. Rumsfeld had the power to override that standard operating procedure, but his staffer signing that form did not. Since that form should have been signed by a Commanding Officer and the staffer was not one, it appeared that Rumsfeld did not sign it in order to avoid having his name attached to that blatant lie. When I checked the death certificate it listed the cause of death as MVA for Motor Vehicle accident. Yet, many military officers had been at the test and in the record of the test they had written that this man had been crushed under the artillery piece. It also recorded that he had been sent to the hospital. I verified that the hospital received him from the ambulance shortly after the test and that he died at the hospital soon thereafter. The Death Certificate appeared to be a forgery or faked as it was dated 2 days after the hospital records showed that he died. Also I could not find a physician by the name of the signer of the death certificate at that hospital. There was a physician by that name in the
Another of the three Pentagon officials I sent in the afternoon had been an eye-witness to the tests and the injury of both men who died. The last of the three had written the report on the artillery being unsafe prior to the death of either man.
The artillery was manufactured by a Saudi Arabian company with close business ties to the Bush Family. They were having financial trouble because they could not find a market for their products. Their products had a bad reputation in the Defense Industry. A video clip I watched at the CIA which showed their table set up at an outdoor Defense Contractor's Weapon Expo in
I allege that Rumsfeld knew the poor reputation of this company when he placed the order for about 1,000 more of the artillery. The Pentagon keeps lists of its preferred companies and companies to avoid purchasing from. That company was on the Pentagon's list to avoid. Rumsfeld had to sign a 'waiver' in order to make that purchase of the artillery that killed that second man. That, in my opinion, was criminal negligence. And it was criminal negligence in which he personally took a kickback.
As to the laptop case, the company making it was Japanese. I believe that the motivation was not to undermine US National Security but for the purposes of industrial espionage--to best position them to sell computer and electronic products to the Pentagon. But I cannot prove that. The case is quite troubling in light of the violation of US National Security. Rumsfeld, by not investigating and prosecuting corruption cases, left the Pentagon open to any agent of a foreign power with money in their pocket. Thus his actions which disabled US National Security in practice had both active and passive components.
Nations fall easily due to corruption from within. Without corruption from within, they are hard to defeat even in battle. With corruption within, often no battle is needed to take them over. Corruption is an extremely serious violation of National Security as this combined case shows.
I did brief my boss DCI Tenet on my findings above after I had determined their National Security implications. He showed no great interest in my presentation and rushed off in the middle of it. He twice declined my invitation to reschedule that briefing. It was clear that he had no intention of seriously trying to correct the problems even as related to the foreign penetration problems at the Pentagon.
End of Case 5
(Submitted to the
Case 6: Toasters, Traitors, and the Criminal's Hideout
Because I did not do a good enough job of explaining the software methods to cover-up how computer can 'cook the books', I find that I have to write down more cases to give you a full understanding. The cases are interesting and relevant, so that is not the problem.
[Note: the first part of this case presentation appears not to be relevant to the corruption cases, but will later be shown to be. So, please bear with me.]
This case came to my attention during about May 2002. At that time, I was overseeing the software development in Case 3 in order to learn how to expose these cases later. I was in my office when "Halliburton's Representative to the CIA", call him HallCIA for short, barged into my office without even knocking. I automatically moved my phone cord out of his easy reach his time. He sat down in a chair and launched into a long rambling semi-incoherent description of his latest Halliburton problem. Frankly, I thought he was on drugs. It was my medical opinion as well. I told him that I would look into the matter and politely asked him to send his head programmer up to give me a 'fuller explanation in technical terms'. He became enraged at the implication that his explanation was unclear and tore my door off its hinges and left a hole in my wall with his fist. Fortunately, I managed to duck and dodge the blows that he rained down in my direction. Had his coordination not been thrown off drugs, he certainly would have managed to have his fists make contact with my body. He made such noise with yelling that the building security people of the CIA showed up promptly. They apologized for him saying "He sometimes gets like this" and "There is nothing we can do about it". I was busy with pressing intelligence matters and it was afternoon before the head programmer came up to my office.
In the meantime I had filed a charge of attempted assault against my Halliburton boss with the CIA security office, told Tenet in person the problem and showed him the considerable damage to my office. The CIA security people took photos of that damage. I had also faxed in a complaint to the nearest FBI station on the attempted assault charge. That had taken up almost all of the intervening time of about 3 hours. Thus, an official from the FBI called me shortly into my discussion with the Head Programmer. The FBI man asked me why I believed that the assailant was on drugs. I listed his dilated pupils, his change in gait and his in-coordination as well as his sudden violent behavior without provocation. The Head programmer then asked to speak to the FBI official and gave many more reasons to believe that his boss was on drugs. Those reasons included seeing him take them by mouth before his "erratic episodes" and brag about his ability to take drugs without it affecting his behavior. The FBI official then mentioned that the assailant had a previous record for assault with a deadly weapon. He warned me to 'stay out of the man's way'. I explained that he was my boss and the FBI official recommended immediately leaving my workplace until the assailant was arrested. He recommended that to the programmer as well since the assailant might retaliate for his giving information to the FBI. Thus it was that we moved our meeting to outside of the CIA and continued it at a local restaurant. It was about 2:30 pm and the restaurant was essentially empty. Our section of it was isolated from prying ears.
The Head programmer then proceeded to lay out the case in a way that I could understand it. One of Halliburton's subsidiaries, in so much as it carried a different name, had made "a big mistake". Instead of overcharging by a factor of 10 like it was supposed to, it had overcharged by a factor of 100. This is similar to other known cases where the Pentagon was charged and paid $200 for a wrench, etc. That "big mistake" had brought it to the attention of an official at the Pentagon responsible for fighting fraud. Halliburton now wanted a 'quick fix', a cooking of the books. They wanted make it look like that product had cost to produce it at least 50% of that charged price. The item was a small appliance, a toaster. It should have cost under $20 dollars on the open market, but Halliburton had charged almost $2,000 for each one. And it was a big number of them in the order so Halliburton had netted about $1.2 million from picking them up cheap at a discount appliance warehouse. They had not even made the item. It was worse than that. They had 'fenced' the items--they were stolen. They had no bill of sale for them and did not even order the parts they went into the manufacturing of them. They had raided the discount appliance warehouse pretending that they were FBI officials and the toasters had to be picked up because "they caused house fires".
Ok, now you begin to see why the first part of the story was relevant. The whole case was like a drug-crazed crime caper.
I had not known that Halliburton had impersonated FBI officials in another state when I was on the phone to them. But the Head Programmer had and he had decided that he had to report his boss's drug use so that the FBI did not come after him later. That did not quite make sense to me. I felt like I had fallen into
Meanwhile, they had set up to arrest my Halliburton boss when he returned to his house. Then suddenly while I was still in their office they got a call to release the programmer and call off their investigations. That included not arresting my Halliburton boss for the attempted assault. They were absolutely floored. I asked them who had ordered them to back off. They said it was the Deputy Director of the FBI. I asked to use their phone. They handed it to me. I then called the Director of the FBI. It was Mueller by then and I knew him well enough to get through. I asked him in a non-judgmental tone why he was calling off the arrest of the man who had assaulted me in the past and tried to do so again that morning. He said he hadn't done that. Then later in the conversation he realized the convergence of the two cases and realized that he had called off all FBI action against that known felon. He also realized that it would look bad if it hit the press. He asked me "Are you going to go to the Press about this?" I replied "It looks like I will have to in order to get justice served." He said, "Give me your number, I will call you right back." I told him at that point that I was sitting in an FBI office and had just explained to two of them that Halliburton impersonated FBI officials to pull a heist of toasters. He laughed. Then he asked the names of the FBI men at my location. He asked for the exact spelling. It appeared that he ran a check on them of some kind. I feared that he was checking to see if they were on the take enough to be able to order their silence in the matter. He called back about 15 minutes later. He said, "Sorry, orders from above. It has to be this way. No arrests of those 2--ever." I was shocked and said, "So, you are just going to let this man kill me next time." He said he would have to call me back. He never did!
I did not go back to my office that day until after hours and after I had verified that HallCIA had already gone home. I had to wait until after 7 pm. That put me seriously behind schedule on an important mole case. That had the strong potential to effect National Security--the mole was inside the CIA from an "unfriendly country". I was not happy about that delay---so many hours of my day had been wasted by Halliburton being inside the CIA where it did not belong and did not behave itself. Really, it was worse than having that unfriendly mole in the CIA. But I needed to work on the mole problem so I got down to work on it.
Shortly thereafter that Head programmer showed up inside my office without knocking. I still had no door. He thanked me for getting him out of jail. I admitted that it wasn't me and it appeared to be the White House. He said "That figures". He then explained to me that the FBI had been after him off and on for about 4 years and that joining Halliburton was the only thing that worked to stop them. He said that he had killed a man and that 'it looked real bad afterwards'. He had apparently dismembered the man and left the pieces laying around at the scene of the crime. He said he asked to be transferred to the CIA's section of Halliburton after he heard it opened. He hoped that he would learn how 'to clean up better next time".
I told him that I was very busy and that he would have to manage the Halliburton mess by himself without me. He left and I got back to work on the mole case. But about an hour later Tenet called and ordered me to go help the programmer. I reminded him of the mole case and how the mole was stealing CIA documents every day as he left the building. He did not care enough to change the order. I reminded him that Halliburton had already eaten up more than 10 hours of my time already that week. He still did not budge. Nothing worked.
I ended up staying up all night and half way into the afternoon down at the Halliburton's creative accounting computer. I procured and fed coffee and donuts to the programmers and made sure that they did not fall asleep. I also had them each give me briefings on what they were doing. In that way I learned a lot and performed my role of overseer up to people's expectations without having to add any illegal advice. It is very hard to keep your nose clean in this business. But with tremendous effort one can do better than most people at it.
The stolen toasters were among the cheapest models in the industry. They did not even have a dial to set how browned you wanted the bread. They did not have a way to adjust the width of the slice it would accept. The slot was big enough but the metal holder for the bread would only accept the thinnest slices. I know because I asked for one to be sent by courier and it arrived in the middle of the night. The programmers groaned when they examined it. They had been trying to justify the cost on "its extra features". I had told them that they had better check the toaster and not Halliburton's product blurb on it before they went down that road. The blurb was stolen from a high-end GE model verbatim. It had nothing to do with the toaster that Halliburton's alias has sold to the Pentagon. Halliburton made aliases to protect the parent company from lawsuits and settlements. Towards morning I was told by another Halliburton bigwig at the main headquarters not to keep the programmers overtime. He was a Vice President, if I remember correctly. He said that 'if it comes to that, we will just close down this company as bankrupt and open another one the same day under another name. I asked him about the cost of moving. He said "No cost, we didn't have 'a factory at a fixed location'". I asked him about the other products of the company. He admitted that they were 'all reclaimed'. He said 'there is a lot of reclaimed stuff in the world' "we just know how to find it'. I teased him to keep the information flowing in a light hearted way and said "Did you go to a second hand FBI shop?" He laughed. He said "We have more of those where those come from--we get them new for a discount." I asked him if he could get one in my size and told him what size that was. He said, "Sure, no problem." I offered to pay him the cost. He said, "No cost." I insisted on paying him the exact amount. He said "Nothing. But you can pay for the shipping, if you like. I said fine. It arrived by FBI courier! It was from the FBI directly, brand new. The wheels in my mind were spinning. I was beginning to put 2 and 2 together to get 4.
I had insisted that the programmers take the toaster apart and count the number of parts. They had been making up part name and costs for them by the hundreds. There were only about a dozen parts in the whole thing:
1) Cord
2) Plug for cord
3) Crumb pan
4) Metal shell
5) Two sets of slice holders
6) 4 heating wires
7) 4 frames to wrap the wires on
8) A lever to pop the toast up
9) a knob on the lever
10) a bi-metal thermal detector
11) 4 knobs for feet
12) an internal frame and screws
13) the release mechanism
14) springs
They had already named and priced over 200 parts for that toaster. They had already written code to make the fake books for that factory that manufactured that toaster. But it was all a virtual reality that had no reality to it. That was their standard operating procedure! They accused me of trying to sabotage their efforts by making them look at the actual toaster and how it was made!
So, any investigation of the books has to start with real products already delivered and taking one of them apart to count the parts! It also needs to start with a site inspection to ensure that there is a factory making those goods that that company owns.
When I forced them to use the toaster's actual parts in their accounting scam, they then went to claiming that they were made of titanium or even "platinum alloys" to justify the cost. They wrote transactions for buying platinum and for the equipment to make special alloys of it. They knew all about such jargon and the equipment that a factory would have to have to make such alloys. The cost was going to be justified then on how expensive the manufacturing of those special alloys were.
I looked at the toaster and saw only chrome, steel, and some aluminum. I asked them how they were going to justify not just using those ordinary cheap material to make the toaster. One of them said "You don't get it. No one cares. Everyone is already part of this scam. Who is there left to bust us?" Another one said, "We get away with doing this day in and day out because no one checks. If you weren't here we would be done already. We make up the books for about one fake factory a day. That is our normal rate of production and you are slowing us down."
I called Tenet when he normally got up at home and explained to him what they said. I told him "I am just in the way here, let me get back to my regular work." He said "They might check this time. That is why I have you there. I want it to stand up to scrutiny. I said, "And what if someone asks to have an onsite inspection of the factory?" He said he hadn't thought of that. He said that he would call me back. He did, about 30 minutes later. He said that it had never happened before. He said that accountants just looked at the books, not even the products and so were easy to fool. He told me "forget the toaster, just make the books hold up to inspection".
Before I continue I want to backtrack a bit. I checked to see who FBI Director Mueller called while I waited for his answer. He called Cheney. I made a copy of that phone conversation. It was on record at a number of places. I did the same when Tenet said he had to check. He called Cheney and then Cheney had him also double check with a third person, a Halliburton employee. That person's sole job was to deal with investigators. I later went out to visit that man. He had in his files every case of an investigator worrying one of Cheney's companies. He let me look through his files to prove to my satisfaction that no corruption investigator had inspected a factory. He was very proud of his cover-up skills. He bragged that they were better that the CIA's and that he could beat me at this game any day of the week and twice on Sunday. He assumed that I was playing the same game he was since HallCIA and Tenet sent me out to see him. He then spent half a day teaching me "to be a pro at it like me". He said that what he did was a form of psychological warfare when the investigators came. He said "make them pay in their own time for every piece of information that they get out of you". "You have to give them information, it doesn't have to be real." "But make sure to waste as much of their time as possible each time they contact you." Take 2 hours to find each piece of paper. Time yourself at it. Make sure that you don't give them anything faster than that. Keep them on hold while you "look" for the information. Never call them back. Make sure they have to call you. Make them wait 30 minutes just to get you each time. They will get tired of investigating your case and more onto someone else's. They want to make progress and advancements just like anyone else. Make them go elsewhere to do that." At the end of the day I thanked him and he gave me his phone number. I asked him if I would have to wait 30 minutes. He said, "No, that's not the listed number. I always pick up that phone immediately. It could be the President calling me. He calls me for advice, you know. He always does what I recommend." I asked him if Cheney did. He swore briefly and said that he and Cheney "went way back" but that they didn't always see eye-to-eye. He said that Cheney mostly took his advice but sometimes didn't have the patience to do it right.
The software team had decided before I arrived downstairs that the factory would make just one product, this toaster. That simplified their work. They were into production. They did not want any unnecessary complications in making a good set of books. They started with the outer facts the Pentagon had, that 1000 toasters had been bought, each one costing $1,891 dollars. When the numbers were jacked up they were jacked up like in supermarkets, $1.99, $5.99 etc. But they liked to make it look like it reflected real costs a bit, so they would let the last digit be low, or another digit not follow the 9999 pattern.
They then added to the books they were creating on the computer 'ordered parts'. They liked to do that by listing transactions from known suppliers that some of Halliburton's real factories did business with. They had listings of real transactions with those companies for many parts over many years. A part might be listed as a $19.99 dollar appliance rack from General Electric. The programmer added it to their books and changed its title slightly like $19.99 rack for the appliance. That would then morph into one of the 4 slice racks in the toaster to add $79.96 to the cost of the toaster. Then a fake shipping order might be added to move those 4 racks from the actual Halliburton factory to the fake address for this alias. That fake address might be a real factory, even a real Halliburton factory making something else. Since the advent of maps with aerial views it was important to have an address with a big factory already on it.
If doing that was not enough to get the price up they might add 'metal plating' or additional chrome plating "to enhance durability". Then they could claim that that $19.99 single rack cost them $89.52 to make in their factory and $358.08 for 4. They might say the metal plating enhanced its heat resistance or its anti-corrosion properties. It might even make some kind of sense that one would want that in that part. But the fact would remain that it was completely unnecessary and the toaster would work fine without it.
Then one might add a "scratch resistant" finish or a finish that wouldn't show a scratch because it was 'brushed'. Of course, that adds nothing to the toast that comes out. Unless one sees the product you don't know if it was added.
If the books were not cooked up to CIA standards for cover-ups, then there would not be a real transaction as a basis for each part at the corresponding GE factory etc. During the time that I was overseeing the efforts of those software programmers about half the time they did not have a real transaction to match the number and type of part. Small and common parts were not hard for them to morph into a part for the toaster. But specific function, like the bimetal thermal detector, and shaped parts, like the toaster's outer shell, were harder for them. Some company's transactions had very vague part descriptions like "Metal Housing" or "Holder" without giving size, shape, or function. Those companies were almost always witting parts of this conspiracy to defraud the taxpayer. It impairs efficiency not to have parts described accurately. So, then there has to be another reason for it that is making them money to do it that way--corruption! So, when you see books where the real transactions, as listed in the part seller's books, are vague parts, then you should suspect that the buyer's books are cooked. You may not be able to tell well by looking at the one set of books. Those could look perfect, especially if you are dealing with a piece of equipment that you have never disassembled or even seen before.
The books that were produced in this instance were inspected. Tenet was correct about that risk to Halliburton. But it was hardly something that should have taken precedence over a national security issue.
They passed that inspection even with the actual toaster Halliburton had sold them on display at the inspection!
I had been intuitively correct that the books had to reflect in this case the actual features and numbers of parts. They did not take the toaster apart but they peered into it from top and bottom with the crumb pan open. Tenet sent me the security camera pictures and an audio of that Pentagon inspection taking place. There were 4 Pentagon Generals doing the inspection and not an engineer among them! They were obviously already bribed and I later proved that with their bank statements. They were just looking for an excuse to pass it. How can anyone justify spending $1,891 on a toaster for 1,000 of them in bulk when one could buy a better one for $19.95 down at the mall without a volume discount?
Since there were no glaring inconsistencies on the fictitious books the 4 generals passed it. There needs to be engineers and cost cutting experts with real veto power to prevent this corruption from going on. All one had to do is set a $19.95 toaster down next to that one and ask the generals to justify the extra cost according to its real function-- making toast. They would not have been able to do that.
I sent all of proof of that scam to that same GAO officer in the previous cases. That included the financial records of the generals, the real transactions and what those parts looked like and were for, and how they were morphed by software into expensive parts He then asked me to send him one of those toasters. I did. I sent the one that I had requested at the CIA and that we had dissembled. He asked me to meet with him again. I told him that it had become too dangerous for me to do so. Shortly, thereafter I drove to
I hoped that corruption would be cleaned up. It was not. I do not fault that GAO officer. He was an honest man of courage and integrity. His boss shut down that investigation, no doubt on orders from the White House or one of their power brokers like the Director of the FBI or Director of CIA.
Now I want to talk more about the mole problem as it relevant to this case. A mole is a person inside an agency who is acting as a traitor to give secrets to a foreign power. The motives can vary and include bribes or blackmail. The CIA knew that it had a mole because one of its bugs at the Russian Embassy in
The mole was a Halliburton employee who had never been vetted by the CIA! The Russians had approached him and offered him money. In addition they offered not to expose his criminal background. He was a prime candidate for blackmail by the Russians; keeping his job meant having to hide his felony conviction. The CIA had not run a criminal background check on all of those Halliburton employees but the Russians had!
The CIA has rules that prevent it from hiring drug takers for the same reason; they are too high a blackmail risk, and thus a mole risk. Since the CIA never vetted the Halliburton people they never even asked them if they took drugs under a lie detector test like they normally do. And the CIA never even did drug tests on the Halliburton people.
When I showed Tenet the documents that I recovered from that Halliburton man's flat he was shocked. He immediately called the Director of the FBI and thanked him for his help in recovering them. I asked Tenet to ask the FBI Director to arrest the Halliburton traitor. Tenet sent me out of the room to discuss it. He called Cheney. Cheney told him no, that that man was his friend and that they could never arrest him. The phone was on speaker and I heard everything. I cried for my country that it had been taken over by crooks who were traitors as well.
I could not stand to be in such a corrupt institution and under such a corrupt govt. That was the moment in 2002 that I decided to leave my country.
After the CIA knew that its new satellite's security codes had been stolen, it had to figure out what to. It decided that it could not use that satellite because its security had been too compromised. That satellite cost the
The man responsible for that was the man I called on these pages HallCIA. I have not used his real name because Cheney threatened to kill me himself if I ever mentioned his name or the name of his partners in crime. I also have not mentioned them because no one is prosecuting these cases, so it makes no sense to risk one's life for nothing. HallCIA and the Head programmer were moved back to Halliburton's main office, just like the priests sexually abusing children were moved to a different parish.
They were never prosecuted.
End of Case 6
(Submitted to the Committee on May 18, 2008)
Case 7: Halliburton's Stolen Federal Salaries
[Note: this case is another facet of Case 6 which needs to be read first to have the back ground for this one.]
The FBI uniform I was sent by Halliburton came with all of the necessary accouterments to falsely claim that I worked for the FBI. Without asking for it, that package included an FBI badge and number, the paperwork to join the FBI and get a salary, and the FBI official acting also as courier to swear one into the actual FBI! As the CIA's Special Operation's Advisor, I decided to test how good the FBI's vetting procedure was for people inducted into it via Halliburton's back door; I joined the FBI by signed on the dotted line.
The next day I went back to that closest FBI station in that uniform. They let me in without thinking even once about it. I then introduced myself as from another FBI office, giving only the name of the Station--"DC Headquarters". Then I asked for a desk to start working on a case. I was given a desk. No one had even yet asked for my name! I started making phone calls on their FBI secure lines. I called up a judge on their phone list under WARRANTS and explained why I needed a warrant to search a flat. I used a generic reason; "I want to catch the crooked bastard by getting the evidence." After telling him that I had searched flats before but never before been assigned to get the warrant, he talked me through how to do it, including what information on the form would sway him to do it. He also told me which FBI form I needed to fill out and when he would be available to sign it. After doing so, I asked another FBI officer if he had time to pick up the warrant for me and help me search the flat. He agreed and in the hopes of 'seeing some action' other of his buddies joined in. No one had asked my name or vetted me in any way whatsoever.
I had been at that exact station two days before when the Halliburton programmer I had been with in a
He was arrested for 1ST DEGREE MURDER OF AN FBI OFFICER! By that second visit to that FBI station, I had proof that the FBI officer he had murdered was a bonafide one with proper papers and vetting in the FBI's personnel archives. The FBI had fingerprint and DNA evidence to prove that the Halliburton programmer was the murderer. They even had a trial and a conviction of the man for that murder. He had feigned a fainting episode right before the reading of the sentence and been taken to a hospital. He assaulted the hospital guard inside his room and left him unconscious in his bed. Then he impersonated the guard using his uniform. He later went to a lawyer who put in a motion to declare the trial a mistrial on the grounds of a technicality--- the defendant had not been present at the reading of the sentence. The fact that the criminal had committed a second nearly deadly assault the same day in apparent good health was omitted from that motion.
The FBI-Clandestine CIA raid that I organized was on the private flat of HallCIA. It was not at his house where he lived with a prostitute whom he pimped, according to a CIA file. He did not keep his contraband items there as there were too many unsavory people coming through his house. At the flat the FBI confiscated drugs in pusher quantities and also illegal weapons, including unregistered machine guns, explosives and hand held artillery that could blow holes through a wall for illegal entry. He had one bedroom devoted just to weapons, with shelves devoted to about half-kilo packages of drugs. It was equipped with a padlock.
CIA top secret documents were strewn all over the bed, dresser and floor of the master bedroom. It looked like a hurricane had hit the bedroom even before we arrived. The padlock was broken on the door to the weapons and drug room and the door was open when we arrived. But the drugs were still neatly on the shelves. The flat may have been raided by Russian intelligence before we arrived; leaving the CIA documents behind as cover-up after copying them. Or it could be that HallCIA was just that messy and disorganized as to leave his drugs and weapons unsecured. The FBI collected fingerprints and I collected the CIA documents.
