The Amercan Gestapo
Dr.Peter Janney
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the few surviving members of Hitler Gestapo, of Secret State Police, should be gratified that their counterpart, the Department of Justice’s Federal Bureau of Investigation, has copied, in detail, the so-called Vertrauns-Leute or V-Leute, program and is now developing it into a very powerful, and relatively unknown, internal surveillance force in the United States. Unlike the Gestapo, who had Communists as their chief enemy to observe, infiltrate and destroy, the FBI program is aimed solely at American citizens who are considered as present, and future, threats to the state.
Before we analyze the FBI program with its nearly sixty thousand reporting members, let us briefly look at its father, the Gestapo’s V program because in comparing Hitler’s secret internal surveillance program with its huge network of volunteer informers with the FBI program, the parallels will at once become painfully obvious.
The Gestapo, or Geheime-Staats Polizei (Secret State Police) was initially constructed from the political section of Berlin’s civil police force in April of 1933. Given the intensive Communist espionage in the lax Weimar Republic, a number of German law enforcement agencies, such as the Berlin and Bavarian police, had set up sections to deal with this menace.
In Berlin, under the government of Prussia, Hermann Goering, its Prime Minister, set up the Gestapo by enlarging the previous Geheimes Staatspolizeiamt. In 1934, the SS, under Heinrich Himmler and his top intelligence chief, Reinhard Heydrich (Head of the Sicherheitsdienst or SD) assumed control over the Prussian, and later, Bavarian, police. The small Gestapo was put under the control of one Heinrich Müller, a top operative in the political police of Munich. Although Müller had been a devoted enemy of the National Socialists, he was considered by Heydrich as an extremely competent expert in detecting and dealing with the Commniists and other dissident groups. Müller, a member of the Catholic right-wing BVP, organized the small Berlin intelligence agency into a highly competent and efficient arm of detection and repression. With the outbreak of the war in September, 1939, all German police and political police agencies were put under the umbrella of the RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt…State security main office) and the Gestapo, still under Müller, constituted Amt IV (Bureau IV) of that agency. Although nominally under the control of both Himmler and Heydrich, Müller, a decorated WWI military pilot, was essentially independent and was in complete control of his organization.
At its height, the Gestapo had offices in all the major, and some of the minor, German cities but never had more than thirty-two thousand personnel, to include office workers and field agents but the effectiveness of the Gestapo lay not only in Müller’s institution of an in-depth national card file on most German citizens but in an enormous network of volunteer informers called ‘V-Leute’ or Vertrauens-Männer (Leute) or trustworthy sources. Politically trustworthy supporters of the Nazi movement were recruited as voluntary, unpaid, reporting sources and could be found in all walks of German civilian and, to a lesser degree, government and military, sectors. These ‘V-Leute’ were given special identity cards, assisted if possible by the Gestapo in the event of civil or criminal legal problems and made privy to various impressive but unimportant Gestapo information. The value of this army of over 75,000 known domestic informers was, without doubt, one of the reasons for the Gestapo’s successes against internal dissident groups. Setting aside malicious denunciations, the V-Leute kept the Gestapo field offices and from them, the central headquarters on the Prinz Albrecht Strasse in Berlin, with an enormous input of often very valuable information.. One of the positive aspects of the activities of this army of domestic voluntary informers was the feeling among the German public that the Gestapo was everywhere, even present, ever observant and this fright quotient was often more than sufficient to quell any anti government sentiments in most of the German population and created a `self-policing' society operating within a `consensus dictatorship'
Here is a very brief outline of the structure of the Gestapo that dealt with the input of information from the unpaid but very effective ‘V-Leute’:
Amt IV
Gegnerforschung und (Also known as the Geheime Staatspolizei)
Gegnerbekämpfung Under SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller
(Investigation and combatting
of Opposition)
IV A 3
Gesellschaftsspionage Combating of espionage in society.
Fahrlässiger Landesverrat Treason through negligence,careless talk,etc.
Spionage Combating of political espionage.
