New York Times on 'Ambush in Mogadishu

- OPEN SOURCE  US/1

TELEVISION REVIEW; Good Intentions Going Horribly Awry

By WALTER GOODMAN
Published: September 29, 1998

 

''Frontline'' offers a tour de force tonight. Short on pictures of the October 1993 firefight in the Somali capital, ''Ambush in Mogadishu'' provides a compelling account through the memories of United States Army Rangers who found themselves pinned down for 17 hours. Eighteen Americans were killed -- the most memorable picture was of a body being dragged through the streets -- and scores more wounded, with enduring consequences for American foreign policy.

The 90-minute program begins with a well-meant United Nations effort to take food and stability to the chaos of civil war in Somalia. But the killing of 12 Pakistani peacekeepers set off a manhunt for Mohammed Farah Aidid, a powerful and elusive warlord; the United States, with a mission meant to be limited both in duration and scope, became a target in a confusing civil war.

Plenty of blame is distributed by the military officers and intelligence specialists interviewed here. They fault the Clinton Administration's testy relations with the Pentagon, friction within the United Nations forces and faulty intelligence.

There seem, too, to have been mixed signals in Washington. It is reported that no one told the commanders in Mogadishu, who were under pressure to capture Mohammed Aidid, that President Jimmy Carter had been entrusted to work out a secret deal with the warlord. (Administration officials declined to talk to ''Frontline.'')

The raid by Rangers and Army Delta Special Forces, following up on a dubious tip from a Somali informer, turned into disaster when a Blackhawk helicopter was shot down and the Americans who came to the rescue were trapped. ''Wait a minute,'' an American soldier says. ''It's not supposed to work like this, you know. We're Americans, you know: we're the ones dictating the game here.''

Most of the second half of ''Ambush in Mogadishu'' is given to a description of the fighting as the Rangers moved into the mazelike alleys to save the downed helicopter crew only to find themselves under heavy fire from the Aidid gunmen who were waiting for them. ''It was just crazy,'' one Ranger says. ''We were getting shot from all over the place.'' Another says, ''There were Rangers with blood on their uniforms, people looking haggard and tired. There was just carnage.'' (The Somalis say they lost 350 fighters.)
The program suggests that a legacy of Somalia, which one of tonight's critics calls ''a failed political military operation,'' was the reluctance of Washington to be drawn into other danger spots like Bosnia and Rwanda. One critic says policy makers were left ''actually not knowing what to do at all.''

FRONTLINE
Ambush in Mogadishu
PBS, tonight
(Channel 13, New York, at 9)
Written, produced and directed by Bill Cran; Kate Leonard-Morgan, production manager; Lisa A. Jones, line producer; Carlos Mavroleon, field producer in Somalia. For ''Frontline'': Michael Sullivan, executive producer; David Fanning, senior executive producer. A Frontline production with Invasion Productions, Ltd., in association with the BBC-2. Will Lyman, narrator; William Scott Malone, reporter.

FULL STORY HERE...

Washington Post: The Panama Debacle -- Uncle Sam Wimps Out

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[redacted]; US/1           - MEMBER CONTRIBUTIONS 

[ed.note: Check how we spelled Muammar Gadhafi back in the day. How to start a war against a friendly dictator. Much more BlackBACK-Story to come on this escalating escapade. Stay turned...]

April 23, 1989, Sunday, Final Edition

The Panama Debacle -- Uncle Sam Wimps Out

By William Scott Malone

   A YEAR AGO, the United States was trying to intimidate Panama's Manuel Antonio Noriega and oust him from power. Today, the opposite seems to have happened: It is Noriega who is intimidating the United States and our power in Panama that is crumbling.

The Panama fiasco is a classic lesson in the misuse of American power. Indeed, it seems almost like a re-run of the 1982-84 Lebanon debacle: the United States faced a challenge from an intractable foe; administration hardliners responded with aggressive military options, but without a practical political strategy; the Pentagon, worried about the risks to U.S. forces, opposed the hardliners. The resulting policy was a half-hearted middle course that accomplished little and left America's allies hanging.

Added to this messy mix was election-year politics. Panama became a political hot potato during the 1988 campaign. The Reagan-Bush administration, which had provoked the confrontation with Noriega, then walked away from it as the election approached. They never returned to the fray -- to the point that today, the United States can't even provide a radio transmitter for the Panamanian opposition we helped create!