After the raid I returned to the FBI station and filled in the appropriate forms to write a FBI report up on the raid. As I was doing so, the two FBI officers who I had spoken with two days before walked by the desk I was using. They did a double take seeing me in the FBI uniform. I had not changed my hair color or how it was done. I told them that I had just tested FBI vetting and security procedures for a report I was writing for the CIA. I explained to them that I had just successfully impersonated an FBI official to the extent of going on a raid with them, and not one had yet asked for my name or run it through a background check. I showed them the CIA top-secret documents the raid had netted and they laughed at the ruse I had played on the FBI. They were not laughing however when I explained how I had gotten that FBI uniform and signed the papers. They checked on their computers; I was not yet registered on the rolls of the FBI. I asked them to arrest all of the appropriate Halliburton people involved in that scam. They called the Director of the FBI and I also spoke to him. He refused to authorize the arrests. He told me "Write up your report and let me read it first". I offered to drive over immediately with the evidence. He refused to make time to see me. I immediately faxed him a short report and enough evidence to warrant the arrests. Nothing happened. But the next day when the local FBI checked my name again they called me to let me know that I was officially part of the FBI now per their computer.
I sent promptly sent in a full report to the FBI, the CIA, and the Pentagon on this scam to sign up Halliburton employees as their officers and have the
The Directors of the FBI, the CIA, and the Chief of the JCS that I sent those reports to did not implement my list of recommendations; one of them was to shut down all those public salaries going to Halliburton employees. At least they had not been implemented as of about Summer 2004 when I last checked those accounts. Another recommendation was to make sure that everyone on those salaries and in those agencies is properly vetted and drug tested as per that agency's usual security measures.
Because I was concerned that my recommendations would not be acted on, I sent copies of those letters, the forms that I had signed, and the numbers of the Swiss bank accounts to the GAO. In my cover letter to the GAO I told them that I had given them the authority to check the balances in those accounts by written authorization to the Swiss bank. I hoped that seeing the
When I checked in 2004, 2 years had passed. The US taxpayer had paid;
via the CIA about $80,000.00 each year for a total of about $160,000.00
via the FBI about $50,000.00 each year for a total of about $100,000.00
via the Pentagon about $80,000.00 each year for a total of about $160,000.00
or roughly $420,000.00 total into those 3 Swiss accounts.
I really do not remember the figures so well as I did not consider the amounts relevant to my life. But I sure hope the that GAO will check and make sure that those cases are prosecuted--I want to stop that lose to the taxpayer.
I also checked on whether Halliburton continued paying those employees if it signed them up for a federal salary. The answer was no, except for rare exceptions. HallCIA had continued getting a Halliburton salary while getting one at the CIA but the Head Programmer had not.
When I checked in 2004 the number of Halliburton employees getting
a CIA salary was over 200,
a FBI salary was over 400,
and Pentagon over 300.
Suppose that the total for that is about 1,000 salaries each at 50,000 a year. That would be $50 million a year of fraud. Over the 8 years that Cheney has been in the Vice President's office that could easily add up to $400 million in savings for Halliburton in not having to pay salaries. No wonder it was so easy to get that FBI uniform and salary sent out to me by talking to a Halliburton VP.
Other Halliburton programmers had complained to me that they took a 'cut in pay' to work at the CIA location. I asked them why they did it then. They said "the takings are good" and "Halliburton fences the items for us in a 50-50 split".
End of Case 7
(Submitted to the Committee on Monday, May 19, 2008)
Case 8: Halliburton's Thieves inside the CIA & the Predictable Consequences
When I heard that Halliburton's people were stealing from inside the halls of the CIA , alarm bells went off inside my head. The items inside the CIA which were easiest to carry out were its documents! And any computer that one stole inside the CIA was likely to have top-secret information on it in spades. It was a counter-intelligence person's nightmare---and now it was mine! The fact that the Head of their Halliburton section at the CIA had just sold the CIA's communication satellite encryption security codes to
More than one Halliburton person at the CIA had admitted to me that they were stealing to make up for their cut in pay. Halliburton had switched them to Federal salaries, making the CIA pick up the tab. One Halliburton person at the CIA had told me that they were all stealing enough to make up for that cut in pay. Thus, the first thing I did was find out what those 40-odd people used to earn at Halliburton. I had the CIA's accounting office print out for me what the CIA was now paying them. My mouth dropped open in shock. Each one of them would have to steal over $10,000 worth of CIA secrets or goods a year to break even. In some cases the cut in pay was much higher. One man took a $50,000 a year cut in pay when he switched to the federal salary. At the average $23,000 cut in pay, the 40 workers together had sustained a $920,000 cut in pay. I had been told that Halliburton was fencing the goods in a 50%-50% split. So, about 2 million dollars worth of good at black market prices would be stolen from the CIA, if they actually made up their lost salaries stealing. That made my mind spin into over gear. I started thinking back on the history of the mole hunts at the CIA and FBI and what the moles had been paid and what they had sold.
Here is an example from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldrich_Ames;
On February 22 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_22 , 1994 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994,
I walked down to the office a very high ranking CIA analyst, about 3rd in the hierarchy that department, a man I trusted. People advance inside the CIA by one of two means normally, being very good at what they do or being very good at lying to please those above them. The heads of each section were often in the latter category as a general rule. I asked him how many secrets the Russians could buy for $2 million a year, if they had 40 moles able to walk the halls of the CIA. In the posing of the question I explained that the hypothetical moles would be assumed to be good criminals without formal espionage training. I asked him what effect that would have on National Security.
He asked me if this was a conversational gambit or a request for a formal report to answer my question. I thought about it a moment and then said the latter. That meant that I had to go get a signature on a form. By submitting to Tenet a request for 10 separate reports on a wide variety of important topics, I quickly brought the analyst the signed form he needed. He whistled in surprise when he saw the assignment given to him in black and white. Then he asked me "Is this about the Privatized Employees invasion of the CIA?" I said yes. He said, "I have been urging Tenet to let us study that risk for months. No go. How did you get this when I couldn't?" I explained to him my method and also that the Head of the Halliburton group had just sold the CIA's Communication Satellite Encryption Security Codes. He hadn't heard that--Tenet had put a lid on it even within the CIA. I promised to show him the proof. I came back and gave him and a few of his top staff an hour long briefing on what I had learned. One man was in tears as I finished. Another said, "This marks the end of US National Security". Another said, "No,
I asked them what information they needed to make a proper assessment. They said that it would help them if I could get how much the 40 people were actually making off their thefts inside the CIA and a list of what they were stealing.
I came back the next day with the list of how much each one had been paid by Halliburton in "bonuses" the code word for fenced items, and what each "bonus" was for. That list of what each bonus was for was like what the programmers did in morphing an appliance rack into a bread slice rack. It was not an accurate description but it related to the item in a fairly straightforward way.
I showed the list to Tenet and tried to brief him on how dangerous it was. He did not want to hear. Tenet had not followed my recommendations that would have stopped the thefts. And he did not want further reasons why he should do so.
The Director of CIA (DCI) is a political appointee of the White House. He serves at their pleasure. He can be fired by them as soon as he does something they don't like without them having to prove that he did anything wrong. That in effect, always makes the DCI the White House's intelligence lackey. They are usually chosen for their anticipated ability to look "clean" while acting to prevent real Congressional oversight. The usual ruse is for the DCI is to say, "I didn't know". By having a DCI from outside of intelligence, that ruse is usually bought by the Congress. They enable that ruse by not insisting that the DCI has a deep understanding of intelligence when his nomination is approved. The Congressional oversight of the CIA is a joke--a meaningless exercise usually no better than the Warren Commission at exposing the truth. DCIs often make decisions that old timers in intelligence with integrity cringe at because they are so bad, ridiculous, unworkable, or corrupt. Tenet's predecessor, a chemist by profession, John Deutch, had gotten in serious hot water for violating CIA security procedures;
Soon after Deutch's departure from the CIA in 1996 it was revealed that classified materials http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classified_information_in_the_United_States were being kept on several of Deutch's laptop computers designated as unclassified. In January of 1997, the CIA began a formal security investigation of the matter. Senior management at CIA declined to fully pursue the security breach [ i.e. Tenet]. Over two years after his departure, the matter was referred to the Department of Justice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Justice , where Attorney General Janet
The stolen items were going out the door, including computers, without the actions needed to stop them or any reasonable possibility of prosecution. I thought hard about what could be done. I wanted to get the CIA's counter-intelligence committee back in control of what left the building as much as possible. That meant they needed to have veto power over what was being sold. To do that we needed to have Halliburton submit those items back to the CIA for its review. I called Cheney and begged him to send a memo over to Halliburton setting up a program to do that. I even faxed him a memo that all he had to do was sign to get that to happen. He did not deny that Halliburton was selling items stolen from the CIA. He did not deny that he had the power to make that change at Halliburton by sending the memo. He did not deny that he had the power to order Tenet to institute effective measures to stem the tide of thefts. As the phone recording of that call shows I kept briefing him on the problem while he kept saying that he refused to discuss the matter with me. I sent a copy of that call over to the GAO because it showed that I had in fact managed to inform Cheney of the seriousness of the thefts. In that call I cited that the likely consequences were the shredding of National Security and unnecessary deaths of its covert personnel.
Another way to slow the thefts was to try to get as high a price for each of them as possible. But I didn't want to educate Halliburton or its workers how to do that. Using the profit motive as the carrot, I did figure out how to both get as high a price as possible and institute professional oversight. I set up a surveillance operation behind Cheney's and Tenet's back to actually inspect each item that Halliburton fenced from the CIA. That is, I had an ex-CIA operative with counter-intelligence experience whom I trusted apply to Halliburton. I instructed him to offer to "help them fence their CIA goods and get higher prices for them". Call him Alan for short. A Halliburton VP, the same one who sent me the FBI uniform, sent me a thank you letter for referring Alan. He no doubt believed that I was corrupt and making a kickback. It was to my advantage to foster that image of myself without it actually being true. In my position it was best if everything I did could be interpreted as corrupt at the same time as I was collecting the evidence for prosecution.
That operative, Alan, ended up terribly overworked in no time. The analysts and I had been off by a factor of 3 in the amount being stolen from the CIA. We did not find that out until the Halliburton people realized that they could get more money by making sure that Alan sold the goods for them. That meant Alan had to sell them at on average much higher than twice what they could get for them themselves, even by selling directly to the Russians. That was not as hard as it would have been with regular stolen goods; the Halliburton people did not know their true worth on the Black Market. It was not something they could find out on the internet or at eBay. They did not have the intelligence contacts needed to find the highest paying people in Foreign governments. Alan could make a better profit selling a document to a rich government such as
We needed top dollar for the stolen items because we had to make up for the fact that we were not selling all of the items due to their national security risk. We were hiding the fact from Halliburton's management that we were sending items back to the CIA. We could not send computers back as it was impossible to ensure that the Russians etc. had not altered them in the meantime. Those had to be scrubbed clean using a special erasing procedure. But it was possible to send back documents. We had initially thought that it would be only 10% of the items that had to be vetoed on National Security grounds. But as we got a better understanding of what was being sold via Halliburton that figure went up to a little over 50%. Both that CIA counter-intelligence committee and analysts group (AKA oversight committee) were overseeing which items to veto. They were also overseeing how to bring items safely back into the CIA.
Alan quickly needed more staff to find top bidders. This time instead of making the choice, I referred that decision to the oversight committee within the CIA. I then checked to make sure that they had picked people that I agreed were honest. One of them 'flunked out'. He couldn't sell things at a high enough price on the black market.
The oversight and its "Private Eyes" were doing an excellent job at it when I left the CIA in late May 2002. I had not made a cent off of this extra effort and risk on my part. I tried to ensure that they did not make kickbacks either.
Months after I left, they again attempted to get Tenet to address the problem correctly. They demanded that Tenet lock the unvetted people out of the building. In the process of showing how serious the security violations were, they revealed the oversight operation. That ended up revealing that they were recovering about 50% of the items and about 30% of their black market worth. Tenet informed Cheney of that and Cheney ordered an end to the oversight. I later sent copies of those calls to the GAO. The Russians and the Mossad had a complete set of White House calls, including for sale. The CIA also had a fairly complete set.
When I was forced back into the CIA in Oct. 2003 from
It was only after a major national security catastrophe that they manage to get Tenet to insist that Halliburton rehire their ex-CIA 'Private Eyes'. That catastrophe is hard for me to write about without crying. The oversight people briefed me on it when I returned. The first day I came back to the CIA's Headquarters they kept me up all night telling me about it. I cried many times that night for my country and the harm that had been done to her. I cried for the people who had died so brutally and unnecessarily.
Many, many more intelligence professionals lost their lives from Cheney's selling secrets than lost their lives to the traitorous behavior of Aldrich Ames.
"Why should we look like criminals who are enabling this theft"? "We are not making a cent off it." "Yet we have been threatened by Tenet that we will be put in prison because we know of the thefts and hence must be guilty of them." "We are being treated like criminals because we are trying to stop the most dangerous of these sales."
I later collected a memo from Cheney to Tenet which said that the oversight of the sales by the CIA was cutting into profits and had to be stopped. It recommended imprisoning all of those in the CIA suspected of being a bottleneck in US corporate profits. Tenet prohibited the oversight within a week of receiving that memo. The GAO has a copy of the memo and also of the memo that Tenet sent out threatening imprisonment if anyone was found to have decreased US corporate profits. They also have the later memo Tenet sent which threatened imprisonment if anyone knew about stolen goods and did not report it to the designated official. Those who had reported thefts to that official had been fired soon afterwards. Thieves do not report stolen goods, people with integrity do--until it is clear that it is pointless and dangerous to do so. I also sent the GAO the document suggesting this ruse of a new designated official as a way to stop the oversight.
That designated official never prosecuted a case of theft against a Halliburton person. He came from Halliburton! He had been recommended for the job by HallCIA to Cheney who then recommended him for the job. I sent over to the GAO a tape of the phone conversation between HallCIA and Cheney. On it HallCIA says that the man he is recommending will stop the losses of revenues "from our CIA sales". Later he brags about one of his sales to
The designated official was not vetted by the CIA. He was stealing from the CIA while working out of the Halliburton offices. I sent to the GAO a signed statement from a CIA security guard who caught him carrying a computer of the CIA's out the front door. That man could have used the back door out of their offices manned only by Halliburton's guards. He was so used to stealing from the CIA and getting away with it that he forgot and used the front door. That is what he told the guard "I forgot" "Give me a hand and we'll take it out the back door." The Halliburton guards did just that. They helped the Halliburton thieves load CIA computers into their private cars. I sent the GAO several CIA security camera clips of that. The CIA had massive amounts of security camera data showing that. The CIA security people were afraid to report the thefts that they saw because they did not want to lose their jobs without it even cleaning up the problem. By the time I returned to the CIA, 16 people had lost their jobs from reporting thefts to the designated official Tenet's memo directed them to use.
No one at the CIA knew about the item sold during the blackout that caused the National Security Catastrophe until after the Catastrophe happened. The first sign of that catastrophe was a dead body lying on a sidewalk in a foreign city. The body had been the teenage daughter of a CIA officer. The body was no longer recognizable, even by her father. The body was identified definitively by dental records. Her face had been peeled off in small strips. The forensic evidence revealed that she was still able to bleed and struggle during most of the time that was done to her.
The next sign of the Catastrophe was another unrecognizable body. This time of a 6-year-old boy of a
The next sign was an 11-year-old child of a
Could it be that I was recalled to the CIA against my will in order to get my special operational skills to track down the villain? The day I got back to the CIA the first thing Tenet did was hand me these pictures and ask me to find The Killer. He had given me the pictures of 23 victims who had all died the same way. All of them were children of people who could have been in the CIA. About 22 of them did have a known parent or guardian in the CIA.
What he failed to tell me, or give me the photos, for was the over 100 adults that had been killed using the exact same modus operandi. One of them was in the CIA's morgue at that moment. That I had to find out that night from one of the 'oversight' committee members.
I do not want to go more into the investigation which I did yet. This case is really about the thefts from the CIA. The item that was stolen from the CIA that was responsible for those deaths was a computer. That computer had not gone through the hands of one of the ex-CIA operatives. Its contents not been thoroughly erased. It took work and time to do that; the disc had to be erased and written over 50 times. Halliburton's bosses did not care about National Security or the risk to CIA covert operatives, if they were exposed. Neither did key people at the White House judging by the outing of Valerie Plame to get back at her husband. Halliburton had sold that computer stolen from the CIA's personnel Department without erasing the disc even once! I later recovered that computer from a location inside the
I was able to prove that it was the same computer. It still had the CIA's personnel files on it and many of the victims had been selectively deleted from where they should have been in that list. When I compared that file to the current CIA's personnel file, the comparison program marked those deletions in red. The selective deletions showed that the owner of the computer was getting tipped off by someone high up in the investigation of the deaths inside the CIA! The US Administration managed to suppress the news of the murders almost completely, after its ties to the computer started showing up in the CIA's internal investigations. No one in the media had connected the isolated cases across the globe. The motivation of the deletions was obviously to try to cover-up the guilt of the owner's role in those murders. There were about 86 deletions in a file of thousands of names. Each deletion was a victim as already known by the CIA up to a certain date about 2 weeks earlier. No victim that the CIA had on its investigation list by that point had failed to be deleted on that stolen computer. The odds of that happening by chance alone was practically speaking---exactly zero!
In addition, I later obtained evidence that firmly tied the secondary ownership of that computer to those who committed the actual tortures and murders. There was many more than one murderer. What they had in common was membership in a kind of paramilitary quasi religious cult. The members of that paramilitary cult had a group commitment to kill a person once a month. The Mafia usually only requires its members to kill once to get into it. This group required their members to kill once a month to stay in good standing in it. A manual on how to 'please the Lord of Darkness' had been published by a member of that cult. It recommended that the best way to do it was to torture people to death using the modus operandi I have indicated above. That manual had been distributed by the owner of that computer with that CIA Personnel file suggested as the targets. The man who bought the computer was indeed a paramilitary type, with a large collection of weapons, many of them unregistered. He was a Republican and had sponsored fund raising events in his State to support the Bush and Cheney election in 2000. His journal writings showed that he intended to help Bush and Cheney get support for their "War on Terror" by making it appear that Muslims had killed CIA people and their families. He apparently got that idea after he bought this computer and realized what use those names and addresses could be put to. Not a single of the murderers was a Muslim as far as I am aware; they were members of this 'Reverse Christian' paramilitary group. The literature of the group showed upside down crosses as an emblem.
The reason that others in the CIA had not tracked him down and pinned the instigating of the murders on him was political. Like HallCIA, and the Head Programmer from our earlier cases, he was well protected. It was not that CIA investigators had not suspected him. It was that they did not know what to do with their suspicions and even their evidence after they got it. I was the booby prize winner--the fool at the CIA who had before been willing to buck the silence at great risk to myself.
There was precedence for giving me a job like this. At one point a CIA officer had sold a list of MI6 officers to the KGB during the Cold War. The KBG had started killing them off. I was given the job to stop them from continuing. And they had stopped, whether or not it was due to my efforts was a matter of hot debate within the CIA. But some people credited me with having had some influence in the matter.
The Republican who bought that computer was apparently a friend of Cheney and Bush; they had invited him to the White House. They had been present when he picked it out among a number of other CIA stolen computers. I found the White House Security camera footage of that event. The GAO has a copy of it. The payment is shown on the video. The man took hundred dollar bill(s) out of his pocket and handed that to Bush. Bush hesitated and then handed it to Cheney. The footage of that computer being carried out of the room by a guard follows about 20 minutes later. The room had about 20 computers from the CIA in it to start with. The security camera tape shows Bush and Cheney repeatedly coming into the room with a prospective buyer and taking cash in varying amounts. That continued until all the computers were gone. Some prospective buyers remained in the room for over an hour exploring the contents of the computers before deciding on a purchase. I checked with the CIA and found that no CIA vetting of those buyers had occurred. Most did not have security clearances. Some of them had prior felony convictions and had been let into the White House "on orders from above". The sale was 'by invitation only' with Bush and Cheney controlling the invitation list.
The earlier tape shows Cheney directing Halliburton employees in where to set the computers up. Care and time was taken to plug them in and connect them to monitors, mice, keyboards, and arrange the room nicely with a mouse pad under each mouse. The GAO has a copy of that tape too.
The manual on how to torture people that way and the file of CIA Personnel was sent overseas and domestically through the mail whenever a buyer purchased of a snuff film from that man. His poorly kept records showed that he had mailed out at least 2,000 such CD's with the Manual and file on them. His records omitted the address that he sent them to in about 50% of the cases where he marked payment received and product and "How-to" sent.
Thirty of the murders were solved already by local foreign authorities by the time I was given the case. Of those the How-to CD was found in 28 of them. Presumably it had been overlooked in the other 2, or the wrong party may have been charged or the How-to thrown out by the criminal. It certainly was as suspicious as a murder weapon and I was surprised that even 28 of them had been recovered.
Unfortunately, the murders had continued after those arrests. This catastrophe was a very difficult problem for the CIA to correct. It was caused by allowing White House officials without training in intelligence to set intelligence policies. It was also caused by their corruption that sold our National Security to the highest bidder. And it was caused by their refusal to prosecute corruption cases.
That refusal to prosecute corruption cases was not due to a general leniency towards criminals on the part of the US Administration. Bush as
The actions of Bush and Cheney were criminally negligent at the very least.
At least 168 CIA officers and their family members were brutally tortured to death as a direct result of them.
The CIA covered it up and pretended it never happened on Tenet's orders.
The notorious traitor Aldrich Ames had not sent out instructions to torture and kill anyone. He had sold one copy of a list of CIA operatives in one country to one buyer. He was in prison for life.
That Republican fund raiser sent out over 2,000 copies of all the names and addresses of the CIA officers and their families in all countries. He had sent them out with hate propaganda and incited others to kill them. He had sent that to people who were known murderers who had a commitment to kill again. And he had sent it out as a challenge--are you man enough to kill a CIA person? His group offered 'Advanced Membership Privileges' to anyone who succeeded at the task.
It was very curious that someone close and high up in the investigations at the CIA was tipping him off, since he was targeting CIA officers. I was able to supply the GAO with the evidence as to who was doing it. He was getting calls and faxes directly from Cheney and Tenet. Tenet's faxes included the names of the victims to date. He was being assisted in his cover-up at a very high level.
I investigated if the Russians or another foreign group had put him up to this as his methods seemed too effective to be that of an individual's. I found no such evidence of a foreign government or its operatives being behind it. I found many ties to US underworld organizations. The most ties were however directly to Halliburton. According to Halliburton's records which I sent the GAO, he had headed one of their subsidiaries before it went bankrupt. When I looked up that old company I did not find a building on the aerial to correspond to the address. That subsidiary was selling intelligence and paramilitary gear. It specialized in recruiting mercenaries worldwide. It made me wonder if those killing the CIA had done so as a kind of recruitment test; those getting away with it and being able to prove it getting the job. I started looking into whether he was on Halliburton's books as CEO of a new subsidiary. As soon as I started that investigation, Cheney called and told me to 'back off or else'. I asked him what the 'else' referred to because it certainly sounded like a death threat to me. He hung up on me. Then he called me back about 10 minutes later and offered to set up a face-to-face meeting with that computer owner. I agreed and asked for a time and a place. He hung up--apparently his offer was just to threaten me that he would sic that man on me. I sent copies of those calls to the GAO also. They should still have them.
That Halliburton mercenary recruiter was never prosecuted. Cheney and Bush would not allow it.
The computers were plugged in when they were sold at the White House. The security tape shows Bush and Cheney briefly scrolling through the programs and contents of the computers to impress the buyers.
They knew they were selling un-scrubbed computers from the CIA.
Cheney and Bush were never prosecuted for selling those computers with National Security Secrets on them.
End of Case 8
(Submitted to the Committee on Wednesday, May 21, 2008)
Case 9: Cheney's White House Sale of National Security
[NOTE: It was very hard for me looking at those photos of the CIA people and family members who had been tortured to death. I knew some of them as friends and colleagues. While I did not approve of much of what the CIA and some of its members did, some of them were hard working people of integrity. This case is written to honor the work of one of them, a man who I will call James Reilly on these pages. Please forgive me for omitting names, in some cases out of concern for privacy or for danger to people. In other cases, I have omitted names to not incite violence against those who should be in prison awaiting trial. Most names I have included are well-known public figures with bodyguards. By accepting office they knew they accepted some risk and accepted it voluntarily. Where I have included names, I have done so in the service of the public good. The public needs to know the truth about the corruption of its high officials, its agencies, and corporations.]