IV A 6
Karteien und Fahndung (Card Indexes & Wanted Persons)
IV A 6 a
Kartei und Personalakten Card Index, Personal Files
Auskunft
Heinrich Müller, the father of the informant program and the head of the Gestapo almost since its inception, escaped from Germany in 1945 and ended up in Switzerland where he worked as an expert on Communist espionage until 1948 when he was recruited by the CIA’s James Critchfield to work for the CIA, also as an expert in Communist espionage. In studying the current FBI program, it is very obvious that Müller brought more to Washington than his hat and if the old adage that it is lawful to be taught by an enemy is correct, our own form of the Gestapo, the FBI, certainly and clearly benefited from Müller’s organizational skills.
In 1996, the FBI set up an organization they called the Infragard, which very closely followed the ‘V-Leute’ program:
, ….” the protection of our nation’s infrastructure cannot be accomplished by the federal government alone. It requires coordinated action from numerous stakeholders – including government, the private sector, law enforcement and concerned citizens.” And that: “Each InfraGard chapter is geographically linked with an FBI Field Office, providing all stakeholders immediate access to experts from law enforcement, industry, academic institutions and other federal, state and local government agencies”.
One of the publicly stated aims of this project is that: “(b)y utilizing the talents and expertise of the InfraGard network, information is shared to mitigate threats to our nation’s critical infrastructures.” This is nearly identical in wording to Müller’s own description of his national informers program and what follows here was lifted, almost verbatim, from his own period analysis: “An InfraGard member is a private-sector volunteer with an inherent concern for national security. Driven to protect their own industry and further motivated to share their professional and personal knowledge to safeguard the country, InfraGard members connect to a national network of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) communicate with federal law enforcement and government agencies through their local InfraGard chapters, and contribute to the security and protection of our national infrastructure from threats and attacks.”
“Critical infrastructures are physical and cyber-based systems that are essential to the minimum operations of the economy and the government (as defined in Presidential Decision Directive/NSC 63, May 1998) Key resources are individual targets whose destruction would not endanger security on a national scales, but would create local disaster or profoundly damage national morale (as defined in Homeland Security Presidential Directive-7, December 2003) Together, critical infrastructures and key resources are so vital that their incapacity or destruction would have a debilitating impact on the defense, economic security, public health or national confidence of the United States.
“InfraGard has SMEs around the country in each of the following 17 categories of critical infrastructures and key resources, as recognized by the National Infrastructure Protection Plan:”
“Critical Infrastructures:
Agriculture and Food
Banking and Finance
Chemical
Defense Industrial Base
Drinking Water and Wastewater Treatment Systems
Emergency Services
Energy
Information Technology
National Monuments and Icons
Postal and Shipping
Public Health and Healthcare
Telecommunications
Transportation Systems”
In additional similarity to the earlier Gestapo program of unpaid informers, we learn that the current FBI imitation provides its informers the following benefits:
“The benefits of joining InfraGard include:
> Network with other companies that help maintain our national infrastructure.
> Quick Fact: 350 of our nation's Fortune 500 have a representative in InfraGard.
> Gain access to an FBI secure communication network complete with VPN encrypted website, webmail, listservs, message boards and much more.
> Learn time-sensitive, infrastructure related security information from government sources such as DHS and the FBI.
> Get invitations and discounts to important training seminars and conferences.
> Best of all, there is no cost to join InfraGard
Our 45000+ membership is voluntary yet exclusive and is comprised of individuals from both the public and private sector. The main goal of the Washington, DC Nations Capital Chapter of InfraGard is to promote ongoing dialogue, education, community outreach and timely communication between public and private members. Furthermore, to achieve and sustain risk-based target levels of capability to prevent, protect against, respond to, and recover from all hazards or events, and to minimize their impact on lives, property, and the economy.
InfraGard members gain access to vital information and education that enables them to in turn provide assistance to prevent and address terrorism and other transnational crimes. InfraGard members are provided threat advisories, alerts and warnings and access to a robust secure web-VPN site and e-mail. InfraGard also helps promote an effective liaison with local, state and federal agencies, to include the Department of Homeland Security.