The folly of our Panama policy was captured by New York Sen. Alphonse D'Amato (R), who likened it to "setting your hair on fire and trying to put it out with a hammer."

[US/1’s All Time Favorite Quote EVER…]

The following reconstruction of how Noriega outfoxed the United States is based on classified U.S. documents and interviews with over a dozen American officials and Panamanian opposition figures.  The State Department and the National Security Council declined to comment on any of the information. Some of the evidence remains controversial within the U.S. government, which has been bitterly divided for more than a year about Panama policy. Among the highlights:

* Cuban commandos may have joined Gen. Noriega's forces in military attacks against American bases in Panama, including an April 1988 raid on a fuel tank farm. Like the Marines in Beirut, the troops of the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) in Panama have lacked clear rules of engagement allowing them to respond to such attacks.

* Libya's Muammar Gadhafi provided crucial financial support that helped Gen. Noriega survive U.S. economic sanctions last year. According to one intelligence source, the Libyan leader provided $ 24 million in cash.


* In its efforts to topple Noriega, the administration considered a range of tough tactics -- including luring the Panamanian to the Dominican Republic and kidnapping him to the United States to stand trial on drug-trafficking charges. A much more limited covert-action plan was adopted last July, based around a group of Panamanian exiles. But by all accounts, it has failed to bring any real pressure against Noriega.


The Panama roller coaster began in February 1988, when Noriega was indicted by two federal grand juries on drug-conspiracy charges. The indictments culminated several years of growing American disenchantment with Noriega, despite his longtime assistance to the CIA and covert support for the contras program. In late February, with U.S. encouragement, Panamanian President Arturo Delvalle tried to fire Noriega from his post as commander of the Panama Defense Forces. Instead, Delvalle himself was ousted.


State Department officials, led by Assistant Secretary Elliott Abrams, decided that it was time to play hardball. To discuss options, the Reagan administration arranged for Eduardo Herrera, then Panama's ambassador to Israel, to fly secretly to Washington on March 7, 1988 for a series of meetings with U.S. officials. Despite the attempt to conceal the Herrera mission from Noriega, the Panamanian leader quickly learned about it and forced out Herrera -- providing an early demonstration of his saavy. (Herrera later emerged as the military leader of the Panamanian opposition.) By late March, hardliners at the State Department had put together a tentative plan that included economic sanctions against Noriega, beefing up the American military presence in Panama, and covert support for the Panamanian resistance. The strategy, in effect, was to lure Noriega into a confrontation in which the United States could deliver a devastating blow.


One specific proposal was to send Herrera and other Panamanian exiles into Panama and let them operate from safe houses on American military bases or other U.S.-controlled territory. They would conduct sabotage operations, such as raiding Noriega's bases, and propaganda operations, including clandestine radio broadcasts. These activities might draw a counterattack -- with Noriega hitting the American-controlled areas. But that apparently was part of the plan, since it would allow the Reagan administration to intervene to protect Americans.


Another option was kidnapping Noriega. One CIA official said the original plan entailed luring Noriega for a secret visit to the Dominican Republic. Noriega's daughter is married to the son of a powerful Dominican general, and he apparently feels safe there. The Defense Intelligence Agency also noted Noriega 's Dominican connection in a March 1988 report: "In view of his daughter's marriage . . . Noriega may have sent some of his assets [there] for storage as a contingency measure."


An Army special-forces officer involved in the planning says the administration "had a variety of options -- five different ones. One was the DR [Dominican Republic] plan."


The National Security Council is said to have debated the hardline options, but President Reagan ultimately decided against them -- largely because of Pentagon opposition. The military feared that the confrontation strategy would make the roughly 25,000 American military personnel and dependents in Panama sitting ducks. The Pentagon's wariness was illustrated by one exchange: The military argued that dependents should be evacuated before any confrontation with Noriega. Fine, said the State Department, but how long will it take? About eight months, said the military -- basing its estimate on information provided by commercial moving firms.


Jose Blandon, Noriega's controversial former chief of political intelligence and by then a leading opposition figure, describes the Pentagon's rejection of hardline options this way: "Last March [1988] the exiles wanted to return to the [former] U.S. Canal Zone, but the Defense Department said no." Another opposition official recalls that in April 1988 anti-Noriega forces requested permission from the U.S. ambassador to place a radio station on U.S.-controlled territory, only to be informed that "the Army says no." Despite the American vacillation, Noriega and his Cuban allies moved toward a confrontation. The most extraordinary incident was an April 13, 1988 raid against the Arraijan fuel tank farm near U.S. Howard Air Force Base on Panama's Pacific coast. There's still a lively debate within the intelligence community about what happened, but some analysts believe that Cuban commandos led the attack.