The day after I returned to the CIA, I went down to its morgue to see the body of my friend James Reilly. He was a man who I respected greatly in the CIA's Department of Intelligence, an analyst. He had acted with great integrity and at some considerable risk to his life when in 1975 he had helped me. The CIA knew that the US was losing the war in Vietnam. DCI Colby had told some people inside the CIA that it was probably only a matter of months before the US would be forced out. Then he had written an order to execute all of the prisoners held under CIA Operation Phoenix. He had been head of that program which had death squads assassinate, kidnap, and torture civilians. It did that without proving first that they were guilty of as much as stealing a bicycle. He had good reason to want those prisoners dead; once released they might talk about what he and others had done to them. Colby later admitted to Congress that the number of people who had been tortured and/or killed in Operation Phoenix exceeded 20,000. Most of them were civilians.
James Reilly had helped me get 8,000 women and children out of being killed in that execution order. He had done that by helping me with an analysis which showed that almost all of those women and children were innocent of any wrongdoing. In a related context, it should be recalled that General Karpinski had admitted that about 90% of the Abu Ghraib prisoners were innocent (see http://dir.salon.com/story/books/int/2005/11/10/karpinski/index.html). She had command responsibility at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq during the US torture scandal there, and was in a position to know. The percentage of the women and children who were innocent would be much higher than the percentage of men. In any case, the US had failed to charge, fairly try them, and prove their guilt. It never had the right to send even the rare guilty among them to summary execution. It did not have that right even if they had been military people engaged in fighting the US.
As I looked down at the tortured body of my friend, a liberator of the tortured, I thought about the ironies of his death. He had been tortured to death that way because he was a member of the CIA.
But James had not been an operative, nor a torturer, nor had he advocated or excused CIA torture. Not everyone in a country, an agency, or even a department of an agency should be tarred with the same brush. As I stood over the body of James, I promised his departed spirit that I would get to the bottom of these murders of CIA personnel and their families and stop them. Many times later, I would want to give up and quit that investigation as too dangerous or even as too unproductive. I did not because of my promise to my fallen colleague James. All that you will read about this case is due to his selfless service to his country that he loved more than life itself. We had discussed the risk of him being killed when he helped me rescue the women and children of Operation Phoenix from the execution order. He was not in denial about the real dangers; he accepted them voluntarily with his eyes wide open. The danger was not that the Vietnamese would kill him, but that the CIA's assassins would on Colby's orders.
When one wants to fix a problem one has to figure out if the problem resides in a person, a group, a process, or a system. Then one has a chance to fix it in a meaningful way. Thus, it is essential to keep this catastrophe in its proper historical perspective.
CIA members indeed had done many dreadful tortures around the world since its inception (See ex-CIA John Stockwell's In Search of Enemies and The CIA's War Against the Third World www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4068.htm http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4068.htm and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eootfzAhAoU or listen to my radio broadcast on the American Awakening program for May 1,2008 in the Show Archives at http://www.republicbroadcasting.com). The CIA had trained and equipped torture units and death squads around the world. They had done that to support military dictators who would help the US corporations steal the labor, land, resources, and rights of the populace.
One of the first well-known examples was the overthrow of the democratically elected Arbenz government in Guatemala in the 1950's. That was done to help United Fruit Co.-- DCI Dulles profited from it. The result for the Guatemalan populace was decades of terror, torture, and death squads to keep the US backed military dictatorship in power.
The CIA had trained the Iranian Secret Service in brutal torture techniques to help keep the Shah of Iran in power so the Standard Oil and British Petroleum could steal oil;
From Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Iran
"In 1951 Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Mosaddeq received the vote required from the parliament to nationalize the British-owned oil industry. .... Mossadegh was briefly removed from power in 1952 but was quickly re-appointed by the shah, due to an overwhelming majority in parliament supporting him, and he, in turn, forced the Shah into a brief exile in August 1953. A military coup ... with the active support of the intelligence services of the British (MI6) and US (CIA) governments - including mass propaganda leaflet dropping (slogans such as; "Down with Islam, up with Communism" – designed specifically to turn the population against Mossadegh, as well as the agents of CIA and MI6 (dressed as Mossadegh supporters) spurting machine guns into crowds[citation needed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed ] (known as Operation Ajax http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax ), forced Mossadegh from office on August 19 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_19 . ...In return for the US support the Shah agreed, in 1954, to allow an international consortium of British (40% of shares), American (40%), French (6%), and Dutch (14%) companies to run the Iranian oil facilities for the next 25 years. The international consortium agreed to a fifty-fifty split of profits with Iran but would not allow Iran to audit their accounts to confirm the consortium was reporting profits properly, nor would they allow Iran to have members on their board of directors."
Torture was a standard part of the CIA's support for dictators who denied workers their rights so that US corporation could exploit them. It had even helped Noriega and Saddam Hussein torture people in their prisons. Those historical facts mean that DCIs, usually on orders from the White House, were routinely ordering the torture of thousands of people around the world.
The motive was mainly economic. It was not, however, the US taxpayer who was paying for the expenses of the CIA who was getting the benefit. The benefit was accruing to those who used to be known by the appellation of "Robber Barons". The profits of the black ops of the CIA all went into private pockets. Ex-CIA operative Al Martin's book The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran-Contra Insider details in his book the many financial scams he wrote for the Robber Barons. He quotes Col. Ollie North as being shocked that only 3% of the illicit profits from the Savings and Loan Scandal and related CIA swindles went to fund the Contras. It should be remembered that the Savings and Loan scandal by itself drained $16,000 per US taxpayer out of their pockets, if I remember correctly. Al Martin says 97% went into the pockets of politicians. Al Martin cites Bush, Sr. as saying, "If the public ever finds out about this, they will lynch us." Al Martin also exposed Operation Orpheus, a contingency plan to install martial law, if the public did find out. That operation was to cause a limited nuclear exchange between the US and another country to have an excuse to impose martial law. Ollie North briefed him on it. Al Martin asked him how many US citizens the US Administration (Reagan and Bush, Sr.) intended to kill that way. Ollie North said, "It is just a number." When Al Martin pressed him further, he said, "50 to 70 million."
Al Martin, in that book, also talks about approximately 400 CIA operatives dying suspiciously right before the Iran Contra hearings in Congress. DCI Casey died of a supposed brain tumor before he could testify at those hearings. I had reviewed that case--the X-rays and tests in 'his medical' file were not his. Those skull X-rays did not match his dental records, when I got them directly from his dentist.
Here is some information about Casey's death from Wikepedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Casey
"According to a 600-page report by the CIA inspector general, Frederick Hitz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Hitz , the CIA under Casey was complicit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_and_Contra%27s_cocaine_trafficking_in_the_US in the Contras' massive narco-trafficking operation which resulted in the crack epidemic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_epidemic .[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Casey#cite_note-4
Casey was also the principal architect of the arms-for-hostages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms-for-hostages deal that became known as the Iran-Contra affair http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Contra_affair .
Hours before Casey was scheduled to testify before Congress about his knowledge of Iran-Contra http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Contra , he was reported to have been rendered incapable of speech, and was later hospitalized. In his 1987 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1987 book, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987, Washington Post http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Post reporter Bob Woodward http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Woodward , who had interviewed Casey on numerous occasions, said that he had gained entry to Casey's hospital room for a final, four-minute long encounter .... According to Woodward, when he asked Casey if he knew about the diversion of funds to the Nicaraguan Contras http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contras , "His head jerked up hard. He stared, and finally nodded yes."[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Casey#cite_note-5
In 1987, Reagan was President but suffering from progressive dementia, which was admitted by 1994. His Vice President had been Director of CIA in the past and was largely running the White House during Reagan's second term. His name was George Bush, Sr. Since DCI Casey died right before those Iran-Contra Hearings too, it appeared that someone above him had ordered the deaths of the CIA people. The purpose of those deaths clearly appeared to be to cover-up the crimes of the officials above them.
The CIA had done purges of operatives to cover its guilt the way Stalin had done purges of the KGB in Russia. The only difference was in the numbers killed. Since I had lived through several of those purges in the decades I had been at the CIA, it occurred to me that my friend James might have died in one. He was a member of the oversight committee. Four of about 16 members of the oversight of Halliburton's thefts at the CIA had died in under a year; he was the 5th. Two had been tortured to death in precisely this fashion before; James made the 3rd. The members of the oversight committee were terrified. Two members quit shortly thereafter out of fear.
It was a blatant omission of the facts of the case that Tenet had not informed me of the over 100 adult victims. In retrospect, it appeared that that omission had to have been intentional. Was it to hide the fact that the oversight committee had lost so many of its members? I was concerned at the glaring omission in Tenet's briefing of me. It suggested that the murders of the CIA people and their family members was not 'random violence' by madmen, but targeted violence to achieve a political aim. It appeared that Tenet was witting to the aim and trying to cover it up.
It should be remembered from the previous cases that Cheney had threatened me with death. Thus, there was no reason to believe that he was opposed to ordering the deaths of others to achieve his goals. At that point in time, he had not yet shot a man in the face while hunting, so I had not thought he would kill me himself. I had, however, taken his threats to kill me quite seriously in 2002. It was part of why I did leave the CIA to go to Canada. The context that those threats had been made in were as follows, to the best of my memory. It is the kind of thing that sticks more vividly in the mind of the person being threatened than the person making the threats.
The day before the threats, in about May 2002, a Halliburton person at the CIA had stolen an expensive piece of equipment. It was a CIA ultra-sophisticated bio-feedback machine worth over $5 million. It had required 100's of millions of dollars of R&D money for the CIA to develop it. It was custom made only for the CIA. Its only purpose was to train operatives how to pass a lie detector test. It was only used when they were going on extremely dangerous missions to places like Russia. And it was only used in very critical missions. There was a high risk that Russian intelligence would figure out how to overcome that training, if they interrogated about 5 operatives who had used it. That is, if they realized that those 5 had been trained in that fashion. Thus it was top secret and its manual was also top secret at the time. Loss of that machine and its manual was the same as potentially losing every secret a given CIA official had in their minds when they were in Russia. The head of the CIA station in Russia had been trained on that machine for the obvious reasons. The effect of the training was to give the user control over their automatic nervous system. That meant that they could stop their fear, their sweating, their heart rate increase etc. in response to an interrogation. In addition to those obvious advantages in an interrogation situation, it had a big psychological benefit. It gave those who had used it confidence that they could pass a lie detector test. Thus, they were as if 'bullet proofed" against threats and lie detector tests. Although the signal-to-noise ratio on information obtained under torture is so low as to be unusable, that is not true in a "friendly" interrogation. The British had admirably demonstrated the effectiveness of "friendly interrogations" in WWII. An operative who had fear or fear of a lie detector test was more likely to "tell all" in a 'friendly interrogation' because of underlying anxiety.
I did not find out about that theft until the next day. I learned from a Halliburton person that it had been stolen and was en route to the Russian Embassy to be sold to them! I was absolutely horrified by the National Security implications of that. I rushed up to Tenet's office to tell him. He already knew! Cheney had called him and asked him what it was and what it was worth to the Russians! This was after I had set up the system for things to go through Alan so that the oversight committee could intervene to stop the worst violations of National Security. But the thief was a personal friend of Cheney's and had taken the item straight to the White House to ask him if he wanted to buy it. Cheney had paid him $50,000 for it he told me. The copy of the phone call that I sent to the GAO between Tenet and Cheney showed that Cheney had considered keeping it to pass lie detector tests. They had discussed it and Tenet had promised to find out more about it, how it worked, and how much it was 'worth outside of the CIA'. He had called him back and told him a figure of $1.2 million. Cheney asked him to find out what was his risk of needing the machine himself. Tenet called him back and said that CIA analysts judged his risk to be about 4%.
In front of Tenet with his phone on speaker, I called Cheney and demanded its return. He laughed and said, "What's the big deal? It can only be used 5 times total and it has already been used once. We should sell it while it still has value before those 5 times are up." He had absolutely no understanding of intelligence matters. It was not 5 uses of the machine--it was 5 times a CIA person trained using that machine was interrogated by the Russians. It could be 20 years worth of use to prevent the loss of security codes, National Secrets, and how a CIA station was operating. Who would sell a precious antibiotic that they might need to live, just because over use of it later would make the bacteria resistant to it?
I explained it all quite carefully as Cheney is not a technically minded person. I even asked him questions to make sure that he had understood what I said correctly. He said, "Well, what difference does it make since there are remote viewers like you in Russia who can steal the secrets anyway?" I then carefully explained that remote viewers were not 100% accurate and that intelligence agencies always had to verify what they said using hard data. Lie detector tests are not 100% accurate either, but they add some signal-to-noise benefit. Cheney replied that torture was generally worthless in getting information. That was true. But it was still wrong to sell the Russians the CIA's best and most advanced equipment to deter loss of information under interrogation. "Friendly interrogations" do yield valid intelligence. When I pointed that out, Cheney said that the machine had already been sold to the Russians and that I was too late. I told him that I would figure out some way of prosecuting him, if he ever did that again. He laughed and said, "You haven't got a chance". I told him that I would try. He then said, "I will kill you myself, if you ever get close to succeeding."
I later learned that it was not true that it had been on its way over to the Russian Embassy in DC. Cheney had invited a Russian from that Embassy over to the White House to sell it there. It saved him time. The sale price was $600,000. The Russians talked him into a 50% off deal. Clearly the Russians did not think it was a worthless piece of equipment. It had a marginal use like a very good antibiotic in a very serious and likely fatal infection. It might not prevent death or loss of intelligence, but it increased your odds of doing so.
Later, history was to prove the loss of that machine to be more serious than even I had suspected at the time. The Russians questioned a US official who would certainly have been trained on that machine, if the CIA still had it. He was a very high ranking intelligence person under diplomatic cover at the US Embassy in Moscow. He had previous worked at NATO. During a US Embassy luncheon, the Russian's confronted that man about a bribe he had taken. It could have caused him to be fired or prosecuted, if it had been exposed. Then they asked him for the name of the person at NATO who had proposed a policy that was unfavorable to the Russians. In his uncontrollable anxiety, he immediately gave them the name. That NATO official from another country was dead within 36 hours. That caused the US grave difficulties with some of its allies in NATO. Relationships depend on trust. Some NATO countries believed that the US had deliberately told the Russians that information in order to have that NATO person killed. The US Administration did have a potential motive for killing him. The loss of that machine increased the risk of nuclear war by adding instability into the relationships between members of NATO countries. It took almost 2 years before that hidden rift was mended.
I sent over to the GAO as much information about the cost of the machine to R&D, to build at the CIA, and how it had ended up in the hands of the Russians. That included a copy of my call to Cheney which has the death threats on it. It also included the calls between him and Tenet on the subject, and between the Russian Embassy and Cheney, and the White House sale of it. The payment was not made in cash. I sent over the bank transaction as well. Cheney did not think I could ever get him prosecuted and neither Tenet or Cheney seriously tried to stop me from sending things over to the GAO. They thought that they had the GAO stopped in its tracks and that what I was doing was in Cheney's words "spinning my wheels for nothing". History to date has proven Cheney to be more correct than wrong.
That did not however prevent an attempt on my life the next day that I attributed to Cheney. I sent over to the GAO the evidence of that as well. A CIA car that I drove over towards the Pentagon lost both its brakes and its steering control suddenly. It was a miracle that I survived. The car ran up a grassy embankment and was stopped by a thicket of brush. I was much shaken up but otherwise unhurt except for some scratches and bruises. The car parts and pictures of my injuries went over to the GAO. I then called up Cheney and asked him about my car accident. He did not deny it. He said instead, "It could have been worse." and "Expect worse next time." I sent a copy of that over to the GAO also.
Thus, I did believe that Cheney had ordered the execution of a CIA person, and would do it again. I doubted that he cared about the numbers.
I began investigating the possibility that the White House was targeting CIA personnel for political or economic reasons. I looked at the list of CIA personnel whose family unit had suffered a death and compared it to those family units that had not. I looked at that geographically, by department, by political affiliation, by every variable that was available to me in the CIA's computer data bases. Since I am a mathematician by training, that was not hard for me to do quickly and meaningfully. It was quickly apparent that the deaths were not uniformly spread over the CIA's personnel. There were several large groups of CIA personnel which had no deaths due to that torture modus operandi. They were groups that had no contact with Halliburton or its people. There were other groups that had high death rates in them, such as those in a position to notice what Halliburton stole.
I then tracked down a copy of the personnel file that had been mailed out with the hate propaganda and how to torture to death a person using that modus operandi. When I compared that file against the CIA's full personnel lists, I found that there were several departments completely left off it. I did not immediately understand why there were those particular omissions. The omissions were about 25% of the CIA's personnel list. Then I redid my statistical analyses. Even over that 75% of personnel left, the deaths were not uniformly distributed. How were certain groups being targeted so much more than others? To answer that I quickly tracked down as many copies of that mailed personnel file as possible. They were not all the same! I had about 2 dozen of them after 2 days of effort. Each file had a date that the file was created embedded into it. When looked at by date of creation, there had been a progressive narrowing of targeting as a general rule over time.
Call the paramilitary computer owner of Case 8, Merk, for mercenary recruiter. Merk had previously been investigated by US officials for fraud, had unregistered weapons and stolen goods at his house. It was not hard for me to get a warrant. From the Mossad and other sources, I obtained archived copies of his phone calls, emails, and faxes. I found a particular person at the CIA who was instructing him in which groups to omit, and more rarely to add, to that mailed out personnel file. He was an administrative assistant to Tenet. He handled a subset of correspondence to and from Tenet. Most of that correspondence was to and from Corporations, including Halliburton. When I took all of his instructions into account over time, then the hits were uniformly distributed over the targets. That is, there was an excellent correspondence between the actual deaths and the amount of time that the person had been targeted. The oversight people were always on the list to target and so they had the highest death rates. It appeared that this method of targeting people was designed to make it appear that the deaths were random acts of violence. But in fact, that was not the case; particular groups were indeed being targeted for a 'reign of terror'.
The administrative assistant was not sending out the names of the people to Merk. He was sending out their number on the personnel list, i.e. "remove 125-280" meant remove people 125 to 280 on the list in that computer. Then within a week or so the lists being sent out by Merk removed the names on lines 125 to 280 from the list. That meant that the Administration Assistant had the exact same list as Merk! I checked with the Personnel Office to see how long that exact list was in use by them. The CIA with all of its worldwide offices is a very big organization. They are hiring people and people are leaving the CIA every day of the year. That exact list had been on the personnel office's computers for only about 20 minutes before the list changed! Thus, the Administrative Assistant was using a list taken off the stolen computer itself before it was sold! That was highly damning evidence.
As soon as I realized that, I sent the GAO proof that that list had been on that Administration Assistant's hard drive. That is, I removed the hard drive and replaced it with another one. On the replacement, I copied all of his files back except I substituted a list with the name and addresses doctored (see below). On the original I erased everything 50 times, except that file, his emails and faxes to Merk. Then I sent the original hard drive over to the GAO, along with the phone call evidence. One of those phone calls also had a number sequence to delete. On the average the list had changed twice a month. That meant that there were about 16 changes in the list over the approximately 8 months that the CIA people had been being killed before I was given the case. The true figure if I remember correctly was 22 times that the list had been changed on his instructions. So, it was certain that the Administrative Assistant was changing the lists being mailed out.
The first time that the mailed list was changed was only 2 weeks after the sale of the computer! The first list that was mailed out appeared to be 2 days after the computer was sold, per the poorly kept records of Merk.
The date and time of the computer's theft could be determined within 20 minutes by looking at the most recent entry of the personnel list. The Administration Assistant's list was created as a computer file a day before the date of the sale to Merk! Copying that CIA personnel file from that computer was a deliberate act. It had a specific motive or set of motives behind it.
I set out to try to determine those motives and who they had come from. Although they appeared to come through Cheney and Tenet, it was possible that they were on orders from someone else. In intelligence work we are always concerned as to whether people are acting freely or being coerced by foreign agents, such as through blackmail. Even if a person is making money off a deal, there could be other forces at work determining their behavior.
Next I attempted to figure out where that computer had been at the time of the copying of that file and who had copied it. By that time I had the computer in my possession as I recovered it from Merk. That was an obvious first step to stop the murders but previous CIA investigators before me had been too afraid to confiscate it back. I looked at the event logs of the computer. They had not been erased. That gave me every single time that it had been turned on and off. It had only been turned on once between its theft and the start of the sale at the CIA. It had been turned on for only about thirty minutes on that occasion and the Administrative Assistant's copy had been made during that relatively brief amount of time. The CD burner software on the computer also had an event log on it. It had been used for about 20 minutes of that period. So, it appeared that the file had been burned onto a CD. [The personnel office had some computers with CD burners in order to transfer some personnel files between CIA Headquarters and CIA stations by CIA courier.]
The CD had been made at about 2 am in the morning prior to the sale of the computer to Merc. By looking at the White House security camera tapes, I was able to find the footage of the burning of that CD and its later placement in Cheney's office. The file had been copied by a computer technician on the White House staff. It was labeled CIA Personnel by that computer person. His security clearance did not cover access to CIA Personnel files. That computer, when he accessed it, had a warning about the security clearance needed. It also had a window to insert a name and a password. He violated that security procedure and hacked into it through a back door. That was a witting act and he knew what he was stealing off it. It was clearly a theft of the CIA's information, else Cheney would have given him an authorized name and password. That tape showed that he spent almost all night hacking into those CIA stolen computers to disable the CIA's password protection of their top-secret information.
I recovered the CD from a shelf in Cheney's office. Before I took it, I pointed it out to a Secret Service officer and had him write in his log that I was taking it. I said I was photographing it in place to be able to put it back later exactly where I found it. Tenet had sent me over to Cheney's office to pick up a document, and so I had both items logged at the same time. It could be that I suggested to Tenet that he desperately needed that document back and to send me to go get it.
This would have been in Oct. or Nov. 2003. I don't remember the exact date. After I had the CD, I bought an identical CD of the same brand. I then put a different list on it. It was almost identical but I had added two people towards the beginning and subtracted two people towards the end. That meant that the departments on Cheney's copy all started 2 further down. I then went back to the White House and "returned" the disc. I also made other changes so that the names and addresses were no longer correct, in case Cheney tried to sell the disc to someone else. For those changes I had the help of the counter-intelligence section of the CIA as they were extensive. The list that I substituted on the Administrative Assistant's computer did not have the shifting down by 2 of the departments. It just had the changes to make the names and addresses unusable.
Merk was out of the country and due back but he did not yet know his computer was missing. I wanted to see what the next change to the list would be. If changes to the list were specified that were outset by 2 from the original department positions, it would mean that Cheney's disc was the one the decision maker was using. The next instruction from the Administration Assistant to Merk came before he arrived home. It had two sections of names removed from it, both large and both offset by 2 from the original.
That troubled me in how that communication between the White House and the CIA was happening without my having a record of it. If the information were conveyed by hand, say during the morning Presidential briefing on intelligence, that would be the case. I thus looked into whether that Administrative Assistant was attending that with Tenet. It turned out that he was, about every 2 weeks. I was able to get a copy of the White House logs during those 8 months. I wrote down the dates he attended and compared them to when he was sending the list changes to Merk. He did it the same day about 90% of the time, and at most 3 days later.
Thus, those changes were not coming through Tenet. Since if Tenet was the carrier for them, they could have come anytime in that 2 week period, not just right after the Administration Assistant attended. That says nothing about whether Tenet was witting.
When Merk returned he reported to the Administrative Assistant that his computer had been stolen. He did not report it to the police. The Administrative Assistant sent him a copy of his file through the US mail. I discussed with the counter-intelligence committee whether I should intercept it. They said not to worry because their bastardization of the information was sufficient.
Over the ensuing weeks, two more times the list was changed. Again the changes showed the offset by 2 and came on the same day that the Administrative Assistant went to the White House. By then I had done an extensive background check on that Administrative Assistant. He had been hired at the CIA shortly after Cheney took office. He had worked for a company that Cheney owned in the past. The books at that company had been cooked. I had also looked into what he did each day at the CIA. Although he was officially Tenet's Administrative Assistant, the work he did all day was directed almost exclusively by Cheney. It was as if, he was in Tenet's vicinity in order to frame Tenet for misdeeds that Cheney accomplished through him.