The FBI retained InfraGard as an FBI sponsored program, and will work closely with DHS in support of the CIP mission. The FBI will further facilitate InfraGard's continuing role in CIP activities and further develop InfraGard's ability to support the FBI's investigative mission, especially as it pertains to counterterrorism and cyber crimes. The FBI and Department of Homeland Security Office of Infrastructure Protection are currently executing an InfraGard Partnership Program Plan under a Memorandum of Understanding signed in December 2007.
Current Washington Field Office (WFO) cleared InfraGard members are encouraged to register on the Cybercop ExtraNet Portal to validate your affiliation with this chapter.”
There are, of course, suggestions and support concepts available to the informant organization as per this statement: “The interests of InfraGard must be protected whenever presented to non-InfraGard members. Independent of the type of presentation, (interview, brief, or published documentation) the InfraGard leadership and the local FBI representative should be made aware of the upcoming presentation. The InfraGard member and the FBI representative should agree on the theme of the presentation. The identity of InfraGard members should be protected at all times.”
As of January 1, 2010, there are over 45,000 InfraGard informants organized in 86 chapters in each of the 50 states, operating under the supervision and control of local FBI agents Secretly, and not reported, are branches in foreign countries, to include Britain, France, Italy and Switzerland..
Given the proliferation of anti-government internet sites and the even larger proliferation of conspiracy stories (many the result of government disinfomation) a reader of the above material might well be expected to dismissed most of it as mere self-serving bombast on the part of persons with a desperate need to be recognized. In response to these entirely legitimate observations, perhaps it should be noted that the italicized quotations above were taken directly from official sources and can be easily seen at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfraGard. This lengthy article, an official overview on a site well-known to be very friendly to governmental needs, is confirmation, not only of the existence of this informant organization but, to a historian, a terrifying parallel with the earlier, and very effective, Gestapo program.
Who are the volunteer informers spying on their co-workers, friends and neighbors? If a volunteer is approved by the FBI, they can join InfraGard but the FBI has put special emphasis on persons connected with the communications sector (to include computers and manufacturers and developers of computer-oriented software and equipment) which contains the major, and often minor, telecommunications firms, national, and international, credit reporting bureaus, the major American members of the national, and international, banking systems, the American credit card companies, American automobile manufacturers (who install GPS or on-board vehicle tracking systems in their products) Internet providers, (Internet II is owned and operated by the FBI) a significant number of American Evangelical religious organizations who are often over-eager in their efforts to inform on Unbelieving neighbors, friends and co-workers, the hotel and motel industry, the airlines (whose information base of Americans traveling is considered highly important) and even companies who sell boats and private aircraft. Also, and far more alarming, are a number of teachers, recruited into the service because of the often unsophisticated parental remarks small children can be provoked into repeating to the informant. But not all of these sources of information are the sole purview of the FBI. The question arises as to whether the FBI is alone in its intensive spying on the American public and the response unfortunately is that they are only part of the picture of growing, invasive domestic spying. There has grown up in the United State, an enormous infrastructure of agencies designed solely to spy on the American public and a discussion of some of these might now be in order.
First, and foremost, there is the National Security Agency (NSA) Created by President Truman in 1952, during the Korean War, the NSA is charged with protecting the United States from foreign security threats. The agency was considered so secret that for years the government refused to even confirm its existence. Government insiders used to joke that NSA stood for "No Such Agency
Since early 1996, the National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data voluntarily provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth,. The NSA also down-loads any and all information gleaned from its control, or penetration, of global communications satellites. In a word, the NSA can, and does, automatically record all overseas telephone conversations for all sources. It is the goal of the NSA to “create a database of every call ever made” by or to any American resident. To achieve this end, and it should be noted that Müller’s Gestapo had identical systems in place during the life of the Third Reich. This also includes bank transfer information, diplomatic traffic and other interesting information. The Bush administration used the NSA to spy on U.N. diplomats in New York before the invasion of Iraq..President Bush and other top officials in his administration used the National Security Agency to secretly wiretap the home and office telephones and monitor private email accounts of members of the United Nations Security Council in early 2003. As well as the diplomatically-secure UN, the National Security Agency (NSA), on the orders of the Bush administration, eavesdropped on the private conversations and e-mail of its own employees, employees of other U.S. intelligence agencies -- including the CIA and DIA -- and their contacts in the media, Congress, and oversight agencies and offices.