The raid began just after 1 a.m., when Marines guarding the tank were attacked by about 60 "unidentified individuals" wearing black camouflage uniforms and using assault rifles and mortars, according to a U.S. intelligence report prepared shortly after the incident. The document noted that fighting had continued for "approximately 2 1/2 hours" into the early morning, but "no U.S. casualties were reported."


U.S. military intelligence finally pieced together an account of the Cuban connection only by accident, according to one American official. "Three of the Cubans were wounded in the [April] attack. They were taken to a PDF military hospital and registered under the Spanish equivalent of John Doe. One died, and after some of the hospital workers became suspicious, the other two were transferred to a Cuban ship transiting the canal."


The intelligence community gathered other evidence of Cuban involvement with Noriega. One late April report stated that Cuban leader Fidel Castro intended to "ensure that events turn out favorably" for Noriega. Another intelligence report warned that Castro was sending "Cuban soldiers [to] Panama" to render "guerrilla warfare training for Panamian soldiers."


Some U.S. officials contend that the Cubans were brazen enough to return to the Arraijan tank farm for a second attack last year, but that the Pentagon has deliberately played down the incident because it doesn't want to stir up trouble with Noriega. A SOUTHCOM spokesman denied Friday that there has been any cover-up. There have been over 50 attacks at the Arraijan fuel depot, the spokesman said, but there is "no confirmed evidence" of Cuban involvement.


Castro wasn't Noriega's only covert backer. To cope with the financial squeeze that began in March, when the United States suspended payments to Noriega, the Panamanian dictator turned to the Reagan administration's No. 1 nemesis -- Libya's Col. Muammar Gadhafi.


An account of the Libyan connection comes from Panamanian Air Force Maj. Augusto Villalaz. He recalls that on March 14, 1988 he was told to fly to Cuba on a special mission. En route, a Noriega intelligence officer named Capt. Felipe Camargo told him: "Our mission will be to receive $ 50 million from the government of Libya." The plan was to meet a Libyan airplane at an airbase outside Havana. But when they arrived, they were told that the money hadn't arrived yet. So they instead flew home with a cargo of 32,000 pounds of Soviet-made small arms.

"We hear Noriega did receive cash through Cuba [around April 1988]," says Blandon. According to a military intelligence source, "$24 million ultimately went through from Libya last year." The CIA reported that "Noreiga [had] run through his Libyan money" by late September, according to one intelligence document.


With U.S. military options rejected by the Pentagon and economic sanctions blunted by Gadhafi, the Reagan administration turned to diplomacy. The State Department's deputy legal counsel, Michael G. Kozak negotiated with Noriega's representatives during May 1988 to drop the U.S. drug indictment if Noriega would relinquish control and leave Panama. The negotiations finally collapsed on May 25. While Secretary of State George Shultz waited on the tarmac at Andrews airbase to depart for Moscow, Noriega relayed his final answer -- no deal.


Noriega had won! This galled U.S. officials who were familiar with intelligence reports about his harassment of American citizens. According to the latest Defense Department figures, there have been over 670 incidents of harassment against U.S. civilians and troops during the past year, ranging from detention without charge to severe beatings.  The Reagan administration took another brief shot at covert action against Noriega. An intelligence finding was prepared in the summer of 1988; a mid-July State Department memo noted that the administration faced an "uphill battle" trying to persuade the Congressional intelligence committees to "support" it. The White House, this memo stated, felt the Panama finding required congressional approval, "since monies must be reprogrammed."


The presidential finding apparently was signed by early August. Jose Blandon recalls that during the first week of August, "President Reagan called Delvalle in New York City and told him that he had signed a finding. Kozak and [Robert] Pastorino from NSC also told us the president had already signed a finding."