I took the matter to Tenet and explained how he was being framed. Because this was such a sensitive matter, I took the Head of the Counter-Intelligence section with me. I did not want what happened at that meeting to be my word against Tenet's, if it went badly. I wanted matters to be resolved, not to be made worse.
The Head of Counter-Intelligence was a very level headed man. He was a very careful thinker and planner. I let him do the talking and kept my big mouth shut as much as possible. He laid out the evidence. Tenet admitted that he had been told to hide from me the adult CIA deaths by the White House. But, he said that he could not in good conscience ignore the deaths of the family members. Thus, he had given me the assignment in the fashion that he did. He refused to say who at the White House had told him to cover up the adult CIA deaths. By then, I already knew. I had run across the tape of the Presidential Briefing at which that had happened. Bush had asked him how things were going over at the CIA. When Tenet started to complain about the number of deaths, Bush stopped him. He had said, "We will not discuss the deaths, ever." He had not actually said, "We will not discuss the adult deaths". So, Tenet had misheard, or misinterpreted, or decided to try to correct the problem. Had Tenet really wanted to cover up the problem of the deaths, he would not have given the problem to a remote viewer with investigative espionage skills and the courage to pursue the case. It would have been easy for him to give the case to someone who would do a "Warren Report" cover-up. He had not. He had assigned several people before me to look into it. They had made honest efforts mostly to investigate and then had backed off out of fear for their lives.
I am not saying the Tenet is a perfect person, no one is. But he did try to get these deaths stopped after the fact, in my opinion. My opinion in the matter is not an unbiased one, however. There are many reasons that that is the case which are beyond the scope of this text. So, judgment should be made by others on the evidence, not on my opinion.
That said, he did not stand up to the US Administration. He allowed unvetted people to have access to the building. They were criminals committed to stealing. He did not stop the thefts. Deaths of CIA personnel were the predictable consequence of that. It was criminal negligence for the DCI to allow unvetted people into the CIA. It was criminal negligence to not take all reasonable and necessary steps to ensure US National Security as was his sworn duty to do. That required him to take all reasonable and necessary steps to correct those breaches of CIA security or resign. He did not resign and the predictable deaths of innocent women and children happened "on his shift".
Someone in the White House selected who was to be targeted from Cheney's copy of the list. A computer technician wittingly made that CD, apparently at Cheney's direction as he put it on Cheney's desk without a note of explanation. Someone gave the list to the Administrative Assistant. Someone kept making decisions to change that list. Someone kept giving those changes to the Administrative Assistant every two weeks. Thus, it appeared that a group of conspirators plotted the deaths of CIA personnel, and continued executing that plan after 169 of them died, including 2 dozen women and children. Those people ought to be in jail for the rest of their lives next to Aldrich Ames, if there were any shred of justice in this country.
The CIA has acted as a criminal agency around the world--killing, torturing, and starting wars for profit. Its actions as an agency were directly responsible for many of those CIA personnel deaths in so much as it was not hard to motivate mercenaries to kill CIA people. It some sense it was the expected blow back for committing black ops, or even just belonging to such an agency. Those black ops caused much suffering and death around the world. They were in large part responsible for the wealth of the First World at the expense of the Third World. Christ instructed us to help the poor, not to rob, torture, and kill them.
“Lord, forgive us. We know not what we do."
It is possible to switch US intelligence to using only clean, transparent, and ethical methods. I proved that in CIA studies. I suggest that the system is broken. Under administration after administration, the CIA has tortured and killed people so that the Robber Barons can steal their resources, labor, and rights. It is time to stop this injustice before it destroys not just US National Security, but the world.
End of Case 9
(Submitted to the Committee on Thursday, May 22, 2008)
Case 10: Rumsfeld Tried to Bribe Me and Worse...
Rumsfeld walked into my office at the Pentagon in about late Nov. 2003 and tried to bribe me with an increase in rank, salary, and $20,000. I had previously investigated several cases of Pentagon fraud; Rumsfeld had blocked prosecution of them. I was starting to work on another case. Private contractors were being charged big fees for setting up trailers at military bases in the war zones. The fees were on the order of $20,000 to $50,000 a year for a water, toilet and electricity hook up on a 60 ft. by 20 ft. piece of desert. In Iraq, $20,00 would have bought you a nice house with water, toilet, and electricity before the US arrived. But what made it a scam instead of just an official rip off was that half the fee had to be paid up front in cash as a kickback to even get the space. Otherwise the request simply never got acted upon in time for the contractor to do his work. The evidence that I had collected so far showed that Rumsfeld was getting that cash when the fee was paid at the Pentagon. That evidence included security camera footage of contractors paying the cash into Rumsfeld’s hands in his office. It also included Xeroxes of 5 matching pages of the 2 sets of books which he kept. The company's representative was shown one set of books listing the inflated price when Rumsfeld asked for the money. The Pentagon set of books recorded only the amount paid by check. When that kickback was collected in the war zones, he appeared to be getting half of the cash. But, I only had one Pentagon source and he was not willing to sign a statement. For each 100 contractor trailers set up it appeared that Rumsfeld was making about $1 million. My best guess was that there were at least 2,500 such trailers set up in the war zones, bringing the figure to 25 times as much for at least a $25 million a year profit. He was depositing the cash in the vault in his office. Once a week an armored car picked it up and took it to the Chase Bank, a Rockefeller enterprise. I did not know how much Rockefeller got to launder that cash into an account, if anything. At that point I did not yet know into which account the cash was going.
Officially, I did counter-intelligence at both the CIA and Pentagon, not corruption investigations. But the dividing line between counter-intelligence work and fighting corruption is often non-existent in practice. That is because corruption is an almost invariable facet of a foreign penetration of an agency. So, if one ignores corruption, one has already lost the battle to prevent foreign penetration of an agency. To tell a counter-intelligence person to ignore corruption while they do their work, is like telling a police officer to ignore others in his office taking illegal drugs while he does his work. It is an oxymoron.
When Rumsfeld sat down and started talking about how I should "shape up" and "become a team member", I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Not wanting him to waste my time, I cut to the chase. I asked him, "What is in it for me?", as if I were willing to be corrupted.
He laid out a set of 'fringe benefits' which included a bonus and a promotion. I asked him to put it in writing and said that I would think about it overnight. He said he would and then got down to the details of what he wanted me to do "to earn that promotion and $20,000 bonus". What he wanted me to do was head a department at the Pentagon to "investigate" its fraud problems. But as I listened to the specifics of what he wanted me to do it sounded like the real point was to block all investigations.
That is, he conceded that the Pentagon's Criminal Investigation Division (CID) was not pursuing prosecution of corruption--he was the one blocking that! (see case 5) He said that all of the corruption cases would be sent over to my dept. allowing CID to "handle the serious criminal problems" better.
I wondered what he considered a serious crime, if sending soldiers into battle without bullet proof vests and equipment that worked wasn't considered one. Soldiers had died from having vests that were too hot to wear and didn't work. Another company made vests for $20 less a piece that were cooler and did work, but apparently did not make anyone a kickback. I wondered what he considered a serious crime, if allowing Halliburton to ship the soldiers only half food and water rations in the desert was not a serious crime? At least 4 soldiers had died of dehydration directly as a result of Halliburton's routinely shorting the shipments. It had been known since WWII that soldiers fighting in the desert could not drink enough water to rehydrate themselves unless they had enough of food to eat with it. I wondered what he considered a serious crime, if continuing to test artillery units that knocked soldiers unconscious or crushed them to death, was not a serious crime? (see case 5). It appeared that an enemy agent must be behind those decisions. Sending soldiers into battle without the water, food, and equipment they need is more cruel than summary execution of them. It causes them not just physical suffering but the intense suffering of knowing that their country has betrayed them. They often commit suicide after months or years of cruel and intense mental anguish (see Post-War Suicides May Exceed Combat Deaths, U.S. Says at http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601124&sid=a2_71Klo2vig&refer=home
In the UK a judge said that sending soldiers into battle without proper equipment violates their human rights--their right to life!
Then I asked Rumsfeld if I would be doing the investigations myself or overseeing them. He said, "Oh, not yourself, Tenet said that he can spare you at most 4 hours". I asked him if he had gotten from Tenet a firm promise of 4 hours of my time, as Tenet usually jealously guarded my time. He admitted that he had not. When I asked him how many staff I would have and with what training and skills, a blank look passed across his face. He said, "We will talk about it, if you sign on". I again pressed him, asking him what the budget of the department would be. He looked away uncomfortably, rocked his chair up on its back legs and said "It is something to be discussed". Later in the conversation, I mentioned by name a Major I would want in my dept.. He again rocked his chair onto its back legs during a pause and then said, "We would have to see if there is money in the budget for him." Majors are not high ticket salaries. What was he intending to use, a single unskilled Private to investigate the corruption of Generals and the tens of thousands of Pentagon employees and private contractors? In short, it appeared that he intended to create a corruption investigation unit with 4 hours of oversight of no workers at all. The GAO intended the position to be a full time one. It was quite possible that Tenet would be used in this scheme to prevent my even spending 4 hours a week at the task. His offer was clearly designed to foil the GAO's intention. For me to accept, under the proposal he designed, would have been selling my soul straight to the devil.
After he left about 40 minutes later, I made some enquires. Previously, Rumsfeld had asked 4 Pentagon officials in turn to head that department and they had all turned him down. I went to see 2 of them I knew and asked them why. One said it was a dead end job with no advancement possibilities since Rumsfeld would not allow any real investigation of the corruption cases. The other said that he didn't like having doors slammed in his face and being disliked by his colleagues. He said that he was willing to die for his country but not be ostracized for it.
Rumsfeld's office sent me over the contract for the position. It would raise me to a 3-star general from a 2-star. It would also give me about $1,200 a year more in pay, for 10% time. When I read the fine print, I saw that the contract was written up by a lawyer just for me. It referred to the signatory as a 10% Pentagon--90% CIA employed person. It appeared to have a nasty clause in it that could be used to put me in prison, if I did any actual investigating. It said that my sharing evidence with other federal agencies would be construed as the crime of disclosing National Security secrets. That crime would be punishable by 10-years imprisonment and a $50,000 fine for each occurrence. It waived my right to a jury trial in the prosecution of that crime and said that the proceedings would be secret to protect National Security. The document made it a National Security crime if I sent a corruption case over to the US Justice Dept. or talked about one to the GAO! It tried to make it legal to jail me without a fair trial, if I reported a corruption case to anyone other than Rumsfeld! In fact, it made it a National Security crime for me to even discuss a case with my boss at the CIA or the CIA's counter-intelligence committee. That was true even if I had uncovered a foreign mole at the Pentagon in the pursuit of a corruption case. It was as if the person writing it was so concerned about covering up their corruption that they were willing to have any number of foreign moles at the Pentagon stealing the location of US missiles and their launch codes. The document purposely perverted the term National Security to mean the security of corrupt people to steal, not the security of the Nation from all enemies foreign and domestic.
I walked down a hallway and plopped it on the desk of a Pentagon lawyer, call him Major Larrel. I asked him if this was standard in Pentagon contracts. He looked out it and asked in surprise, "This is a gag, isn't it?". I said that I did not think so, and asked him to find out for certain. He found the Pentagon lawyer who had written it and talked to him. It was not a gag as in a joke. But it was a gag as in a gag order.
I went back to two of the men who had turned down the position and asked to see their contracts. Only one of them had bothered to ask for one. It was completely different from mine and seemed quite standard. The lawyer thought so too. I then investigated and found out that Rumsfeld had briefed the lawyer who wrote up my custom contract in his office. I was in luck--over a dozen intelligence agencies had bugs in his office and it was not hard for me to get a copy of that conversation.
It should be noted in this context that I had frequently advised Tenet, Rumsfeld, and the White House that their offices were bugged by foreign intelligence agencies. I had also offered to help them correct that problem. They rarely took me up on that offer. When they had, I had proven to them that they had many bugs that the bug sweepers did not pick up. The time I helped locate bugs in the Oval Office in 2004, there were 16 bugs found AFTER THE BUG SWEEPERS went through. Most were in expensive gifts that sat on desks, on shelves, or hung on walls. In order to prevent recurrences, they had to follow the security procedures. Those included not letting criminals/foreign agents come into their offices to plant the bugs. It also included not excepting any gifts "from admirers". Since they refused to use those standard intelligence procedures, they usually had a full set of bugs in place again a week after a set was cleared out. It was part of how their reckless behavior shredded real National Security. Corruption is the willingness violate the common good for a private gain. Corruption is always an enemy of National Security.
I asked Major Larrel to listen to the tape and give me his opinion as to whether it was legal. He said that he was shocked at the contents and begged me to listen to it myself. He listed about 4 violations in it, one being a conspiracy to commit fraud. Another was to silence whistle blowers by violating their rights to due process. A third was the intention to falsely imprison a person. The fourth was on the order of undue legal risk in the execution of one's official duties. I did not have time to listen to the tape then. I sent it over to the GAO as evidence as was my habit.
About 2 days later, I got a frantic call from a man at the GAO. He was not the one that I had sent material to before who shelved it for future use--when the political climate became accommodating. This GAO official had listened to the tape and then referred the matter to the US Justice Department He was frantic to reach me as a lawyer at Justice wanted me to come to an appointment to see him that afternoon. I barely had time to make it over there from the CIA. He said that he had been trying to reach me at the CIA by phone and couldn't. I had been in my office all the time he had tried to reach me. I said that I had also had that problem that the GAO official could not reach me, unless I happened to pick up to call out. He said that that was 'obstruction of justice'. He also said that he had listened to the tape, something I had not done yet, and that I needed to prosecute immediately. I asked him why. He said, "Because the case is so egregious". I asked him why he thought that. He played me a two-minute section of the tape. Rumsfeld had asked the lawyer to write up the contract so that I could be imprisoned for exposing fraud. The Justice lawyer then went on about how that was a felony offense. He had not yet seen the contract. I showed him the original. He was completely shocked that the lawyer had put it in writing, proving that he was in on the conspiracy to deprive me of my right to freedom.
As we were speaking in his office, an official barged in. He was not that lawyer's boss, but the boss of his boss. He insisted that I leave the Justice Department immediately. At first he had said that I was wanted at the Pentagon. I told him I was done for the week at the Pentagon. He came back about 15 minutes later and said that I was needed immediately at the CIA. I called the CIA and found that no one was looking for my help then. He came back about 10 minutes later and just insisted that I leave. I asked him on what grounds. He started spouting legalese at me that sounded like he was accusing me of 'being unwanted' and 'trespassing'. I told him that I had an appointment and had been invited to come. He went away and about 10 minutes later came back again. He said that he had called the security guards to remove me already, and that I better leave immediately or I would be arrested. I wanted to see what the charge was against me. I felt that I had a right to know and said so. So, I stayed. The lawyer I was talking to had agreed that I had a right to know and invited me to stay. He had told the higher official that it appeared that I was being harassed.
The guards took almost 20 minutes to arrive. They refused to answer the question I asked about what the charge was. They insisted I leave. The lawyer told them I was an invited guest of his. But they started manhandling my body. I went limp and asked them to arrest me, if they had charges against me. They got very mad at me. They had no charges. They had rehearsed charging me with resisting arrest and that was what one said to me. The lawyer laughed since I had just asked them to arrest me. One of the guards then struck me in view of both the lawyer, the security camera and the other guard. I had to laugh at that move--the man was a fool. I had a bruise on my shoulder where he had hit me hard with his fist. It was a bruise as large as a grapefruit within a minute or so. Apparently, he had ruptured a large blood vessel in my shoulder. Being a medical physician I wanted to look at it and apply pressure to it. I pulled my blouse off the shoulder without exposing so much as my bra and applied pressure to the part of the bruise that was swelling the fastest. The guards then wrote up a ridiculous citation saying that I had fallen down the stairs and exposed myself like a flasher! I had not left the office nor exposed myself as the security camera footage clearly showed. I asked to file a complaint of assault and battery and they refused to take it. They ended up bodily carrying me by arms and legs out the door of the Justice Department with the lawyer following in tow the whole time. They dropped me on the sidewalk causing bruising of my tail bone. I again asked them to tell me the charges and to arrest me which they did not do.
The lawyer carefully documented what he had witnessed and had it notarized. I went to a physician and had the injuries documented. I then went to the FBI Headquarters close to the Justice Department and filed the assault and battery charges. They gave me a copy of that complaint paperwork. I then sent it, the lawyer's statement, and later the tape of the security camera footage to my usual GAO official. With the evidence I had sent a note that it appeared not to be possible yet to file a case against Rumsfeld.
Perhaps I should mention how I was able to collect so much security camera footage and evidence. I taught intelligence collection classes to CIA, Defense Intelligence, and Office of Naval officers. I had taught thousands of officers over the decades. Some of them were more than willing to pitch in to help me fight corruption. It also gave them a little more of my time as well.
In the course of my CIA work, I went over to Iraq to collect some intelligence. That allowed me to meet with many of my intelligence students there and ask them what they knew about corruption. I listened for more than 2 hours to their many eye-witness testimonies on the subject. I recorded that discussion and later asked several of them if they would write up formal reports. I also asked others of them to collect sufficient evidence to make what they knew into a well founded case which could be prosecuted. Out of that grew 3 other investigations, much more serious in terms of their effect on the soldiers and on the war at large. But I also found out more about the trailer kickbacks. It turned out that the contractors were only allowed to put certain types of trailers on the bases. They had to fill out forms to get the trailer approved to set it on a plot of desert. The intelligence officers said that in practice the contractors had to buy the trailers from either Halliburton or Carlyle Group parent companies. If they did not, their permits to drive the trailers onto the base were delayed for months. In one case they knew of the contractor was still waiting after a year. He had refused to pay the cash under the table or buy a new trailer from those companies at grossly inflated prices. As a result his contract was cancelled by the Pentagon saying that he was unable to complete the work. But he had completed the work! He had done so by setting up his trailer off the base, supplying his own water and power, etc. He then tried to contest the Pentagon's canceling his renewal by proving to them that he had done the work. He sent photos, signed statements, including from a judge in Iraq, etc. But he was unable to get the contract renewed. The Pentagon gave the contract to someone else. I asked the intelligence officer telling me this to collect the evidence and send it to me. He did. That contractor had done excellent work. If I remember correctly he was rebuilding some schools in Iraq. His buildings were sound. The Iraqis were quite happy with them. But the Pentagon was not. He had not played the kickback game with they and they had thrown him out of the game for it. I submitted evidence of that to the GAO.
When I looked into the selling of the trailers themselves, I found that the scam I had started working on was the tip of the iceberg. The trailers were being sold at outrageous prices, even after accounting for the cost of shipping them to Iraq. Plus, it was possible to buy trailers in Iraq at a fraction of the cost that were built in Europe and worked just fine. Contractors had preferred them early in the war. But when they could not get them onto the US bases they had to abandon them. The US taxpayer had to eat the cost of that. The Halliburton parent company trailers were shoddily made. They broke down frequently even just sitting in place. So, many contractors abandoned them--they were too expensive to repair. They then bought the Carlyle parent company model, often as their 3rd purchase in 3 years. That trailer was serviceable apparently; at least I personally heard no complaints against it.
Now comes the real kicker. The Halliburton people apparently got mad that their trailers were not being used anymore. The Pentagon announced that certain bases would only allow Halliburton parent company trailers. The excuse was that it allowed hook-ups to all be the same on that base. But there was a $10 coupling part allowed the Carlyle trailers to use the Halliburton type hookups. So, it was ridiculous and obstructing the war effort to require Halliburton trailers. One of my intelligence officers brought me a picture of the trailers on a base that only allowed the Halliburton trailers. The pictures showed that that base had hookups for the European trailers. Each trailer had to have a $25 part to allow the Halliburton trailers to use the hookup. The extra $10 part allowed a Carlyle trailer to use the hookup. Yet Pentagon would not allow the European or the Carlyle trailers on it. That was a ridiculous and unnecessary obstruction. Supposedly, the war was a coalition action, but in practice unless one paid Carlyle or Halliburton an arm or a leg in jacked up prices or kickbacks, one was out of the game. The result was inefficiency, work delays, and hampering of the reconstruction of Iraq. That is the predictable result of graft--the results are always the same.
When I returned from Iraq about weeks later, my usual GAO contact asked to meet with me. He was very concerned about what had happened to me. He had invited the Justice Department lawyer to meet with us also at the restaurant. He was about 20 minutes late due to being held up in traffic. Shortly after he arrived, the police came and said that I was wanted at the CIA. I called the CIA and no one needed me immediately. Then they came back and said that I was wanted for resisting arrest on that particular day at the Justice Department The Justice Department lawyer explained to them that no charges had been presented and that I had repeatedly asked to be arrested so as to find out what the charges were. I asked those police also to show me the charge papers or arrest me so that I could see the charges. They were thrown into confusion and went away.
They came back shortly and put handcuffs on me saying that they were arresting me. I again asked the charges and they did not answer. They took me down to their station and threw me roughly into a cell causing me to fall onto the cement floor. I had bruises on my knees. They held me over night and refused to give me water or even a single blanket or mattress. There was no mattress on the bed only a wire frame as the security camera footage later showed. I had to sleep on the cold cement floor. My coat had been taken from me. The guards refused to give it back. They refused close the window above me or turn on the heat. I shivered all night from the cold as it was wintertime. The lack of warmth was obviously intentional harassment in my case. Other prisoners were brought many blankets to compensate for the open window in my cell. They said that it had never been opened before, nor the heat turned off, until I arrived. They all had mattresses and even sheets. They were brought water and even coffee and food, while I was denied any by the guards. The footage on the security camera clearly showed that discriminatory treatment.
Ex-CIA operative Al Martin in his book The Conspirators says that when he turned whistle blower he was thrown into prison without charges repeatedly. He said that happened to him about 20 times. Each time he was booked under an alias so he could not to prove that it had happened to him. That was like what happened to me.
The Justice lawyer got me out the next day. He then said to me, "Whatever you are up against, it is bigger than I can handle. I have been threatened with being fired, if I ever have any contact with you again." I later heard that he was fired by the Justice Department I did not hear that until about 2 months later. But when I checked on it, it appeared that he had been fired the next day. Both he and the GAO official had written up their eye-witness testimony of that restaurant episode. I also managed to get the tape of the security camera from the restaurant. Those items all got stored over at the GAO.
In addition, I sent copies of the calls from Rumsfeld over to the Justice Department to the boss of the boss and Justice security, and their calls back asking what to do next. I also sent copies of the call Rumsfeld made to the DC police and their calls back asking what to do next. Not only had Rumsfeld planned to have me falsely imprisoned, but he had done so. Plus, I was assaulted and battered twice on his phoned recommendation to the security people and the DC police 'to rough her up so she gets the picture". I had been safer in Iraq; no enemy had even tried to harm me, deprive me of food, water, or warmth.
I carefully documented what had been done to me in that DC jail. I also included a physician's examination the next day and my second complaint paperwork to the FBI on my abuse at the hands of the DC police. I also included the security camera footage from the police station. I had the names of other prisoners who had witnessed it as well, and one guard who refused to participate in it. I also sent over the conversation between Cheney and Rumsfeld discussing what methods they would use 'to break her". My alias was the only name mentioned on the tape. The conversation made it clear that the objective was to stop my "nosing into their affairs", i.e. their corruption. There were no allegations that I was a terrorist etc. or that my security clearances should be stopped. They were not. I went back to working at the CIA the same as before. The methods they discussed "withholding necessities", that translated into withholding food and water for about 18 hours. It also included exposure to cold. They had discussed the possibility that I would die of it. They had agreed to blame it on the jail as an accident if that happened. In addition, Cheney mentioned to Rumsfeld in that tape that Bush had signed the order 'for the torture" so that they were covered.
People can die in 3 hours from cold exposure. What had been done to me was deliberate torture with the intention to cover up my murder, if I died from it. No measures had been put in place to protect me from dying from cold. So, in that sense it was an attempted murder. Twice during the night I passed out from the cold believing that I would never wake up again.
I was tortured not because I was a terrorist. I was tortured because I refused to play their game of selling our country's true National Security out for a buck.