AT&T , once the sole national provider of telephone service, merged with SBC and kept the AT&T name. Verizon, BellSouth and AT&T are the nation's three biggest telecommunications companies; between them they provide local and wireless phone service to more than 200 million customers.
The three carriers control vast networks with the latest communications technologies. They provide an array of services: local and long-distance calling, wireless and high-speed broadband, including video. Their direct access to millions of homes and businesses has them uniquely positioned to help the government keep tabs on the calling habits of Americans.
Although under Section 222 of the Communications Act, first passed in 1934, telephone companies are prohibited from giving out information regarding their customers' calling habits: violations of Federal law are quite acceptable, if carried out by official stool pigeons and with grateful acceptance. Also, all incoming calls, as well as wireless calls, are subject to being covered.
The financial penalties for violating Section 222, one of many privacy reinforcements that have been added to the law over the years, can be stiff. The Federal Communications Commission, the nation's top telecommunications regulatory agency, can levy fines of up to $130,000 per day per violation, with a cap of $1.325 million per violation. The FCC has no hard definition of "violation." In practice, that means a single "violation" could cover one customer or 1 million and the NSA has made clear that it was willing to pay for the cooperation. AT&T, which at the time was headed by C. Michael Armstrong, agreed to help the NSA. So did BellSouth, headed by F. Duane Ackerman; SBC, headed by Ed Whitacre; and Verizon, headed by Ivan Seidenberg.have proven to be gold mines of intimate secrets for the FBI. Although several lawsuits have been filed against these cooperating communication giants, they have all been quickly dismissed by cooperative Federal judged before they could get to the potentially dangerous discovery process whereby unwelcome information could become public
The Office of Terrorism Analysis[ supports the National Counterterrorism Center in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. See CIA transnational anti-terrorism activities. Previously, the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) oversaw the Intelligence Community, serving as the president's principal intelligence advisor, additionally serving as head of the CIA. The DCI's title now is "Director of the Central Intelligence Agency" (DCIA), serving as head of the CIA.
At the present time, the CIA reports to the Director of National Intelligence. Prior to the establishment of the DNI, the CIA reported to the President, with informational briefings to congressional committees. The National Security Advisor is a permanent member of the National Security Council, responsible for briefing the President with pertinent information collected by all US intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration, etc. All sixteen acknowledged Intelligence Community agencies (and five more whose names and activities are considered to be too secret to divulge) are under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence.
The National Clandestine Service (NCS) (formerly known as the Directorate of Operations) is the main United States intelligence agency for coordinating human intelligence (HUMINT) services. The organization absorbed the entirety of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)'s Directorate of Operations, and also coordinates HUMINT between the CIA and other agencies, including, but not limited to, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Diplomatic Security Service, Defense Intelligence Agency, Air Intelligence Agency, Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, and Office of Naval Intelligence. The current Director of the NCS is Michael Sulick. The Director of the NCS reports to the CIA Director.
The creation of the NCS was officially announced in a press release on 13 October 2005.[1] The NCS was created by a bill from US Senator Pat Roberts in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks. The investigation by the 9/11 Commission reported that HUMINT had been severely degraded in the past two decades, principally because of the end of the Cold War and because of startling revelations about CIA operations uncovered by the investigations of the Church Committee of the US Senate.
The NCS has analogues in the National Security Agency (signals intelligence), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency.
The final version of the anti-terrorism legislation, the ‘Uniting and Strengthening America By Providing Appropriate Tools Required To Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism’ (H.R. 3162, the "USA PATRIOT Act") puts the Central Intelligence Agency back in the business of spying on Americans. It permits a vast array of information gathering on U.S. citizens from school records, financial transactions*, Internet activity, telephone conversations, information gleaned from grand jury proceedings and criminal investigations to be shared with the CIA (and other non-law enforcement officials) even if it pertains to Americans. The information would be shared without a court order. The bill also gives the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, acting in his capacity as head of the Intelligence Community, enormous power to manage the collection and dissemination of intelligence information gathered in the U.S. This new authority supercedes existing guidelines issued to protect Americans from unwarranted surveillance by U.S. agencies such as the FBI.