End of Case 10
(Sent to Congressman Waxman, Chairman of the US Govt. Oversight and Reform Committee on Monday May 26, 2008)
Case 11: Halliburton's Hostile Break-in of the CIA's Computers
In about June 2001, the CIA and Halliburton started software development to make their book cooking programs compatible. In January 2002, about 2 weeks after starting counter-intelligence oversight of that project, a young man entered my office at Halliburton's CIA offices without wearing a badge. That surprised me, normally the Halliburton people wore their Halliburton badges inside their office, then hung it in a rack next to the door to the CIA's hallway. They picked up their CIA badge from that sage green metal "pocket rack". So, the first thing I did was ask him his name. Then I walked him over to that rack, assuming to find both his Halliburton and CIA badges in it. But the name he gave me did not match a name on the rack.
I then asked him how he had gained entry. He said that he was the nephew of "Halliburton's Representative to the CIA", call him HallCIA, and that HallCIA had let him in. That did not make me happy. I was about to call the CIA's security office and Halliburton's as well, when I decided to first ask him why he had entered my office. He said that HallCIA had asked him to deliver to me some invoices that I had asked for from Halliburton's main office. He pulled out of his pants pocket a half inch thick stack of papers without an envelope and laid on my desk. Frankly, it looked to me like he was in the process of stealing them and decided to give them to me to prevent Security from catching him with the papers in his pocket.
I asked him why the regular courier from Halliburton had not been sent. He gave me a flimsy excuse that the man was busy making a delivery to another company. I then asked him why he had come into my office. He said that he thought my office was empty and that he could sit down and "do some work". Then seeing that his excuses were not adding up he hastened to add "while I waited for you to give you the papers". I thought it more likely that having stolen some papers, he had intended to steal some from my office too.
Intelligence professionals like to use small moles to catch bigger moles, if at all possible. A mole is any person inside an intelligence agency whose loyalty is not to the govt. of that country. Usually, a mole is loyal to another country, but nowadays many moles are stateless, owing their allegiance only to a corporation or to money. Although exposing a mole may be the most straightforward thing to do, one can often get better results by leaving them in place until one can catch who they are reporting to. But sometimes it is possible to both report them and leave them in place at the same time, if the reporting of them does not lead to effective prosecution of them. I judged that that would be the case in this instance.
A plan flashed across my mind as to how I could use this young liar to advantage in my investigations of Halliburton. I would still report him to CIA security, but not to Halliburton Security. The later would do no good anyway given that his uncle was head of the Halliburton at the CIA. I took care to document that relationship by asking to see his driver's license and making a copy of it. I then teased him that he needed to get a Halliburton Security Badge in order to avoid getting his uncle in trouble. I picked up the phone and spoke into it as if I was speaking to Halliburton's Security. He ran out the door without the papers as I was sitting on them on top of my desk.
That was the result that was most useful to me, given my plans on how to use his breach of security to further my investigations. I then called CIA building security and reported that there was "an intruder in the CIA" who just ran out of it, giving them a description. As he was outside of Halliburton's office, he was unprotected by Halliburton. He was still on CIA soil; they quickly picked him up in the parking lot.
I then faxed CIA security my full report on the incident, including the young man's driver's license. They did arrest him and put him in the CIA's jail on the ground floor.
But within a few hours HallCIA had intervened and Tenet released him. I obtained copies of those phone calls. In them HallCIA lied and said that his nephew was delivering papers to another person at Halliburton's office to the CIA. Tenet had told CIA security that the papers were routine Halliburton invoices and not secrets.
When I looked at the papers they were not Halliburton invoices, they were CIA invoices and they had been printed inside the CIA that day. They had then been routed to Halliburton by a bribed man inside the CIA. That man had accidentally routed some of them to me and they were sitting in my inbox. Perhaps he was trying to alert me to the problem, even if only subconsciously. It appeared that the nephew knew of that error and had tried to pick them up from my inbox.
The CIA invoices were not for Halliburton products. They were also not for products from a competitor of Halliburton's. They were for security products that the CIA used and knowing exactly which of those security products the CIA was using could allow an unscrupulous person or groups to hack into the CIA's computers through a back door. That is, third party software sometimes has known security flaws. So, those precise invoices getting into the hands of the Russians, the Chinese etc., or even into Halliburton's hands was a grave violation of US National Security. It was obvious at that point why the uncle had commissioned his nephew to take them out of the office, instead of walking out with them himself. It was an act of treason!
It was quite curious then that Tenet had said in his phone call that the papers were "routine Halliburton invoices and not secrets". It suggested that he knew that in fact they were important secrets and was trying to cover that up. I say that because it was known to the CIA that I had the papers and Tenet had not asked me what they were. How did HallCIA claim to know what they were unless he had sent his nephew specifically into get them? He had opened the door to let him in--the security cameras confirmed that.
After giving the invoices to the CIA's Counter-Intelligence Head and discussing my plan with him, I put nearly identical invoices back in my inbox. The Head of Counter-Intelligence then made sure that the CIA's computer people were watching the back door on that third party software very carefully.
Two days later the CIA's computer people reported an attempted intrusion via that backdoor. It was from Halliburton's main office computer. We knew the attempted intrusion was a result of those CIA invoices that I had purposely left in my inbox. That was because of the precise alterations that had been made in them. The details are not something that I should go into on these pages. It appeared that those invoices were sold to the Russians when Halliburton's computer experts were not able to hack into the CIA's computer using them. I say that because 3 days later, there was a more sophisticated attempted intrusion using that same back door. It carried that same precise alteration fingerprint and the IP address was from inside Moscow.
The CIA's computer people had not just watched that back door, they had booby trapped it with a computer worm. One property of that worm was to broadcast back to the CIA the identity of the computer that attempted intrusion. It did that by looking at more than the IP address which can be faked. Thus, the CIA was sure that the first intrusion was from Halliburton's main office and the second from Russian intelligence's First Directorate which deals with Foreign intelligence.
A third attempted intrusion of that backdoor using that precise alteration came about 6 days later. It was again from the same Halliburton computer. By then the CIA's computer people had set up a virtual computer inside that back door. That let them determine what Halliburton was trying to accomplish by that intrusion. That turned out to be quite interesting.
In simplistic terms, Halliburton's computer tried to download all of the CIA's security codes for all of its computers and buildings around the world. That included the CIA's creative accounting computer and regular accounting computers. It appeared that the point of that was as in a coup, to take control of them. The Halliburton computer tried to corrupt all the files of the CIA's creative accounting computer to make them unusable. Had it succeeded all of the CIA's front companies would have been without the ability to print up cooked books. Maybe that would have been a good thing! But it would have caused the CIA to waste lots of taxpayer money to cook new books.
I was able to look at Halliburton's emails in their main office from Halliburton's computer at the CIA. Their main office programmers knew that solving the incompatibility with the CIA's computers was going to cost a lot of effort and money. They appeared not to know that the CIA's cover-ups were more sophisticated. They blamed the CIA for forcing them to make 90% of the changes. They did not seem to understand that the CIA's cooked books did not expose Halliburton's cooked books. They intended to destroy the CIA's files, assuming that it would then adopt the Halliburton method of cooking the books. But the CIA was firmly committed to their methods. The CIA's creative accounting head told me that the CIA would never have adopted Halliburton's shoddier cover-up methods.
A phone call archived by the Mossad, showed that Cheney himself had approved Halliburton's plan to destroy the CIA's creative accounting computer. It was worse than that though; it was an attempted coup to overthrow US National Security. Cheney was paid $400,000 by the Russians for those CIA invoices. The Russians clearly believed that they were valuable secrets, and for good reason.
The Russians paid Cheney into a Swiss bank account that the CIA had set up for him. That payment was made the day before their first attempt to intrude into the CIA's computer via that back door. They made another handful of attempts after that. Their assault on the CIA's computer was not a hundredth as bad as Halliburton's. They had not attempted to corrupt data or destroy anything. They had not attempted to download security codes. They had sought specific intelligence information. CIA analysts later said that the Russian intrusion was mainly to figure out which of their secrets the CIA had already learned. Thus it was defensive in nature, not offensive. That was not at all true of Halliburton's intrusion which was a full scale assault with the intention to control the CIA and destroy at will.
I did not send the documentation of this case to the GAO. I gave it instead to the CIA's Counter-Intelligence Committee.
End of Case 11
(Submitted to Waxman's Congressional Committee on Govt. Oversight and Reform
on Monday 26 May 2008)
Case 12: The Exorbitant Cost of Cooking Intelligence
Shortly before Tenet announced his resignation on June 3, 2004, I submitted evidence to the GAO that the intelligence reports at the CIA were being cooked at ridiculous cost.
[Note: For a brief overview of this topic please see an 8 minute You Tube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EP18L0PtKS0 including that Chalibi, a convicted bank swindler, was paid $345,000.00 a month to provide intelligence to the CIA.]
What I sent the GAO included evidence that selected people inside the CIA were paying "independent" think tanks and scholars very high fees for articles. The independents had been contracted to have a particular point of view or conclusion. It was one way that the neo-cons used to shift the CIA's analysts and foreign policy in the direction that they wanted. The corruption case that I sent the GAO had to do with exorbitant fees being paid for these cooked "independent" articles.
I documented that one 5-page article had been written in 2 days to re-iterate a self-serving view; the CIA and thus the US taxpayer had paid over a million dollars for it. It was not a report on a scientific study that had taken time to complete. The author of it was not a scientist. I looked at that article myself. It had not a single reference in it. It faithfully followed the handwritten notes of the author from the call which gave him the assignment. The person who called him was a staffer at the White House. The author was an academician at an Ivy League college, Harvard, if I remember correctly. The opinion took on a respectable patina after passing through the typewriter of that professor. The CIAs analysts to then reference the opinion as if it were fact in their own reports.
The article was on how Middle Eastern countries were financially incompetent to manage their own accounting and banking affairs. No evidence was given for that assertion. It recommended that loans made to and from Middle Eastern banks to US corporations/banks under a certain size should be forced to go through banking structures that the US could control. The staffer calling in that assignment to the Professor had received a call within the hour from David Rockefeller. The staffer's hand written notes from that call showed that he had faithfully transmitted Rockefeller's instructions to the Professor. Those instructions included recommending that the World Bank and the Bank of International Settlements in Basel be used to give "the US oversight control". But as both of those institutions were controlled, not by the US govt. but by David Rockefeller, it gave the control to him, not the US Govt.. That is, unless one made the mistake of thinking that David Rockefeller was the US Govt.. It was a mistake that perhaps he had made subconsciously.
I guessed that the point of that propaganda stunt by Rockefeller was to set the stage for his taking over many banks in the Middle East later. It also seemed designed to cut out smaller companies from being able to compete with his own enterprises. It later prevented Iraqis and Afghanis from getting the loans they needed to rebuild themselves. It forced them to wait for US reconstruction by large US corporations. It was part of a set of US policies which put a stranglehold on their economies in practice. That often forced them to work for the US occupation of their country or watch their children starve to death.
[There is an excellent video "When Ireland Starved" of a historical example of how economic policies can turn a natural disaster such as the potato blight into a mass starvation which could have been prevented. For example, in that case British landowners growing oats in Ireland sold them overseas rather than letting the Irish eat them.]
The Rockefellers had funded much eugenics research and were strong supporters of population control measures. Rockefeller's protégée Henry Kissinger stated in a memo;
"Depopulation should be the highest priority of US foreign policy towards the Third World….". National Security Memorandum (NSSM 200) early 1970's
When that set of about 22 policies in the Middle East caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children in those countries, it raised the issue of whether that was intentional genocide or an unintended consequence.
The CIA had an 18-foot long section of floor to ceiling library books on how to cause populations to starve. Thus, I did not think it beyond the realm of possibility that the set of foreign policies which resulted from this cooking of intelligence intended starvation. Certainly, anyone creating policies which intended genocide would want to disguise who proposed those policies. This case does not attempt to answer the question of whether deaths of so many children in Iraq and Afghanistan were intentional or unintentional consequences of that set of policies.
I want to mention a few historical facts in passing. They are relevant to how bad it could look for Rockefeller, Bush, and Cheney, if they were seen as the sources for that set of policies and the effects they had. A million dollars to launder an opinion as fact seems very excessive. But, if that laundering prevented one from being accused of genocide, then that stellar cost may be more easily understood.
People become agents of foreign powers largely by blackmail. Counter-intelligence people always have to investigate what could be exposed. That helps them judge how likely it is that a person's actions are being driven by a foreign agent, and sometimes even how to correct that.
The Bush Family had worked for the Rockefeller Family, both directly and indirectly, starting since great grandfather Samuel Bush was a war profiteer in WWII. [Please see the extensive references for this paragraph at the end of this case which explain the connections.] Standard Oil was a Rockefeller enterprise. In WWII, Standard Oil of New Jersey had made a deal with IG Farben (which produced the Zyclon B gas for the death camps) and together they built the Auschwitz Labor Camp. That was to have the slave labor for their factories nearby. War crime convictions resulted for some of those involved. According to the Director of the Holocaust Museum in Florida, grandfather Prescott Bush and his partner Thyseen were also involved in the deal that built of the Auschwitz Labor Camp. His partner funded Hitler into power and wrote the book "I Paid Hitler". They had coal and steel factories near the Auschwitz Labor camp. According to records in the US National Archives, three times in WWII some of Prescott Bush's companies were seized as Nazi front companies under the "Trading with the Enemy Act". After the war he was sued by Auschwitz survivors for making money off their slave labor. He received 1.5 million dollars in profits. A Dutch intelligence officer had said that Prescott Bush oversaw a portion of the slave labor at Auschwitz. Bush, Sr.'s Presidential Campaign advisors included more than a handful of former Nazi officers. More recently, Mayberry's testimony in Congress revealed that the US Embassy in Baghdad was being built under Bush, Jr.'s command by slave labor. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney confronted Rumsfeld about Halliburton and DynCo. continuing to get US Govt. contracts after they were implicated in the running of sex slaves. Bush said he would look into it but did not change that. [Note: I have only cited public references which others can verify for themselves; what I had access to from inside the CIA and the Rockefeller Archives was much more definitive.]
Bush was out of the White House during the hour of the transmission of that part of the economic strangle hold proposal and there was no evidence of a call to him. Cheney was in the White House in a meeting. I could find no security camera footage to show that the staffer had sought or received Cheney's input on the matter. And no extra points were added to the staffers notes that were not covered in the phone call from Rockefeller.
That staffer had a title like White House researcher. But, when I looked into what he actually did by watching his computer screen and emails, he did not research topics. What he did was take the opinions of neo-cons and 'create the research' citations to support them. More than half of his inputs were coming from David Rockefeller--about 55%. About 15% were coming from Bush, Jr. and 20% from Cheney. Also disturbing to me from a counter-intelligence point of view was that most of the rest were coming from foreign sources, including the Saudi Ambassador to the US. That meant that even foreign agents were cooking CIA's Dept. of Intelligence's reports and thus shaping US foreign policy.
I then looked into who was overseeing that staffer's work. That was not encouraging. He was being bribed by the Saudis and 2 other foreign agents, one from Libya and one from Egypt. The oversight of him had not been sufficient to detect that. It had not even attempted to ensure that most of his work was being done for those whom the taxpayers had purportedly elected.
Next I went to talk to 3 CIA analysts whom I respected. I showed them the 5-page article and asked them to speculate on how that Professor had come to write the content in it. Two of them said that he likely wrote it as a result of his academic interest in the area. They considered that what he said was 'probably right and probably based on a lot of in depth research'. I pointed out that he was in the Political Science dept., not the Business School. That was a fact that any analyst could have by searching on his name on the internet. But it was not a fact that appeared in the citation of his article in the CIA's reports. They then said, "Well, that makes it less convincing, unless he had the help of a person in business administration." I then pointed out that unless he had the help of many spies in many Middle Eastern banks that the help of a business person was pointless. Although one could look at how many cases of fraud charges Middle Eastern countries had brought against banks, that does not tell you whether that means that the countries were thus ensuring a clean banking system or not. Let me relate it to a problem that you have experience in. One can't tell by the number of speeding tickets the police give whether the traffic will be normal or too fast in a town. At that point the analysts conceded that it was unlikely that his opinions were based on fact. Any one reading the article from the point of view of "How did that professor have the data to arrive at those conclusions?" would have realized that the opinion was likely to be based on mere hearsay. There are thousands of banks over a dozen Middle Eastern countries. If the professor had limited himself to referring to a single bank, it was possible that he had the data to reach the conclusions that it was poorly run.
These analysts turned off their usually excellent analytical skills after reading that a respected expert from Harvard wrote the article. They accepted his writing as truth without further proof because they assumed that he must have done his homework well to stay at Harvard. But his colleagues at Harvard never saw those articles he sent to the CIA.
The 3rd analyst had seen the article before. He said to me, "Oh, that professor writes whatever the US Administration wants us the tell them." We take our clues as to what to write from his articles and that gets us promoted". I asked him how many articles of that professor's he had read. He pulled them out of a file drawer within easy reach of his desk and handed them to me. There were over 20 articles. I copied them and looked them over.
Then I called up the Professor and I asked him to write an article for me. Before I even told him on what topic, he asked me how much I would pay him. I said that I was at the CIA. He said that the CIA paid him different amounts according to who at the CIA called him. He wanted a dollar figure and whether it would go into a tax free Swiss account or a US account. I cited him a figure of $10,000 for a 3 page report and he hung up on me. I called him back and asked him how much he wanted for a 3 page report. He said that with his reputation to protect, he needed $100,000 a page. I said that seemed steep to me. He said, "Then find someone else." I agreed to pay $100,000 for a 3-page report and we bargained over price. He agreed to write 3 full pages for $120,000. He had still not asked the topic! Then he asked me what I wanted him to say in the article. I said that I wanted a follow up article on the 5-page one which dealt with a single Middle Eastern Bank. I asked him which bank had been the worst of those he knew about. He could not give the name of a single Middle Eastern Bank, let alone name one that the State Dept. had already listed as suspect and not worthy of US investments. I had that State Dept. list in front of me. I waited assuming that he would rifle through his papers to find his copy of it. It was not classified information. But instead he asked me to name the bank that should be the subject of his report. I gave him a name--I knew that no such bank existed. He agreed and again asked me what the article should say. I told him the I wanted to know what banking practices it used that were substandard and the scandals that had resulted from it. I said that any scandal probably had forced people are of their homes in a foreclosure and had forced people to be homeless. I told him that I had heard of a case of a 4-year-old Israeli girl dying on the streets in Jerusalem because an Arab bank associated with this one had gone bankrupt. He said to me, "Now you are talking. I can give you what you need but I needed to know what that was."
He sent me the article the same afternoon. It appeared that he was a faster typer than I was. Given the time it took him to get it to me he had to have over a 90 words a minute typing skill. The article sounded well founded. It included 3 scandals at the bank and ended on the note of the Israeli girl dying on the street after her family was forced out of their home.
I then sent that article and a survey to many of the CIA's analysts. I tried to send it to every CIA analyst at Headquarters, but a few later complained that they had not gotten 'the great banking article' from me. When I looked into how many analysts did not get that survey, it was less than 4%. Since I offered to send them another article if they would send me back a completed survey, I got about an 80% response rate after personally walking the halls of the analysts to remind them. The results of that survey showed that CIA analysts were quick to adopt opinions without investigation. About 10% went on line looking for more about the scandals. Even after finding nothing about them on the internet, 60% still believed that the article had been based on fact. Only 20% of the analysts said that the article was hearsay without supporting references that they could check. And this was in the CIA's Intelligence Dept.! It was a dreadful performance for intelligence analysts.
The article I passed out was a four page one on how their reports were being cooked by feeding them material like that article. It included who was behind the writing of the articles, including foreign agents, how much it was costing the US taxpayer to launder those neo-con opinions into presumed facts, and the results of the survey showing how successfully they were being duped. It had taken me four days of very hard work and long hours to write those 4 pages.
Tenet demanded that I "stop taking up the time of the analysts."! I pointed out that the amount of time I had taken up was the amount required to read 7 pages and fill out a 2 page multiple choice questionnaire. He replied that analysts had 'lost days of work' trying to find that bogus company and its scandals. I challenged him to find me a single case where an analyst had lost over 4 hours. He sent a bigwig in Intelligence "down to have a talk with me". I lambasted the man for running a shoddy dept. He had been the person at the CIA calling the professor the most and paying him the highest rates, up to $200,000 a page for a "rush case". All of the professor's articles were rushed through as fast as he could type. He expected me to sit by and idly twiddle my thumbs while he destroyed the integrity of US intelligence. About 40% of his time was spent 'outsourcing' CIA intelligence analysis assignments--that is finding who to bribe to write up the US Administration's opinions as academic or well-founded facts. He was the counterpart of the White House Researcher. What they 'researched' was how to cook the CIA's intelligence to make it say what the US Administration wanted to hear. He was the one who had gone to Tenet saying that I had wasted the time of his analysts.
When I looked into who he took assignments from it was not primarily Tenet. The pattern was much the same as for the White House researcher. Most of his assignments, about 60% were coming from David Rockefeller. Only 10% were coming from Tenet. About 15% were coming from Bush and Cheney. Most of the rest were coming from the White House researcher. That piqued my interest. Why was the White House researcher not commissioning the studies directly?
When I looked into the reports that had been written on request of the White House researcher to the CIA's Intelligence researcher, a pattern emerged. The pattern I detected first was the illegal arms trade. The White House appeared to be unwilling to directly commission articles on the illegal trafficking of drugs, weapons, and human slaves. I called up the White House researcher. He assumed that Tenet had directed me to call as I was seen by many people as Tenet's go-fer. I asked him for a list of good independent researchers and what they would or would not write about. He sent me over his computer reference file that he used to select writers. I then compared it to a similar list from the computer of the CIA's Intelligence bigwig. The main difference appeared to be that the underworld figures were left off the White House's list. The CIA's Intelligence bigwig was having the Mafia write the articles on the Mafia! And he was paying them big bucks to let them write what they wanted about themselves! That "professional courtesy" was extended also to big drug running outfits, big arms traders, and big slavers. I located 10 articles in each of these categories that had been written by 'the insiders', the criminals themselves. Then I 'wasted my time' reading them. That was a real eye opener. It was not a waste of my time once I understood that the articles were written by the criminals to help the CIA cover-up their crimes.
I went to the bigwig in Intelligence and showed him my 30 articles and asked him who in his dept. had 'commissioned them from the criminals'. I already knew the answer. He had been responsible for every one of those articles being written and submitted to the CIA's analysts. Usually they were inserted as from 'an anonymous CIA informant whom we trust". I wondered who had decided to 'trust' those criminals enough to pay them big bucks to mislead CIA analysts. In the face of the evidence, that man confessed that he had been cooking the intelligence.
Then I took his confession up to Tenet expecting him to be fired. Tenet did not fire him. Not even after I explained that Libya and other countries on the list of terrorist states were feeding the CIA analysts lies through this man. 3 of the men on his list were also on a list of Al-Queada terrorists. He had them listed as experts in illegal weapons and had used two of them to feed information into the CIA's analysts.
It is not wrong to ask criminals to write articles, if something they knew could not be learned another way that was important for the CIA to know. It is not necessary to identify them by name, a consistent alias will do, if they are a covert source. But their background needed to be listed honestly, so that the analysts could properly evaluate it. Everyone should be paid fairly and in an amount that the taxpayer would approve. It is completely unreasonable to list someone as a professor of a University, if their colleagues are not peer reviewing that article and ensuring it meets the standards of that institution. It was that bigwig Intelligence Analyst's job to ensure that the articles his analysts wrote were true and based on reliable sources. What he had done was as bad as a bank manager embezzling funds. In the civilian world, had he embezzled the amount of money he wasted, he would have ended up in prison. But what he had done was much worse. US soldier's lives and the fate of the nation, not just tax dollars hung in the balance.
It deeply concerned me that Tenet did not fire that man. I copied the calls between Tenet, Cheney, and Bush discussing whether to fire him based on my evidence. There were two such calls made in the hour after I spoke to Tenet. Cheney recommended 'holding tight' and 'letting the storm pass by'. Bush said, "this doesn't look good"... "we could replace him and keep going". Tenet did not offer much of his own opinion. Cheney apparently won out in Tenet's thinking, because the man was not fired.
Then I sent out a one page article to the analysts explaining my findings on how their opinions were being shaped by criminals in the underworld. I offered to give anyone who showed up at my office the 30 articles and the proof of what I said if they promised in writing to read it 'on their own time'. That was a bit of a joke as many analysts worked long hours without overtime. The CIA did not pay overtime. Anything they did after 40 hours a week was automatically on their own time and they already knew it.
My office was overrun by requests and I had to station a secretary outside my door to pass out the articles after analysts signed the promise. The analysts did want the truth of how they were being fed lies. Many of them asked me to keep exposing the corruption. Others shook their heads sadly and said, "We have to cook the intelligence so as not to lose our jobs, or worse." (see Cases 8 and 9). One man asked me who was behind the cooking of the intelligence. When I explained what I knew already, he said to me; "There has to be more to it than that. Feeding us lies doesn't require much effort, but keeping us from reading the truth must take a lot of work and people. Look into that next."
I sent all of that information over to the GAO along with many records from the CIA's accounting office showing what the bogus 'independents' had been paid for what they wrote. The costs were staggering. The Dept of Intelligence was spending more to pay for bogus reports to cook the intelligence than they were spending on the salaries of CIA analysts!
References:
1) Great grandfather Samuel Bush was called a "Merchant of Death" for arming the Kaiser and fanning the flames of war for profit in WWI.
See a) The Bush Empire : How four generations of arms, oil, fascism, and US Govt. defiance made America 's First Family by Charles Shaw at
www.newtopiamagazine.net/archives/content/issue12/features/bushempire.php
b) George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography by Tarpley & Chaitkin which can be read online for free at http://www.tarpley.net/bushb.htm
and c) "Follow the Money! Bush Fortune Soaked in Blood"... http://ecosyn.us/Bush-Hitler/Blogspot/Samuel_Bush/Remington_Arms.html .
2) The Bush family were supporters of a fascist coup to overthrow the US President in the 1930.
Fed up by FDR's New Deal policies to help the poor, the Morgans, Rockefellers, Duponts, Harrimans, and others, paid US General Smedley Butler via a front called the American Liberty Alliance to have a fascist coup against the US government in the 1930's—
see a) overview online at "Wall Street's Plot to Seize the White House" at " http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/53-index.html
b) the book by General Butler The Plot to Seize the White House which can be read online for free at http://www.clubhousewreckards.com/plot/plottoseizethewhitehouse.htm
"Nazis in the Attic" by Randy Davis http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/randy/swas1.htm
BBC Radio: The White House Coup http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/document/document_20070723.shtml
3) Three times in WWII the US govt. seized some of grandfather Prescott Bush's companies as Nazi front companies. Prescott Bush was the American business partner of Thyssen, the German banker who wrote the book I Paid Hitler. Prescott Bush funneled millions of dollars to fund the Brown Shirt Army of thugs.
See a) video by investigative journalist Buchanan on Bush Nazi Family Ties at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAxQzK_FrO4
b) "How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power", The Guardian newspaper at http://www.guardian.co.uk/germany/article/0,,1312542,00.html
c) Trading with the Enemy: An expose of the Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949 by Charles Higham at http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/Trading_Enemy_excerpts.html
d) and How the Bush family made its fortune from the Nazis http://www.tetrahedron.org/articles/new_world_order/bush_nazis.html
"The 1942 U.S. government investigative report said that Bush's Nazi-front bank was an interlocking concern with the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel Works Corporation or German Steel Trust) led by Fritz Thyssen and his two brothers. After the war, Congressional investigators probed the Thyssen interests, Union Banking Corp. and related Nazi units. The investigation showed that the Vereinigte Stahlwerke had produced the following approximate proportions of total German national output:
50.8% of Nazi Germany's pig iron
41.4% of Nazi Germany's universal plate
36.0% of Nazi Germany's heavy plate
38.5% of Nazi Germany's galvanized sheet
45.5% of Nazi Germany's pipes and tubes
22.1% of Nazi Germany's wire
35.0% of Nazi Germany's explosives.@s8" See George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography by Tarpley & Chaitkin Chapter - II - The Hitler Project by Tarpley ,read it online for free at http://www.tarpley.net/bush2.htm
"The U.S. embassy in Berlin reported back to Washington that the "costly election campaigns" and " the cost of maintaining a private army of 300,000 to 400,000 men" had raised questions as to the Nazis' financial backers. The constitutional government of the German republic moved to defend national freedom by ordering the Nazi Party private armies disbanded. The U.S. embassy reported that the [Harriman-Bush] Hamburg-Amerika Line was purchasing and distributing propaganda attacks against the German government, for attempting this last-minute crackdown on Hitler's forces….
Thousands of German opponents of Hitlerism were shot or intimidated by privately armed Nazi Brown Shirts. In this connection, we note that the original `` Merchant of Death, '' Samuel Pryor, was a founding director of both [Prescott Bush's] Union Banking Corp. and [Prescott Bush's] American Ship and Commerce Corp. Since Mr. Pryor was executive committee chairman of Remington Arms and a central figure in the world's private arms traffic, his use to the Hitler project was enhanced as the Bush family's partner in Nazi Party banking and trans-Atlantic shipping.
The U.S. Senate arms-traffic investigators probed Remington after it was joined in a cartel agreement on explosives to the Nazi firm I.G. Farben [which also made the Zyclon (sp) B poison pellets used in the Nazi death camps].
Two months before moving against Prescott Bush's Union Banking Corporation, the U. S. government ordered the seizure of all property of the Hamburg-Amerika Line and North German Lloyd, under the Trading with the Enemy Act."…
"President Bush's family had already played a central role in financing and arming Adolf Hitler for his takeover of Germany; in financing and managing the buildup of Nazi war industries for the conquest of Europe and war against the U.S.A.; and in the development of Nazi genocide theories and racial propaganda, with their well-known results. "
(Please read The Hitler Project at http://www.tarpley.net/bush2.htm
Please read the excellent The Nazi Hydra in America at http://www.nazihydra.net . It discusses how the Robber Barons used Hitler to get rid of labor unions and provide them with slave labor for their factories;
"There is no better example to illustrate the power of the pro-fascists in the United States, than to compare the plight of the American worker with his counterpart in the rest of the industrial nations. In every category, the American worker comes up short when compared to the workers in other industrial nations. As an example the American worker earns 44% less than his German counterpart and 15% (1994 figures) less than his Japanese counterpart. 18"
"George Seldes lists the following seven facts from the La Follette reports:
"1. that American business employs a vast espionage system whose purpose is to fight labor.
2. that 200 agencies employ 40,000 to 50,000 spies in industry;
3. that $80,000,000 a year is spent by big corporations in fighting labor, employing spies, buying gas and guns, hiring gangs;
4. that almost all the great corporations are in the spy racket, including Ford, General Motors, U.S. Steel, Bethlehem Steel, Consolidated Edison, Weir, Frick Coke, etc
5. that 2,500 companies comprising what Senator La Follette called the "Blue Book of American Industry" are part of the American Gestapo.
6. that the National Association of Manufactures, US Chamber of Commerce, Merchants and Manufactures Association, National Metal Trades Association are the chief organizations engaged in native fascism that the American press, which still gives its front pages and its approving editorials to smears, exaggerations and falsehoods of the Dies Committee. And similar committees, and which employ reporters to attack labor, and especially those labor unions which are progressive and militant and put up a strong fight for the rights of labor, suppressed almost all the hearings and findings of the La Follette Committee, which constituted an exposure of Fascism in American industry." 16
" IG Farben built a factory (named Buna Chemical Plant) for producing synthetic oil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_oil and rubber http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber (from coal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal) in Auschwitz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_concentration_camp , which was the beginning of SS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schutzstaffel activity and camps in this location during the Holocaust http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust . At its peak in 1944, this factory made use of 83,000 slave http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave laborers.[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IG_Farben#cite_note-8 "
4) After WWII, 3 Auschwitz survivors sued Prescott Bush for making money off their slave labor. A Holocaust museum director unearthed evidence that the Bush family made 1.5 million dollars off the slave labor at Auschwitz. Furthermore, it is alleged that Thyssen, Bush, and IG Farben built the Auschwitz labor camp to have the slave labor.
"The reason Auschwitz was located where it was is because that is near where Fritz Thyssen-[Prescott Bush]'s coal, steel, and railroads were. That made it possible for I.G. Farben to synthesize fuel from coal gasification for the war machine there, which made it also possible to synthesize rubber there. I.G. Farben also made Zyklon B gas, enough to annihilate two million people according to the trial testimony of the Auschwitz camp commander Rudolf Hoess...But in 1942, even after Pearl Harbor, Prescott Bush and his father-in-law George Herbert Walker, were administering Thyssen's money until forced by the US government to halt (temporarily).
"The Bush family got rich stealing everything these people had. It stole their children, stole their homes, stole their belongings, stole their clothes, stole their hair, stole their freedom, stole their government, stole their work, stole their health, stole their lives." see a).
a) "A Dynasty of Mass Murderers: Bush Family Nazis" at http://ecosyn.us/Bush-Hitler/
b) "Heir to the Holocaust: Prescott Bush, $1.5 million, and Auschwitz: how the Bush family wealth is linked to the holocaust" by the Director of the Florida Holocaust Museum
http://clamormagazine.org/issues/14/feature3.php
"On March 19, 1934, Prescott Bush handed Averell Harriman a copy of that day's New York Times. The Polish government was applying to take over Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation and Upper Silesian Coal and Steel Company from'"German and American interests" because of rampant "mismanagement, excessive borrowing, fictitious bookkeeping and gambling in securities." The Polish government required the owners of the company, which accounted for over 45% of Poland's steel production, to pay at least its full share of back taxes. Bush and Harriman would eventually hire attorney John Foster Dulles to help cover up any improprieties that might arise under investigative scrutiny.
Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939 ended the debate about Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation and Upper Silesian Coal and Steel Company. The Nazis knocked the Polish Government off Thyssen, Flick and Harriman's steel company and were planning to replace the paid workers....
1940s: Business As Usual
Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation was located near the Polish town of Oswiecim, one of Poland's richest mineral regions. That was where Hitler set up the Auschwitz concentration camp. When the plan to work Soviet prisoners fell through, the Nazis transferred Jews, communists, gypsies and other minority populations to the camp. The prisoners of Auschwitz who were able to work were shipped to 30 different companies. One of the companies was the vast Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation.
"Nobody's made the connection before between Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation, Auschwitz and Prescott Bush," John Loftus told Clamor.
"That was the reason why Auschwitz was built there. The coal deposits could be processed into either coal or additives for aviation gasoline."
Even though Thyssen and Flick's Consolidated Steel was in their possession, Hitler's invasions across Europe spooked them, bringing back memories of World War I. Thyssen and Flick sold Consolidated Steel to UBC. Under the complete control of Harriman and management of Bush, the company became Silesian American Corporation which became part of UBC and Harriman's portfolio of 15 corporations. Thyssen quickly moved to Switzerland and later France to hide from the terror about to be unleashed by the Nazi war machine he had helped build.
A portion of the slave labor force in Poland was "managed by Prescott Bush," according to a Dutch intelligence agent. In 1941, slave labor had become the lifeblood of the Nazi war machine. The resources of Poland's rich steel and coal field played an essential part in Hitler's invasion of Europe....
Prescott Bush received $1.5 million for his share in UBC. That money enabled Bush to help his son, George Herbert Walker Bush, to set up his first royalty firm, Overby Development Company, that same year. It was also helpful when Prescott Bush left the business world to enter the public arena in 1952 with a successful senatorial campaign in Connecticut. On October 8th, 1972, Prescott Bush died of cancer and his will was enacted soon after.
In 1980, when George H.W. Bush was elected vice president, he placed his father's family inherence in a blind trust. The trust was managed by his old friend and quail hunting partner, William "Stamps" Farish III. Bush's choice of Farish to manage the family wealth is quite revealing in that it demonstrates that the former president might know exactly where some of his inheritance originated. Farish's grandfather, William Farish Jr., on March 25th, 1942, pleaded "no contest" to conspiring with Nazi Germany while president of Standard Oil in New Jersey. He was described by Senator Harry Truman in public of approaching "treason" for profiting off the Nazi war machine. Standard Oil, invested millions in IG Farben, who opened a gasoline factory within Auschwitz in 1940. The billions "Stamps" inherited had more blood on it then Bush, so the paper trail of UBC stock would be safe during his 12 years in presidential politics...
Loftus [John Loftus, Emmy winning journalist, author and current president of the Florida Holocaust Museum] believes history will view Prescott Bush as harshly as Thyssen. "It is bad enough that the Bush family helped raise the money for Thyssen to give Hitler his start in the 1920s, but giving aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war is treason. The Bush bank helped the Thyssens make the Nazi steel that killed Allied soldiers. As bad as financing the Nazi war machine may seem, aiding and abetting the Holocaust was worse. Thyssen's coal mines used Jewish slaves as if they were disposable chemicals. There are six million skeletons in the Thyssen family closet, and a myriad of criminal and historical questions to be answered about the Bush family's complicity." "
c) "I.G. Fabre’s Pact With the Devil" --- http://webletter.net/cybrary/Facts.aft.perp.igpact.html
"IG Farben to be dissolved" --- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1549092.stm
"A portion of the slave labor force in Poland was "managed by Prescott Bush," according to a Dutch intelligence agent. In 1941, slave labor had become the lifeblood of the Nazi war machine. The resources of Poland's rich steel and coal field played an essential part in Hitler's invasion of Europe...If the Bush family refuses to contribute the [1.5 million] money to compensate for Prescott Bush's involvement in the Holocaust, it is like denying the Holocaust itself and their role in one of the darkest moments in world history." ---"Heir to the Holocaust" http://www.john-loftus.com/Thyssen.asp
"It gets worse. It appears that there was a secret deal between William Stamps Farish, Prescott Bush, the Standard Oil Co (Rockefeller Family), and I.G. Farben Company, a German chemical cartel that manufactured Zyklon-B, the poison gas used in the Nazi death chambers . This deal, it is alleged, financed and built the Auschwitz Labor Camp, which opened on June 14, 1940 to produce artificial rubber and gasoline from coal. The Hitler government supplied political opponents and Jews as the "labor force". Apparently, after pleading "no contest" to charges of criminal conspiracy with the Nazis, William Stamps Farish was fined $5,000. Similar fines were levied against the Standard Oil Company. This of course did not interfere with the millions of dollars that Farish had acquired as Chairman, President, and major stockholder of the Standard Oil Company. Prescott Bush pocketed a hefty sum as well. And all the US government sought in exchange for spinning the story to focus exclusively on the Jewish Holocaust was the use of certain petroleum patents that this company had given to the Nazis, the so-called "Auschwitz patents". See http://webletter.net/cybrary/Facts.aft.perp.igpact.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,926883,00.html
http://webletter.net/cybrary/Facts.aft.perp.igpact.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,926883,00.htmlhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1549092.stm
f) "Simon Rozenkier is suing Bayer and Schering for complicity in grotesque medical experiments performed on him by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele and fellow torturers from I.G. Farben. Incredibly, Bush [Jr.] is trying to have Rozenkier's case dismissed. He writes: "After my years of [military] service to this country in Korea, I always expected the president of the United States to stand by me against my persecutors. I never realized that Prescott Bush, Bush's grandfather, made a fortune on Wall Street during the 1930s selling war bonds for Nazi Germany and 'cloaking' American assets owned by German companies [also partners of I.G Farben!]. Now I understand why the Bush administration is urging the presiding judge to dismiss my case and placing legal closure for corporate perpetrators ahead of moral and financial closure for victims of the Holocaust. Prescott's Grandson Blocks Justice for Nazi Victim http://archive.democrats.com/preview.cfm?term=Prescott%20Bush
g) There are many more articles about the Bush-Nazi connection at http://archive.democrats.com/preview.cfm?term=Prescott%20Bush and http://ecosyn.us/Bush-Hitler/Bush-Hitler.html
5) Although the US and its Allies won WWII militarily, it lost it on the intelligence front in 1947 when Truman signed the CIA into existence.
Skull and Bones is a secret death worship cult that was started in 1832 at the Yale Cemetary by a pirate named Russell. He started it to have bright politicians and lawyers to protect his opium, slave, and weapons running operations. Like the Klu Klux Klan, members claim to be Christians while killing, torturing, or terrorizing others into submission. The charter for the CIA was written by Skull and Bones member Robert Lovett. The first civilian Director of CIA, Dulles, was Skull and Bones, as was the first Personnel Director, and many of the top management positions. But Dulles was not just Skull and Bones, both Dulles brothers had been lawyers for bankers who funded the Brown and Black Shirt Nazi Armies.
"The powerful Anglo-American family associations, which later boosted him [Bush, Sr.] into the Central Intelligence Agency and up to the White House, were his father's partners in the Hitler project." (see a)). The CIA is Bush, Sr.'s intelligence agency; even signs on the CIA buildings at Langley Virginia say so. The CIA continues the Skull and Bones business of running drugs, slaves, and weapons. Like the "Federal Reserve", the CIA is privatized, and is not a US Public Institution serving the US public. When a member of Skull and Bones calls the CIA, their questions get answered ASAP. When a member of the public calls the CIA, they might get a sanitized answer after a 20 year wait on hold.
a) Please read chapter The Hitler Project of George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography by Tarpley & Chaitkinat http://www.tarpley.net/bush2.htm
b) "We Lost WWII to American Nazi Corporations" http://stealthlesbian.blogspot.com/2007/02/we-lost-wwii-to-american-nazi.html
6) The first thing that the CIA did was to save Nazi war criminals from the Nuremberg War Crimes trials by erasing their Nazi history.
"One way a government mobilizes support for morally dubious actions is to make those actions sound like the right thing to do. Decisions made for other reasons entirely, for reasons of strategy, say, or economic advantage, are cloaked in religious rhetoric, and when our leaders claim the moral high ground, we the people want to believe them"
a) "Operation Paperclip Revisited" at http://www.counterpunch.org/thieme08222003.html
b) "Operation Paperclip Casefile" at http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/NWO/project_paperclip.htm
Project Paperclip and the Nuremberg Trials Whitewash From the book Whiteout by Cochran and Burns http://www.mindcontrolforums.com/project-paperclip4.htm
For a case study of how Bush, Sr. used Nazi war criminals in Chile to repress the poor see Nazis, Operation Condor, and Bush's Privatization Plan by William F. Wertz, Jr.
10) When Bush, Sr. ran for US President, he had Holocaust deniers and pro-Nazi campaign advisors working for him, some of them WWII SS officers.
"Former President Bush had his own embarrassing moments involving Nazis, including one that almost lost him the Presidency when a number of former SS officers were found
to be high-ranking operatives in his Presidential campaign. Nor has GW been free of Nazi taint."
see "BUSH FAMILY CIA PAST" http://www.citizenslaw.net http://www.citizenslaw.net
See the Nazi Hydra Book, Chapter Gold Fillings, Auschwitz & George Bush
http://www.spiritone.com/~gdy52150/bushies.htm
11) The CIA is in the business of rigging elections around the world, and has done so in the US as well. From my point of view inside the CIA, there has not been a unrigged election for a US President since at least President Jimmy Carter. The Shadow govt. is in control in the US and runs both the Democratic and Republican Parties.
Both Bushes, Kerry, and Clinton are members of Skull and Bones. The US voter has been given no option and the CIA routinely rigs elections. This is not theoretical to me as Bush,Sr. personally assigned me to rig a US Senate election while he was DCI. Since that was against my principles, I had to help the man win using legal and ethical means. Clint Curtis testified at hearings after the 2004 election that he had been asked to write computer software that could hack the vote. Bev Harris's must read online free book Black Box Voting details how the election machines are easy to hack, that they have been hacked numerous times in the past, and that the US allows people with criminal records to make the voting machines. Those who allowed US elections to be without a paper trail that can be audited were traitors intending to steal the elections. In the 2004 US Presidential election, in the middle of the night the exit polls suddenly shifted from 3% in favor of Kerry to 3% in favor of Bush, Jr. in many states. That was definitely fraud as the polls were long closed.
a) For a quick overview read "20 Amazing Facts About Voting in the United States" at http://www.guerrillafunk.com/thoughts/doc000023.html
b) Robert Kennedy, Jr. "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen
c) Clint Curtis "show stopper" testimony causes gasps at hearing http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/12/13/18416/541
d) Bev Harris's book Black Box Voting in right column part way down the webpage at http://www.blackboxvoting.org / NOT COM
e) Stolen! The 2004 Election Fraud by Black Max http://www.iraqtimeline.com/stolen.html
f) other articles at http://fluxview.com/Vote-Fraud.htm
12) Legal scholars and historians have noted that the Bush, Jr. Administration have used many of the same legal and political ruses as Hitler did. The Bush Administration claims the right to torture even innocent children ( see John Yoo memos) and recently got the US Congress to pass a law to make that "legal" for him to order. Supposedly, this is justified by the "War on Terror".
a) International legal expert Scott Horton in the January 28, 2005 issue of Executive Intelligence Review in an article titled
"Bush Team Revives Nazi Legal Ruses, Condemned at Nuremberg " said that the Geneva conventions were set up during a time of intense terrorism and assassinations of political leaders and so the argument that they do not apply due to terrorism nowadays is a " Hollywood " version of law that is not correct. http://www.larouchepub.com/other/interviews/2005/3204scott_horton.htm
b)… Fritz Stern, former Provost at Columbia University, probably the nation's leading historian of the Nazi state, gave a major speech recently, in accepting the Leo Baeck Award, in which he paralleled the interaction between the Bush Administration and the Religious Right, to the political campaign that the Nazi Party launched in 1933, and its exploitation of religious values. Stern gave a sustained and convincing comparison which raised so much comment that it was reported in the New York Times. http://www.larouchepub.com/other/interviews/2005/3204scott_horton.html
c) One of the architects of the Bush, Jr. administration's legal policy, lawyer John Yoo, publicly said in front of other lawyers that the US reserves the right to torture children including by the crushing of their testicles. www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11488.htm. He was not even speaking of a child who was a proven terrorist. He was speaking of an innocent child whose parent might be a terrorist. Officially, the US administration denies that the US does any of these things, while maintaining the right to do them as it sees fit by Presidential edicts.
d) "If the President's newly created Office of Homeland Security sounds to you a bit reminiscent of propaganda from Nazi Germany, you're not alone in that suspicion. …
Very interesting that Texas Homeland Security chief David Dewhurst says he looked at the [Homeland Security] ad twice before it somehow got printed with the SS officer whose name tag had a German flag on it."
From "Bush Administration's Homeland Security Freudian Slip" http://baltech.org/lederman/bush-homeland-security-10-30-01.html
e) Fascist America, in 10 easy steps "As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration." http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2064157,00.html
f) "WWII veteran Nazi interrogators denounced Bush's Torture techniques" http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/10/07/wwii-veteran-nazi-interrogators-denounced-bushs-torture-techniques/
g) Salt Lake City Town Mayor Denounces Bush's Policies and says that silence is complicity
Address by Mayor Ross C. "Rocky" Anderson on October 27, 2007 at http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/110907E.shtml
15) The US Embassy in Baghdad is being built with slave labor as recently came out in US Congressional Hearings
( See Mayberry's Testimony at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evRPwwyno_c#
There is plenty of evidence, other than my 10 part series on Sexual Torture as US Official Policy that it is not due to just "a few bad apples". See the book Administration of Torture by Jaffer and Singh. Also see
U.S SOILDER ADMITS (Widespread) RAPE AND TORTURE AT ABU GHARIB! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba_qqP2Fmuc
Also, DynCo. and Cheney's Halliburton have been running sex slaves.
US Congress woman Cynthia McKinney confronted Rumsfeld about the US Administration still giving contracts to these dishonorable companies (see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eootfzAhAoU . Bush said he would look into it---nothing happened, the companies continued to have a sweet-heart relationship with these slave running companies. Having been a mind control slave of the current US Administration Oct. 2003 to Aug 2004, working at the CIA without ever receiving payment, this issue of Bush caused slavery is not theoretical for me. The Bush CIA is the major running of sex slaves in the world.
End of references and Case 12
Case 13: Detail on the Exorbitant Costs of Cooking the Intelligence
Even when the articles were commissioned through the White House researcher, the CIA was footing the bill. As the CIA's budget was kept secret from the public, it was easy to hide the excess costs there.
I had already determined that the CIA and White House was paying the authors of their bogus articles a high fee, a dollar a page to print their articles. But the expenses of the Professor who wrote the article destroying the credibility of Arab banks were nil; Harvard paid for the Xeroxing, his phone, and computer.
That particular bill of the professor's had listed about $400,000 as "Research Costs". The itemization of that included a year's worth of foreign travel; plane, hotel, and meal costs, all neatly itemized which were made up in the CIA's creative accounting dept.. It assumed that the Professor must have taken a sabbatical year from Harvard to spend the time to do the research that went into that 5-page report. That all looked good, until one found out he was teaching classes at Harvard 5 days a week for 9 months of that year. When I pulled up his bills for 20 articles he had written in the same year, they each had fictitious costs for a year's sabbatical leave; about 18 listed that year of leave as the year before. Those fictitious costs usually were not the same. But 4 times the creative accounting programmer had been lazy and just copied the costs from the first bill. One bill listed the Professor doing the research on "the effects of the 2003 Iraq War" in 2001. It had the costs for his wartime body guard included!