The National Security Service (NSS) within the Federal Bureau of Investigation was created June 29, 2005, by President George W. Bush through the Executive Order (EO) entitled "Blocking Property of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferators and Their Supporters."
Gary M. Bald, Director
Philip Mudd, Deputy Director
The basis for the creation of a National Security Service is documented in the FBI paper "National Security: FBI or MI-5?" from the "Report of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, Chapter 10: Intelligence at Home: The FBI, Justice, and Homeland Security, pp. 466-67, March 31, 2005."
The National Security Service "pulls together the Counterintelligence Division, the Counterterrorism Division, and the Directorate of Intelligence, enabling it to act together to develop intelligence and then to act on that intelligence, in consultation with not only Department of Justice but also the Director of National Intelligence (DNI)." June 29, 2005, DoJ Briefing Paper.
Also see: Memorandum: "Strengthening the Ability of the Department of Justice to Meet Challenges to the Security of the Nation," White House, June 29, 2005.
TALON is the acronym for Threat and Local Observation Notice. "To track alleged ‘domestic terrorist threats against the military,’ the Pentagon is created a new database that contained raw, non-validated' reports of anomalous activities within the United States Talon was intended to provide a means to gather and disseminate reports from volunteer ‘concerned citizens’
In 2002, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz "designated it as the DoD “standard for reporting suspicious activity.” The Department of Homeland Security, ever eager to enlarge it own domestic citizenry files, declared that; “ TALON as a template within the emerging Protect America homeland defense information sharing system."
"Talon reports grew out of a program called Eagle Eyes, an anti-terrorist program established by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations that 'enlists the eyes and ears of Air Force members and citizens in the war on terror,' according to the program's Web site. A Pentagon spokesman recently described Eagle Eyes as a 'neighborhood watch' program for military bases. The Air Force inspector general newsletter in 2003 said program informants include 'Air Force family members, contractors, off-base merchants, community organizations and neighborhoods'," Walter Pincus reported in the December 11, 2005, Washington Post.
In April 2007, the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence requested that the Secretary of Defense terminate the TALON program because the results of the last year do not merit continuing the program as currently constituted, particularly in light of its image in the Congress and the media.
Operation TIPS, Terrorism Information and Prevention System, was a program designed at the specific order of President George W. Bush to have United States citizens report suspicious activity on the part of their co-workers, neighbors and family members. US workers who had access to private citizens' homes, such as cable installers and telephone repair workers, would be reporting on what was in people's homes if it were deemed suspicious to them. A packet of what was deemed suspicious was to be supplied to each informer. (A copy of this is in the author’s possession and borders on the idiotic) The United States Postal Service, after at first supportive of the program, later resisted its personnel being included in this program, reasoning that if mail carriers became perceived as law enforcement personnel that they would be placed in danger at a level for which they could not reasonably be expected to be prepared, and that the downside of the program hence vastly outweighed any good that it could accomplish. The National Association of Letter Carriers, a postal labor union, was especially outspoken in its opposition. Although the TIPS program was officially cancelled in 2002, on June 30, 2008, the Denver Post reported that 181 individuals, including police officers, paramedics, firefighters, utility workers, and railroad employees had been trained as Terrorism Liaison Officers to report suspicious information which could be signs of terrorist activity and that while Congress had specifically forbidden its implementation, it was still very much active. The article also stated that TLOs were already active in six other states and the District of Columbia.
Editor’s note: A long and detailed listing of members of Infragard cannot at this time be published on the Internet for obvious reasons. However, it will be sent out attached to our Slaughterhouse Informer this coming week. There will be additional material on this subject forthcoming in future issues of TBR News.
www.tbrnews.org/Archives/a3008.htm