In the details of the travel bill for the Arab bank article, the costs had been padded by lodging him in Paris hotels for months at a time, not the Middle East. If I remember correctly the travel bills for a year of Middle East Research had amounted to close to $400,000 in most of the bills. The plane travel usually assumed about 10 first class transatlantic round trip fares, adding under $35,000. That left about $365,000 a year to account for. $1,000 a day for hotel, meals, and rental car/taxis is very high living in the Middle East! I challenge the CIA's accounting office to provide a valid itemization for even a single day spent in the Middle East that had to cost $1,000 of the taxpayer's money for a bed, meals, and taxis.
The security costs for travel in the war zones was billed on a separate line. Not surprisingly, although the hotel costs listed him in Paris for about 9 months, the security costs listed him in Iraq for 12 months. If I remember correctly, the security costs were listed on the order of $200 a day, for about $75,000 a year. For that price in Iraq one could hire one's own body guard. But since the professor had written at least 20 articles, the taxpayer had been billed for 20 bodyguards for him!
I don't want to belabor the point unnecessarily so I will just list a few other inconsistencies. One creative programmer had him 'hosting a conference' to promote US Peace Initiatives. That sounded good to me. I wanted to know who he had invited and what Peace Initiative he was talking about. But on investigation, I found that there was no such conference. In another case, a bill listed a conference and put all the bills of it on his CIA article tab. The only problem was that it was hosted by someone else and he had not attended. I gave him the benefit of the doubt that perhaps he had planned it. But when I asked him the outcome of that conference on the phone, he said that he had never heard of it.
According to the CIA's accounting computer, the professor had written about 34 articles in the previous year. But some of the bills listed no title for the article and I could find no proof that they had ever been written. The average length of them for billing purposes was about 4 pages. He had been paid on the average over $100,000 a page. That was about $14 million in a year to launder a neo-con storm of falsehoods into respectable opinion inside the CIA.
When I asked him if he liked Paris and staying in Middle Eastern hotels, he admitted that he had never been to either location. When I asked him for a list of all of the articles he had written that the CIA had paid for he refused to fax them to me at the CIA. One was an article on the sexual behavior of Arab men in brothels which said that most of them were secretly gay. I asked him by its title if he had written it--he denied it. I read him an unforgettable incident in it and he still denied he had written it. I suggested that he return the money that the CIA had paid him for it, if that were the case. He did not return the money. After that, he hung up whenever he heard my voice on the phone.
The professor's 20 articles written in 2003 that I did obtain and read showed that about 80% of them were propaganda pieces aimed at destroying Arab respectability and credibility.
Per my memory, some of the articles were as follows:
The Unfaithfulness of Arab Wives
This article asserted that Arab wives were more unfaithful than Western wives, if you looked at the % he gave of about 60%. That was an incredibly high figure in a society with a high penalty--death--for that crime. I could find no academician off the CIA's list of "sources we trust" who asserted anything close to that. Most said the figure was less than 10%. Yet, his 60% figure was quoted over and over again in CIA reports apparently because the White House wanted to hear it.
That figure would later be used in CIA and US military reports to justify not investigating and prosecuting cases of Arab women raped by US forces.
How Arab Polygamy is Destroying the World
The thesis of this article was that the Muslim religion was destroying Arab family life. It said that the neglected children became unfeeling psychopathic personality types who were destined to become terrorists. It cited bogus studies on Morman polygamists to assert that. It did not show that Muslim children were in fact neglected. Since they often had more than one woman in the home and the women often stayed home, it was more likely that American children were neglected. The divorce rate in Arab countries is less than in the West, yet no one was attributing that to the Muslim religion as it did not support their propaganda efforts.
This article, with other unsourced ones like it, was later used to justify holding Arab children as young as 5 in US prisons separately from their mothers. The bogus logic was that the children were already neglected in the home so what difference did it make? As a physician examining prisoners in 3 US prisons in Iraq, I witnessed a large group of naked children being held in cells without any adult supervision. The approximately 50 children were age 5 to 10.
Why Arabs Do Not Feel Pain the Way Westerners Do
This article stated falsely that "Arabs and dark skinned individuals in general have extra melanin [pigment] coating their nerves". I had to laugh at that one as there is no melanin inside the body or coating nerves. It is myelin which coats the nerves and it is the same thickness across races. But it argued that the extra melanin in Arabs meant that they didn't feel much pain when they were injured. Many of the analysts that I surveyed had bought the premise hook line and sinker.
It set the stage to bomb, injury, and torture Arabs without regard to the suffering it would cause them.
Why Famine in Iraq is Inevitable
This article asserted that Man's sinful behavior, including overgrazing and poor agricultural practices, had destroyed the Garden of Eden that used to be Iraq. Between the lines it said that in order to restore God's gift of the Garden, Iraq had to be taken back by the faithful of God, the Christians. Then it would be irrigated and production mechanized so that the area could feed the population. It said that famine would reign in Iraq until the US invaded and brought prosperity and food to all in Iraq. Five years after the war the people of Iraq are starving still. Most still do not have even clean water again. The article made no reference to the US sanctions which caused the death of half a million Iraqi children from diarrhea and starvation. It did not mention that the US prevented the importing of parts needed for farm equipment and the importing of Chlorine Bleach needed for clean drinking water.
It was used later to justify the starvation of Iraqi children, even after the US had invaded and had a responsibility to feed the people in the occupation areas. Analysts listed its title in their reports justifying the starvation, apparently without bothering to read it.
100 Ways the Iraqis Brought the War to Themselves
In this article the crimes of the Hussein regime were reviewed as a list of torture cases. The author apparently ran out of real names of torture cases after about the 3rd and started making up names and case histories. When he got to weigh about 50, he just titled a bullet as Ways 50-100 and made up a group of 50 terrorists to blame for the rest of the 'ways' which remained unexplained. Thus, all the 'ways' were torture. In addition, the article touted the human rights of the West and asserted that torture would be done away with by the US, if it was allowed to invade and set the country right. No mention of the CIA training Hussein's secret service in dreadful torture techniques was made, though the CIA official commissioning the article knew well about them. He had been one of the CIA training them to cut off people's hands more painfully and blame that savagery on the Koran and Arab culture.
This article was later used to claim that Iraqis were better off under US occupation than under Hussein. In fact, the US tortured more people per year than Hussein had, and killed more people a year than he had, according to CIA figures.
Why the Koran Can Not Be Believed
This diatribe cited an Arab scholar as the source of the information without giving a reference. When I asked the Professor for an article by that Arab scholar he did not recognize the name, nor could he later find such an article in his files or computer. He said that the Arab scholar had proven that Mohammed was a corrupt man who took bribes, delighted in killing others, and plagiarized the poetry of a Sufi saint in order to gain fame. The article made no sense, if one knew that the Sufis were a branch of Islam, not a precursor of it. In addition, there was no evidence given for the plagiary or the events it cited as facts. It was a dreadful desecration of the life of Mohammed. Had anyone written the same trash about Christ, there would have been at least a review of the source. Instead, it was cited inside the CIA as if it was fact.
This article was later cited to excuse the US's bombing of Mosques.
Why the US Must Stay in Iraq
This text was written before the Iraq War started! It was written in about January 2003, proving that the White House intended to go to war irrespective of what the weapons inspectors or Hussein said or did. Why else spent close to $2 million for this approximately 6-page article on why the US must stay in Iraq. The thesis of the article was that rebuilding Iraq would take years even though the US had bought Iraq a stable and peaceful democracy. It said that until Iraq had first class education and universities and could train enough of its own physicians, the US needed to stay to ensure good health care. The fact that the Iraqis already had a good health care system and enough physicians, and that the war would destroy that, was not mentioned.
This article was later cited by analysts apparently to put the name of it into their articles as an unstated conclusion. Those citing it did so after it was blatantly obvious that the US had not brought peace and stability. It was cited after the US had bombed hospitals deliberately and destroyed Universities. Clearly, the intention was not to help the Iraqis get good health care. It was a fabric of lies to justify staying in order to steal the oil. Had the US Administration wanted to provide people with good health care, they could have started at home.
It is not within the scope of this text to try to undo all the blatant propaganda lies that the CIA and the US Administration fostered through this cooking of intelligence. But I did want to give you a flavor of what the articles said. Hitler's Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Goebbels, would have been proud of this professor and those who wrote his talking points. They effectively dehumanized Arabs and paved the way for the war and the wholesale destruction of Iraq.
The targets of the propaganda were the CIA's own analysts! I remind you that more was spent to bias their minds then was spent on their salaries to write the CIA's intelligence.
End of Case 13
Case 14: The Kickbacks on Propaganda Aimed at the CIA's Analysts
The VIPs commissioning the bogus articles got a kickback from the CIA for "suggesting topics of interest that the CIA had 'overlooked'". One tape of Bush giving the White House 'researcher' the topic of "How Arabs Smell" revealed that Bush had said afterwards "At $100,000 a pop, I should quit my job, and give that researcher my help full time".
Another tape, caught Cheney bragging that he had made half a million dollars while brushing his teeth that morning by thinking up 5 suggestions. If I remember correctly, the suggestions were;
"Why Bin Laden will not be found in Iraq.",
"Why Bin Laden will not be found in Afghanistan",
"Why Bin Laden will not be found in Yeman",
"Why Bin Laden will not be found in Saudi Arabia.", and
"Why Bin Laden will not be found in the Sudan".
When I checked the CIA's computer I did find that 4 of the 5 articles had been written. It was the one "Why Bin Laden will not be found in Iraq" that I could not locate. I did find the transaction from the CIA to one of Cheney's Swiss bank accounts that the CIA had set up for him. It was for an even $500,000, prior to a currency conversion to Swiss Francs. It had been paid on the day after he made the suggestions, before only 4 of them were approved the next day per the minutes of a meeting in the Dept. of Intelligence. That meeting had 3 listed members on the minutes. But the security camera footage showed 5 and sometimes 6 people in the meeting. Tenet had attended about the last 10 minutes of the 25 minute long meeting and signed forms at the end of it for about 2 minutes. I did send the minutes and the security camera footage over to the GAO; the committee was devoted to cooking the intelligence.
Those who attended the meeting were getting 'kickbacks' from the unsuspecting taxpayer for showing up. The amount that they got varied from person to person. Tenet received $50,000 into his Swiss bank account each time he showed up in person, and $10,000 if he signed the forms in his office. That is what comparing the security camera footage to that Swiss Account showed. The CIA's creative accounting computer was creating a bill each time in response to a signed form. It was one of the forms in the stack that he signed each time and it asked for whether he had attended the meeting in person or not. The computer then printed out a set of 4 invoices through as many CIA shell companies to launder the payment into the Swiss account. The final one was a payment for 'a speech' Tenet supposedly gave on that date, if he checked that he had attended.
The location of the speech was often not listed. In one case the location was clearly wrong because I knew he had not been at that location all that day. But the location, when given, was not the CIA. His speeches given at the CIA were considered part of his official duties, so the creative accounting dept. could not list that on an invoice. It was the sort of thing that if he went golfing that day, they listed the Country Club as the location. Then they added a fictitious Republican fund raising group as the audience and payee. Since they didn't want the fictitious Republican Fund Raisers to be caught with their hands in the public till to pay him, they had fictitious members make the donations to its treasury. But the fictitious members got their money from fictitious businesses they ran which had real govt. contracts. If you read up enough on the US Representative from California Randy "Duke" Cunningham scandal you will see a somewhat similar example. Cunningham cried when he went to jail for 8 years; he had not counted on being caught. The CIA's creative accounting computer created a virtual reality of financial transactions as big as the whole of Boston's business connections. But all of those businesses were contained inside a computer smaller than a jeep.
If Tenet did not mark that he was present, than he was paid for "authoring a text"--he had signed some papers. I checked my above understanding by giving 3 extra copies of those forms to the data entry people. Out popped the 3 payments for $50,000 into Tenet's Swiss account with 3 exact locations I had specified; they were made up place names like Pirate's Nest and Robertson's Treasure Island. It was harder getting the money returned. I had to call the Swiss bank and explain that we had a data entry problem and would be resubmitting the forms with less incriminating data on one of the optional fields on the transaction over the next 3 days. Then they got the regular forms that Tenet signed the next 3 days which satisfied them that I had made good on my promise to resubmit the transactions.
The committee met 5 days a week and Tenet attended about 60% of the time. So, there were about 250 meetings a year, about 150 paying Tenet $50,000 and about 100 paying him$10,000.
$50,000 x150 =$7.5 million
$10,000 x100 =$1 million
Total =$8.5 million
That gave him $8.5 million of taxpayer's money to help send their children off to die in a war to put billions into Cheney's and Bush's Swiss bank accounts.
Other members of that committee were paid less, but the billing strategy was the same. They were paid for speeches they gave, if they were present. Tenet had to sign a form for each of them.
The Chairperson of the Committee, an extremely high ranking person in the Dept. of Intelligence was paid the same as Tenet per 'speech' and was almost invariably present. That person's Swiss bank account did show a payment of almost $12 million in the preceding 12 months, so about $1 million a month to cook the intelligence.
I sent over to the GAO the complete pathway of the money laundering, copies of forms, security camera footage and Swiss banking account activity. Let me make this really clear. I sent a file from the creative accounting computer showing all of the relevant transactions each day for a year and the Swiss banking accounts in their names showing a year's worth of deposits. That left no doubt as to the fact that those involved were paid for their attendance inside the CIA out of the US taxpayer's pocket. The minutes of the meeting then showed that the activity of the committee was to cook the intelligence.
The person on that committee making the least money got $12,000 for showing up each time, if I remember correctly. That would net about $4 million a year. That person was taking the minutes and was almost always present. He was still fairly senior in that dept. He was a very hard worker and did most of the work of the committee. Too bad that committee was cooking intelligence instead of honorably producing it to help the country.
The existence of that committee was not particularly secret, but what it actually did and decided was a fairly well kept secret. It meet at 10:30 am. Tenet had another meeting at 10 which lasted usually all 50 minutes, so he rarely could make more than 10 minutes of the Dept. of Intelligence meeting. I often attended the 10 am meeting in 2004 when I was in the building. Tenet's exits at 10 minutes to the hour not infrequently prevented the work of our meeting from being able to reach needed and timely conclusions. Then we had to wait until the afternoon to try to reconvene at a time Tenet was available again.
I remember a particular instance of that problem of Tenet rushing off to help cook intelligence that was very distressing. The day before I had been over at the Pentagon when a big problem in the Iraq War loomed on the horizon. The problem was caused by a shortage of US Military helicopters in working order. Unlike fighter planes, the US Military really did need both some revisions in the helicopters and more of them. Soldiers in Iraq, unlike in Vietnam, were periodically dying from combat injuries due to unnecessary delays in transporting them to medical care.
I had reviewed the deaths of three soldiers whose transport delays had caused their deaths. In each of those cases those critically injured soldiers had bled to death while waiting over 2 hours to be transported. The transport of one had been delayed over 4 hours. It was ridiculous for them not to be getting 911 type of emergency transport as had been done in Vietnam. Unlike Vietnam, essentially no one was shooting down choppers from the ground using shoulder launch missiles. There was practically no risk to sending out a chopper to do the rescue. The bottleneck was that the Pentagon had not ordered enough of them, just like it had not ordered enough armed Humvees and bullet proof light weight vests.
That had been part of Rumsfeld's "do it on the cheap" plan as regards to the care of the soldiers. Rumsfeld had also killed an order for a revision of the chopper. Blackhawk was not part of Halliburton or Carlyle Group in 2004. He did not make kickbacks on ordering them. Worse, Carlyle Group was in the process of making a deal to supply choppers from another company by 'bringing it into the family'. So, the order of the Blackhawk company's choppers was in limbo in the Pentagon. Rumor had it that Rumsfeld planned to wait 6 months until that Carlyle Group add on was able to supply a prototype! Pentagon officials were predicting that it would be at least 18 months and more likely 24 before those choppers arrived in Iraq. Knowing how often contractors were unable to meet R & D and production schedules, it was more likely that it would be 3 or 4 years before those choppers were carrying wounded soldiers to medical care.
Let me make this more vivid in your mind. One of the soldiers who had died from delay in transport was a single parent of 4 boys. His wife had died young of breast cancer 4 months before while he was on a tour of duty. By all rights, he should have been sent home to care for his children when his wife was throwing up from chemotherapy and unable to care for the children aged 2, 4, 7, and 9. But due to a shortage of soldiers, which was partly due to the US not properly feeding and supplying them with equipment, that had not happened. After his wife died, he begged to be sent home to care for his children. He was not. They ended up in foster care because there were no relatives well enough to take on their care. His buddies later said he was crying at night and considering going AWOL to get home to care for his children. His 2 year old had been potty trained but due to the stress of the change to foster care, both he and the 4-year old were now wetting their beds. Then he got a letter saying that his 7 year old had been sexually molested by the foster father. He was torn up emotionally. Everyone in his unit knew it. He should have never been sent out on patrol because he couldn't concentrate. But due to the shortage of soldiers he was anyway.
During the course of that patrol, the day after learning the news, he was wounded. It was a leg wound with a single bullet to the thigh. In Vietnam, soldiers with both legs blown off survived because they were quickly transported to medical care. Some soldiers in Iraq called the death's Rumsfeld's Curse and went so far as to allege he let soldiers die on purpose in order to minimize the VA medical costs. It was hard not to reach that conclusion when choppers were not sent out immediately to pick up the wounded.
In one of the 3 cases, a chopper was not sent out promptly because there were not enough maintenance mechanics to check them off as ready to fly. The Pentagon was not training enough of them. Again that was the result of Rumsfeld's cost cutting measures for a "lean Army". Had there been more choppers then one would have been waiting from the day before, already certified as ready to fly. The soldiers were having to eat lots of candy bars because Halliburton was not supplying them with adequate calories. They did not think Rumsfeld's lean army was a good idea. Some complained to me that having to eat 4 candy bars a day to stave off hunger was not healthy. They were right. And the sugar highs and lows caused some people problems. The soldier who died from there not being enough maintenance mechanics was one of those who had trouble from too much sugar in his diet. His blood sugar had crashed about 2 hours into the mission and there was no time for him to eat another one. He complained of feeling faint and dizzy. Then as he was going down a set of stairs inside a mortar damaged building he passed out. He fell on the sharp end of an exposed pipe. The injury was to his shoulder and had not penetrated his lung. He should have lived. He would have, if a chopper had been sent out then and not 4 hours later. His death was not listed as a combat death. It should have been listed as a Halliburton short shipping death. But it was not.
Halliburton was spending less than a dollar a day for food per soldier. I found that out by querying their computer. Maybe that would have been enough for Rumsfeld to eat in his desk job, but it was about a third of what it should have been at a minimum for a combat soldier who was wading over rubble and climbing stairs all day to search buildings. Was an extra $2 a day too much for Halliburton to spend feeding a soldier? To give $2 a day more for 100,000 soldiers in Iraq would have cost only $200,000! Why was Cheney not willing to give up two-pages worth of sheer lies to feed the soldiers properly? Why didn't Tenet donate 4 days worth of his cooking the intelligence money to feed them?
As Tenet headed down to that Intelligence meeting without first authorizing me obtain more choppers from BlackHawk, I was steamed. The CIA had 75 choppers sitting around in Iraq hardly ever used. They had extra maintenance people who were sitting around chain smoking and playing cards because they had nothing to do. In the last 4 months there had not been a single time when more than 25 of their choppers were in the air in a day.
All I needed was his signature on a piece of paper to solve the problem. I had been trying for 50 minutes in that meeting to get it and he had put me off over a dozen times. As soon as I had that signature I could immediately release 50 from the CIA in Iraq to be used by the US military. Then the CIA could buy 50 choppers from BlackHawk to be delivered to Iraq within 4 months. There were no extra costs involved. The only stumbling block was that solving the problem for the soldiers made them no kickbacks.
When Tenet refused to allow me to circumvent Rumsfeld's roadblock and walked out of that meeting at the 50 minute mark without signing, I put my head down on my crossed arms and sobbed. It was just too unfair for words! Corruption that stole the taxpayer's money was terrible. But I couldn't help thinking that corruption that killed people was little different than murder! And the corruption that cooked the intelligence had been worse, it had killed over a hundred thousand innocent people in Iraq alone through its hateful lies which robbed them of their right to live with dignity.
End of Case 14
Case 15: Corruption Means Dysfunctional Equipment and Policies at Inflated Prices
When Tenet came out of the "Cook the Intelligence" meeting, I was waiting for him with the helicopter authorization page needing his signature. He looked at me and frowned. Then he said, "You never give up, do you?". I smiled sweetly and offered him a pen and the page. He brushed by me and hurried away.
I tried again in the afternoon and for 21 days until I found a way around him too! Bush signed the authorization to give the unused CIA choppers to the US Air Force (USAF) immediately, and let the CIA replace them if needed. Perhaps he did not know what he was signing. But then that might not have been unusual.
It had occurred to me that he may have been given the elections by others because he rarely bothered to read! He acted rather more like a rubber stamp machine than a President--once you got into his presence with a sheaf of papers and asked him to sign them. Had the Russians, the Chinese, or the Saudis handed him stacks of papers as well via an American citizen whom they had bribed? How could I find out, I wondered? Or was he only a tool of neo-cons? Which ones? The questions haunted me across my long days at the Pentagon and CIA and into my dreams at night. Some of them turned into nightmares of nuclear war. Saddam Hussein was not in them. Bush was--pushing the button by signing a sheaf of forms without bothering to even ask what they were about.
It is sad when you have to trick a President into supplying his own troops with helicopters to rescue the wounded! It reminded me of the book "Catch-22".
If I remember correctly, the cost of those choppers with the side stretchers for 2 to 4 wounded cost about $7 million apiece. They were dual use choppers and not just for carrying wounded. Fifty of them cost about $350 million. But the ones that Rumsfeld wanted to buy from the Carlyle add-on cost about $10.5, even before cost overruns occurred. Unfortunately, they still did not have the improvements that the USAF said it needed. Staying with the tried and true Blackhawk company, meant a savings of about $3.5 million per chopper, which was $175 million. That would have been enough to buy another 25 choppers from Blackhawk. When I looked into why Rumsfeld wanted 50 choppers at inflated prices with no extra capability, instead of 75 choppers from Blackhawk, I found that the Carlyle add-on was promising a cool $100 million in kickback to the US Administration. That was 19% of the purchase price in kickbacks. But the cost to the taxpayer was increased by 50%! That is about typical in the corruption cases that I saw. In addition, companies that cheated by bribing officials to buy them also cheated on the specifications and on the testing of their products. In practice the products cost 50% more and were at least 50% worse.
I knew that I would not be able to hide later what I had done. The Air Force was about to find out that I was shifting 50 CIA choppers over to them in Iraq---the next day. Because I was at risk of getting flak from the USAF, the CIA, and the White House over my covert purchase of those choppers, I carefully documented that the Carlyle add-on ones in the offing would not have the advanced features that the USAF wanted. To do that I had to fly out to that add on company and get hired for a day. I was then able to document that they were pulling a fast one on the USAF by claiming that they were going to install the new expensive flight guidance and stability hardware it wanted. But that hardware did not exist yet--no one had designed it. I was able to prove that they did not have the technical people needed to design it. Furthermore, I was able to prove from their internal documents that they never had the intention to design it. Those documents showed that they intended to get the contract and then lie and bribe their way through the tests to snow the USAF into passing their chopper "AS IF WE HAD THAT CAPABILITY". They subscribed to the prevalent view at the White House that, "it doesn't matter what is true, what matters is what we can convince people is true". I doubted that the wounded in the war zones would be fooled that the US Administration had honest motivations as they lay hours dying while waiting for a chopper to arrive!
It does matter what is true. It matters a great deal. It is the difference between having a chopper that works or one that does not because its quality has been faked at each stage in its research, development, and production.
When I brought to the next JCS meeting the evidence of the lack of quality control at that Carlyle add-on, they looked through the pages with lackluster interest. But when I showed them 3 extremely badly manufactured, deformed internal parts that they had actually installed into choppers they had sold, they took notice. I got them off those returned choppers by paying mechanics to fix those choppers overnight. I had the photos of the parts both while installed and afterwards, and the invoices showing that they had been sold and returned. The parts looked about as bad as photos of babies with birth defects. No one in their right mind would believe that they would work correctly. And they had not.
Rumsfeld was furious with me. He barged into the JCS meeting to try to stop my presentation of the facts. He screamed at me in front of the other generals calling me "c--t" and whore. Not one of the generals tried to stop him in my defense. But I told Rumsfeld that if he wanted to sit down and listen, I would give him time at the end of my presentation to say anything he wanted. He stayed for awhile, until it was obvious that the Carlyle add-on was a company as bad as the Saudi one that he wanted to buy artillery from. Then he angrily walked out. But the generals of the JCS were happy with what I had done to get around Rumsfeld's blockade. After the meeting, three of them approached me and asked me to help them cut through other corruption red tape that was harming the soldiers.
It appeared from handwritten notes I obtained that the split in that $100 million kickback scheme would have put $40 million into the US tax free Swiss bank account of Rumsfeld. If I remember correctly, Rice was slated to get $25 million, Bush $10 million, Cheney $10 million, and David Rockefeller $15 million. In addition, through Carlyle directly Bush expected to get close to $100 million through inflating the price later in cost overruns and using lesser quality parts.
Documents I obtained at that company showed that they used bolts on external surfaces that rusted, instead of the all stainless steel equipment that their brochures promised. I had taken a picture of one of their choppers with long red lines of rust running down the outside from the bolts. It was a very incriminating piece of photographic commentary. Rumsfled at my presentation had blurted out "They are going to the desert, God d__ it!" I then pointed out that the company's factory was in a desert in the US and those photos were the end result of them sitting in that desert for just one year! It does rain in deserts, just not often. But more importantly windows have to be washed to be able to see out of them. Chopper propellers cause a great stirring up of dust each time they take off and land. Because of the problem of dust in the desert, choppers needed to be washed more often in deserts not less. It did not matter what Rumsfeld believed would be the case, it mattered what was actually the case.
Because Rumsfeld had not been able to counter the facts I presented, he launched a smear campaign against me the next day. He started a series of 10 vicious rumors. Those included that I was taking kickbacks from BlackHawk, that I was the mistress of the CEO of BlackHawk, that I was the mistress of that CEO's wife too, that I had bribed Bush to sign the authorization, that I had forged the authorization, that I had broken into the White House to get the authorization, that I had threatened Bush to get that authorization, that I had gotten Bush drunk to get it, that I had faked the incriminating photos of the choppers, and that I was crazy, in about that order. But none of those rumors held up to the light of day. People start smear campaigns when they know that the facts convict them--that is why they start them--to divert attention from the truth of their guilt.
Equipment requires honesty and quality-control free of corruption to work. Everyone can understand that. But the same thing is true in the making of policies. Each policy is like a part in a chopper. It has to be crafted by honest intelligence to be able to get it to do what it was designed to do. Foreign policy with respect to even one country consists of many policies extending far back into the past. Taken together as a whole they are like a chopper that either has the ability to get one safely to a destination goal, or crashes somewhere along the way. It is possible through the use of clean intelligence to craft policies that work. It is even possible to get rid of bad policies that predictably cause foreign relations disasters. But to do that requires an intention to use reality, not opinions, lies and paid propaganda, as a starting point. Lies are like bolts that rust through and break. They are never part of a stable and useful foreign policy. They corrode more than one's own reputation, they corrode the trust needed between countries for the human species to survive!
[ I sent all the evidence, including that of the phone call of the kickback promise, over to the GAO .]
End of Case 15
Case 16: Tenet and Bush Helped the Saudis Cook CIA Intelligence
I investigated who was commissioning bogus articles from that Harvard professor who had written without evidence that Arab banks were corrupt. That was interesting because a fourth of his "extracurricular" work was being commissioned by the Saudis and still ending up as reading material for the CIA analysts. Most of those calls were being made from the Saudi Embassy in Washington, DC. I paid them a courtesy visit in 2004 and came away with their list of "favorite US sources of articles we trust".
When I compared it to the CIA's and White House's list it was almost identical to the CIA list. The Saudis had deleted 3 of the over 100 names and added one. The list was given to me on a floppy disc. That gave me the date of the original creation of the file and the last time it had been modified. The file had been created about the day after Bush was inaugurated in Jan. 2001. The Saudi Embassy had used the file to commission an article favorable to them the next week. That article by a respected Middle Eastern Affairs professor at another prestigious University had preferentially ended up in the hands of the CIA's analysts. The Saudi Embassy forwarded a very large number of copies of it to the White House. The White House forwarded it to the CIA with a memo from Bush directly to the analysts praising the article and saying that, "this is what good intelligence looks like; it makes our friends look good too".
Was Bush really that clueless that he did not know the difference between a sheer fabric of lies and intelligence? I decided to find that out. I tracked down the tapes for the day he had signed that memo. The security camera footage showed when he signed it-- about April 2001. I then went to the audio tapes. During the hour before the signing he had been in a meeting on Middle Eastern topics. One of those topics included its oil and how much it had by country. Another topic was going to war in the Middle East during his presidency. It was agreed that "both were goals to work towards". Bush had then said, "We need to protect our friends in Saudi Arabia from 'a bad rap'". A staffer then went and found the box of articles that the Saudis had sent over in about February 2001.
That box with its original shipping information had been sent over to the CIA. That showed that the box had come straight from the Professor to the White House. But the professor had made a slight faux pax; at the bottom of the box when I removed the rest of the articles he had put 10 copies of an earlier version. There had been major revisions in the text between versions and they now contradicted each other in important ways. When I showed both versions to several CIA analysts it was their opinion that the assignment he had been given appeared to have been changed mid course. They also expressed disgust that he had covered up unpleasant political realities in Saudi Arabia with glib explanations in the second version. His second version also completely omitted the earlier paragraph on in fighting in the House of Saud, and two paragraphs on the rights of women, and a page and a half on human rights problems.
Through careful research I unearthed a Mossad archived call from the Saudi Embassy to the professor. They had promised to pay half up front and half on 'satisfactory completion of the article". In that call they expressed their disapproval of the first version, though in fact it was already a blatant cover up of the severity of the human rights problems in Saudi Arabia. [Not that the US did not cover up theirs with even greater success.] The Saudis said that they were not yet satisfied with his article. It was a thinly veiled threat not to pay him the second payment.
This professor did not seem eager to make a revision just to please them. They later sent him a list of what paragraphs they objected to. He deleted those and made glib, almost tongue-in-cheek, explanations in other places. He then resubmitted a copy of the article via email. They emailed back that they were satisfied and to send a specific number of copies to the White House. That number corresponded directly to the number of CIA analysts at Langley. It was not a round number. Not only that but the Saudi Embassy knew that number more accurately than I had originally been able to discover from looking at the CIA's main frame computer. It was out of date compared to CIA Personnel. That was not surprising as the number changed many times a day. But it meant that the person who had given them that information had called down to Personnel to get it on a specific day and time when that number was correct.
Convinced that someone inside the CIA had leaked that information to the Saudi Embassy with the intention of helping them get that article into the mind of EACH analyst, I set out to find out who it was. I found the call from Tenet to the Saudi Embassy in which he told them how many articles to print to have "full penetration of the CIA". That seemed to border on an act of treason to intentionally help a foreign power skew one's intelligence. Thus, I wanted to know if my boss Tenet had thought to do that himself or had been ordered to do that. I located the phone call in which Bush instructed Tenet to 'be helpful to the Saudis". Again the issue of a possible war in the Middle East in the future was mentioned first. Bush had then suggested that Tenet arrange a meeting with the Saudi Ambassador. That meeting had taken place the next week by canceling an appointment already written in Tenet's appointment book.
[Aside: The meeting that was cancelled was rescheduled for 2 weeks later. It was rather bizarrely on inner city violence and was a meeting with the mayor of a decaying US city. No one in Russia or a foreign country was causing inner city violence in the US that I knew of. I did know of CIA operations to cause inner city violence however. Please see the documentary The Fire This Time: Why LA Burned in the [Rodney King] Riots. Now even Talk Show Host Rush Limbaugh is inciting riots at the Democratic Convention for political gain for Republicans. Nixon had used CIA people in the WaterGate Break in of the Democratic Convention. Did the US Administration or the CIA put Rush Limbaugh up to inciting riots? Without an investigation, it would be hard to say that was not the case. ]
I could not find anywhere that Bush had instructed Tenet to give the Saudis the number of CIA analysts and I am rather good as a remote viewer in using educated guesses to find information, if it exists. Perhaps Tenet had been briefed by Bush in person as to what he meant by "be helpful to the Saudis" or maybe as a political appointee Tenet did not need a precise instruction to do a good job of it. As a long timer in intelligence, allowing the Saudis to feed disinformation into the CIA as if it came from a respected, honest, and well documented source deeply troubled me. Wars are made from the fabric of propaganda to make a blind fold. Wars can destroy even powerful nations by draining their resources and their commitment to educate their populace.
It was an important intelligence question, "What did the Saudis try to accomplish in commissioning articles to feed into the minds of CIA analysts?" It was even more important to try to discover what had been the effect on US intelligence and foreign policy. Many people had wondered after 911 why the US invaded Afghanistan when the pilots were all alleged by the FBI to be Saudis. People had asked me, "Why did the US not invade Saudi Arabia instead?"
Thus, when I investigated the Saudi role in cooking US intelligence in 2004, I collected as many articles as I could which the Saudis had commissioned and sent to the CIA in bulk. It took me some work to figure out which articles had been commissioned by the White House and CIA, versus which had been commissioned by the Saudis. Largely I used the minutes of the "Cook the Intelligence" Committee of the CIA's Intelligence Dept. and the CIA's creative accounting records of the kickbacks to sort them. Then I did a random sampling of the "Saudi" articles and tried to get the actual proof that I was right that the Saudis had commissioned them. That random sampling showed that at least 90% of the "Saudi" group were Saudi commissioned with a very high degree of certainty in that figure.
There were about 125 articles in the "Saudi" group. I guessed from the information I had that that was about 70% of those that they had commission between Jan. 2001 and when I did the study in 2004, maybe 175 total. They averaged 3 pages long, so about 500 pages had been commissioned. If they were paying the same as the White House/CIA-VIPs they were paying about $100,000 a page for a total cost of $50 million. When I located the bank account that the funds came out of, the true cost appeared to be about $38 million. They were using essentially the same list and authors, so they appeared to have that cost savings do to being better at bargaining the price down. Assuming that an average CIA analyst made about $38,000 a year, that $38 million, represented the equivalent of the salaries of a 1,000 analysts at the CIA. It would perhaps have been cheaper just to bribe them directly but that would have lost much in the way of plausible deniability.
The White House/CIA-VIPs, in giving that list of authors to the Saudis had allowed them to 'blend in". Those of the analysts who had figured out that those unreferenced articles were what the White House wanted to hear, had not figured out that the Saudis were behind about 23% of them.
The Saudi paid articles were different in their motivation and method of cooking intelligence. They were not tearing down Islam and dehumanizing Arabs. Although there was some sectarian bias in them that was minor. Their main thrust was to extol Saudi Arabia and cover up its internal divisions and human rights violations. In some sense they had a moderating effect on the racist and anti-Islamic articles that the White House and CIA-VIPs commissioned. Alas, that made it harder for the CIA analysts to recognize those authors as spouting pure propaganda against Arabs.
There was one area in which the Saudi articles deeply troubled me, other than the cover-up of the human rights issues. That was they backed a "might makes right" stance which undermined international law and even treaty making to resolve problems in the Middle East. They acceded to the view that war was inevitable and to the victors should go the spoils.
When I showed the "Saudi" articles to Tenet, he let me have CIA analysts write reports on what effect those articles had had on CIA intelligence. 5 CIA analysts were independently given that assignment and asked not to talk with each other before finishing their reports. I did not think that the 5 were fairly chosen, however, as they were among the known Yes-men in the Dept of Intelligence. And I was later able to prove that Tenet had personally instructed them "not to find anything". Since he could be charged with treason potentially if they did find any shaping of the intelligence, there was a great deal of pressure on them not to. All except one, said that the Saudi articles had made no significant change in US intelligence.
One of those conforming, later told me privately that he had received a death threat aimed at his family the day after he started the assignment. He asked me to forgive him for having to "cook the intelligence yet once again". I did find proof that Tenet had walked down to the office of the Head of the Clandestine Service about 2 hours after he agreed to having the analysts make reports. The Russians had a copy of that conversation which I gave the GAO.
[It should be noted that I was doing official CIA work in Russia during some of 2004 as a negotiator to make an intelligence sharing agreement to reduce terrorist activities. Thus I had many contacts inside Russian intelligence from that and earlier negotiations I had done with them for the CIA.].
Tenet had told the Head of the Clandestine Service to "put the heat on the analysts and keep it on 'high' until the reports were done." One analyst complained to me that his dog had been violently killed and inferred that I was indirectly to blame. Another one angrily told me that his wife had been terminated at her job because the CIA had called her boss. And one told me that he had hardly been able to sleep during the week he wrote the report for fear of what would happen to him. His physician told him he had developed an ulcer and recommended that he quit his job. Thus, we may never know the full truth about the effect of the Saudi articles on the cooking of US intelligence as it was clear that the analysts had been threatened. In this context Case 8 and 9 should be recalled. I was doing this work less than 6 months after the deaths of over 100 adults in the CIA, including many of them working in this very building. The analyst's fears were not unfounded.
The dissenting analyst, to the extent he did find anything at all, did a historical analysis of CIA written articles on the Middle East over several decades. He said that there was a clear drift in it towards the view that the Arabs must "be like us or face extinction". He said that that view was rapidly intensified in CIA written articles when the Saudis added their articles, even though who the "us" referred to had changed. He went on to say that the Saudi articles had shaped US intelligence and that the effect had been a laudatory one. He said that the CIA was lucky to get the Saudi articles without having to pay for them. That completely omitted the fact that they were propaganda pieces without references and thus at the very least worsened the signal-to-noise problem of finding the truth. Of course, I am not an independent person recounting this and what he wrote would have to be read for oneself to do it real justice.
Since those Saudi articles had been written outside the CIA and were not classified, I then sent them to 4 academicians to review their 'likely effect' on US intelligence. They were not paid for their opinions. They did not have the White House/CIA-VIP paid articles. And they did not have access to the CIA's analysts articles. They said that the Saudi articles were likely to have heavily skewed US intelligence because of the credentials of the purported authors of the articles. See Case 12 which reports that that was indeed the case. They said that they expected that skewing to excuse Saudi wrong doing while blaming problems in the Middle East on other countries. One went so far as to say that the US not invading Saudi Arabia after 911 was likely due to these articles shaping the intelligence. Another one said, "if these articles were indeed read inside US intelligence, then the war in the Middle East was partly the result of the Saudis". None of them thought that the effect of the articles was 'minor'.
It is unlikely that the Saudis intended to have a minor effect on US intelligence in any case. They had spent about $38 million and made at least 175 calls to commission those articles. They appeared to have 2 people inside their embassy whose only job was to shepherd those articles into existence and over to the CIA in about 175 individual deliveries. In addition, the Saudis had shaped CIA intelligence by supplying the CIA's library with about 80% of its new acquisitions in 2001 to 2004. CIA librarians complained to me that they were not allowed to order Middle Eastern journals and books on the excuse that the "CIA already has enough of them".
A foreign penetration of the CIA is a serious thing because it can send our country to war. It can also determine which nation our country goes to war with. It is conceivable that the US would have invaded Saudi Arabia, for better or worse, in the absence of those articles. Almost half of them were written before 911.
Those articles expunging the history of Saudi violations of human rights also had predictable 'blowback' for US citizens. The Saudis have been noted for their running of sex slaves and even their kidnapping of young women in the United States to sell into the "White Slave" trade. I knew of one case from within the CIA, where a US citizen, a woman, was not rescued from a Saudi prison through diplomatic means because the CIA cited Saudi Arabia's "fair treatment of prisoners and women" to the State Dept. That CIA opinion was not based on fact but on those pro-Saudi propaganda articles. Since the Saudis had stolen numerous American girls, those articles must have condemned many of them not to get the help that they needed.
Please see http://gvnet.com/humantrafficking/SaudiArabia-2.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking_in_Saudi_Arabia ,http://www.statedepartment.com/14issue.html and http://www.sauduction.com/13issue.html,
End of Case 16
Arrigo Biographical Context Piece
Tenet sent me over to the Pentagon in August 2001 to collect a moving van load of Pentagon corruption documents. In retrospect it appeared that part of the reason was to allow Halliburton and Carlyle Group to increase their "market share". I had been at the Pentagon on and off on assignments since starting in the Vietnam War. I had given General Schwarzokof briefings in Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Iraq ground war as the CIA's coordinator for remote viewing data. And I had been training military officers, especially Office of Naval Intelligence ones since about 1970. So, the US military knew who I was just fine, but they couldn't figure out how to relate to you unless you had a rank. Consequently, I had been given a wide variety of ranks over the years to fit into specific assignments. Good intelligence people should be able to play any rank, like a good actor should be able to play any part.
Since I had been training naval officers at the Naval Training Center in San Diego in advanced espionage skills, before and after the Cold War, they had assigned me a rank of Rear Admiral for well over a decade. That made sense in terms of getting the naval officers to take what I said seriously. They needed to take it seriously to stay alive when they penetrated the Russian shipyards at Vladivostok under my supervision. I was the only US intelligence person who had been inside them before. My espionage skills were quite good. I had even played the part of a Russian Admiral once in Russia and lived to tell about it.
But the Pentagon in August 2001 still had me listed as a Major from a mole hunt assignment that I had done there in about 1998. For that mole hunt, it was better for me to be able to walk the halls of the Pentagon largely unnoticed. That was not the rank that I needed to pull off the task that Tenet had sent me to do. So, I reminded him that the Office of Naval Intelligence had me on their books as a Rear Admiral under an alias. I asked him to get me a rank of a one-star general at the Pentagon.
He called over and that issue was discussed with a 3-star general on the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). The general said that to be effective in accomplishing what Tenet wanted I needed to be a 2-star. In some sense that was not unreasonable; I had set up the Pentagon's Remote Viewing Defense Protocols. No one at the JCS had a clue about Remote Viewing Defense unless I was at those meetings.
However, I did not start attending once a month until Oct. 2004 for a wide variety of reasons. Largely that was because I hate meetings and because I was in Canada starting in June 2002 for over a year. My Pentagon assignments were always done under an alias, as were my CIA assignments. But since I went back to JCS month after month, the alias was the same over Oct. 2003 to Aug. 2004.
My father had been in military intelligence. General Billy Mitchell was given a post-humus medal for accurately forecasting WWII in the Pacific in the 1950's. The CIA wanted remote viewers and figured that they had to start with children to be able to make them.
People considered me a kind of child prodigy. MKULTRA had thrown me into the CIA at a very early age.
My military training was not standard, most of it was at the Miramar Naval Airbase under an alias, since I was already in the hands of the CIA. The military had trained me in battlefield tactics to see what a remote viewer could do playing war games. I was, unfortunately, good at it.
A Colonel under General Westmoreland felt that his Vietnam War strategies killed excessive numbers of US troops. He wanted to humiliate him over it without getting demoted. He set up a theoretical war game and asked General Westmoreland to star in it. It was billed as a "teach the up and coming" military offspring how to "win the war in Vietnam". Admittedly it was kind of an in house publicity stunt for the San Diego military. General Westmoreland fell for it and was pitted against young minds. I was the kid who was able to beat him consistently; I was already a remote viewer for DCIs. Those war games had started out theoretical, but then moved into the war room at the Pentagon. We ended up playing with real troops on the ground in Vietnam. The game was to capture territory. He lost the competition. Westmoreland liked military style campaigns with men dead at the end of them. As a remote viewer, I was like a Zen master merged into the reality of both sides. I felt the pain if anyone got hurt. I could gain territory without anyone being hurt, though I thought it was a pointless and unethical thing to do.
The generals didn't really like my methods even back then. They didn't make enough kickbacks for anyone.
I was thrown into the Vietnam War on CIA assignments where I had to "walk point" on reconnaissance teams to find specific things using my remote viewing skills. I was 19 at the time and the recon grunts liked to follow female buns. It was one way to get them to go into highly dangerous situations. I was used to going by myself into very dangerous situations in Russia. In Vietnam, I was asked to find shoulder launch missiles and VC headquarters. Those were both underground in tunnels and using a remote viewer to find them was quite reasonable.
I was also asked right after the Tet offensive to lead a recon team into an area the US had lost and do an analysis of why the US had lost a battle. We got excellent intelligence by lying in the mud with the US dead as the VC set up all around us.
Then I did something that I have regretted my entire life. I sent the 8 men on my patrol ahead of me down a canyon. I had them hide in the rocks of the side of the canyon. The VC had taken over a US position on the top of that side. I made noise and got several hundred VC to follow me down the canyon, leading them into an ambush. The VC on the top of the hill thought it was US troops in the bottom. They shelled them while I joined my team in the rocks. Since we were not firing, our position was not known. The VC killed each other by the hundreds. I cried over "my hundreds of bodies" that were wounded and killed that day. I was too clever for my own good. I knew that the US should not be in Vietnam, but I had let my desire to know if I could succeed over take my common sense. It was a bitter lesson for me and one that I had to learn many times over. I was good at the war games in Vietnam, because I could 'feel' the positions of the VC in the jungles on the hills as if I were them over there at the same time.
Not everyone does remote viewing that closely merged into what they are viewing as to lose their separation from it. But that is the best way to be accurate. And it was due to my accuracy that I ended up as a remote viewer for Directors of CIA from the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 to 2004.
When I later played war games with Pentagon generals at Camp Pendleton etc, I always won. But I had no desire to fight and that annoyed them. Using remote viewing, I could figure out how to win without fighting and did so.
For example, once we were due to play war games the next day at Camp Pendleton in Aug. It was likely to be blazing hot. I sent some of my men up the hills to set up noise making devices on timers at specific locations which would self-destruct.
Others I sent on a recon mission to the opposition camp. They waited until that team had packed their kits and then replaced the water in the canteens with dirt. The opposition hiked out in the morning without rechecking their kits. I had some of my men lure them up the dry barren hills to look for us. I had ordered all of my team to promptly regroup below the cliff and stay in the shade of it or in the ocean water. Many of them were not pleased with me. They said, we should be fighting the war games not just playing in the surf. I told them, there is no need for us to fight, the weather will defeat them for us. It did. They spent all day exhausting themselves looking for us in those hills and not being able to find us. They had to surrender from heat exhaustion and lack of water. All I had to do was supply the sunscreen and the picnic for my men. The other side should have had the good sense to sit down and rest in the shade. But due to their eagerness to fight they defeated themselves
When I trained Israeli military and intelligence officers in remote viewing in the 1990's, they also insisted that I play war games with them. Remote viewing is a good intelligence and military tool, I beat them too.
Then I challenged them to come into Chechnya with me and slow the Russian assault that was going on there in the early 2000's. The Russians were slaughtering civilians in large numbers. It made it look like Stalin was alive again. We only had a two-week period of time, so we trained some of the locals how to prevent Russians moving their trucks into their area to set up bases from which to slaughter them. At that time the rules I enforced were no civilian deaths--under any circumstances. When they learned how to win using that strategy, then I went to having them practice winning using no deaths at all.
I like to train military and intelligence people on battlefields. I think that they should know how to collect good intelligence while the bullets are flying and not just sit at a desk giving orders that kill others. We have to learn how to do defense without killing anyone. That is the only way that the world will survive. The Israelis have a lot of brave and effective fighters and intelligence people. I wanted them to lead the way on the non-violence front.
People think that I shouldn't talk about this. They want all the publicity to go to war making, not how to defend people without using bullets, missiles, and bombs. They want to protect the Defense Industry from having to go Green.
The Defense Industry is not a Defense Industry, it is an assault industry. If you want to see what those people are doing to the Human Species just look at the birth defects from depleted uranium at http://www.xs4all.nl/~stgvisie/VISIE/extremedeformities.html.
The US Administration falsely claimed that they had to go into Iraq to stop Hussein from using nuclear weapons. But the US tested 4th generation nuclear weapons in Iraq that did not make mushroom clouds. Then they used depleted uranium to pretend that all the radiation was do just to that. It was not. In any case, the use of the depleted uranium was inexcusable. It has a half life of 4.5 million years and is destroying the human genome. Neither dust nor people stay in one place. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes is the future their shortsighted policies are making. The human race needs to give up playing war games and start a Manhattan Project style push to learn how to defend without weapons.
Sue Arrigo