The finding, in essence, provided for "a power transmitter for a radio station and for the CIA to coordinate activities with [Eduardo] Herrera," according to one Panamanian source. Blandon wouldn't discuss details of the finding, but he says in general: "After the May negotiation process failed, there were some plans to use the PDF against Noriega and we received some U.S support, clandestine support for radio and TV broadcasts . . . ." But the American effort was short-lived and half-hearted. In August, according to one source, the DIA informed opposition operatives that they "should expect nothing, nothing, from the military forces of the U.S." Noriega opponents who met with CIA officials in September were told that the agency also opposed military operations against Noriega.


By the end of September, even the modest clandestine radio project had been stalled by bureaucratic infighting. According to minutes of a Sept. 28 meeting of the interagency "Panama Working Group," the CIA had not even "been back in contact" with the key Panamanians who were to run the radio network, even though the agency had completed its "field report" on broadcasting from mobile vans.


"Technically, this is highly feasible and would provide full coverage of Panama City with no risk that their location could be pinpointed," according to the minutes. "Nevertheless, both the [CIA chief of station] and SOUTHCOM consider the risk unacceptable since Noriega will retaliate against U.S. assets if he believes that we have contributed to enhancing the effectiveness of opposition activities."


"Covert operation?" muses one of the exasperated Panamanian rebels. "The covert operation was a radio station! Noriega brought in a Cuban team to trace [it]. When that didn't work, they constructed a large transmitter to jam [it]. We [could] only get on the air for 30 seconds before jamming starts. We needed better technical equipment, but it didn't come."


A Senate source confirms that the extent of covert support for anti-Noriega forces was "radio equipment, leaflets, and some sabotage." The radio broadcasts and other non-military operations were being financed from the interest on Panamanian government assets frozen by the Reagan administration in April 1988. The entire propaganda operation received "substantially less than $ 1 million," according to various opposition and Senate sources.


The military side of the anti-Noriega effort was handled by the "Herrera group," centered around Panama's former ambassador to Israel, which received $1.3 million last year, apparently from the escrow accounts, according to Panamanian sources. (Neither the CIA nor the Pentagon considered supplying weapons to the resistance groups.)


Herrera, in concert with the Delvalle government-in-exile, had been planning to launch a military operation against Noriega, say American and opposition officials. Yet by late October, says one American official, "the CIA [had] nixed the Herrera operation. He had been abandoned -- no meetings -- no explanation." As Herrera told this official last November: "They made all these promises and then totally left me out in the cold." The loss of the U.S. government's remaining enthusiasm for the anti-Noriega opposition was probably attributable to the upcoming U.S. election. Politics were certainly on the minds of the members of the Panama Working Group in late September. According to the minutes, some officials suggested "deferring" the decision on supporting opposition radio and TV broadcasts "until after the election."


By October, the Noriega issue had disappeared almost entirely -- except in the rhetoric of Democratic contender Michael Dukakis. Noriega opponents in the United States had been advised to maintain a "low profile" in the remaining month before the election. "The U.S. [government] requested us not to talk about Panama because of the election," recalls one key opposition figure. U.S. officials, in particular, managed to keep the outspoken Blandon, then under protection of the U.S. Marshals Service, virtually incommunicado before the election -- moving him last October to a Navy base far from Washington.


After the election, U.S.-backed opposition leader Delvalle was granted a 15-minute audience with Ronald Reagan and President-elect George Bush in the Oval Office. "There must be no misunderstanding about our policy," Bush pledged after the meeting through a spokesman. "Our policy will be that Noriega must go."


Yet the anti-Noriega forces haven't received any funds since that warm December meeting, according to both U.S. and Panamanian officials. "No money since Bush was inaugurated," says dejected opposition official. "Nothing."


Meanwhile, Noriega continues his intimidation of Americans. Early last month, Maj. Luis Cordova, the head of Noriega's Transit Police, ordered 21 U.S. school buses full of hundreds of American children stopped for license-plate violations. The children were marched from the buses at gunpoint. A videotape of the incident shows one U.S. security officer helplessly screaming: "You're terrorizing school children!"


At the moment, the Bush administration appears so snakebit by Noriega that it has no policy whatsoever on Panama. Panamanians are preparing for elections on May 7, but Secretary of State James A. Baker III has privately told senators that the United States doesn't plan any significant actions before the election. And sources say that 10 days ago, before a closed session of the Senate Intelligence Committee, SOUTHCOM commander Gen. Fred Woerner testified that he still would not allow U.S. bases to be employed for opposition broadcasts. The Pentagon believes that such propaganda activities would, among other things, violate the Panama Canal Treaty.


According to Blandon, the Pentagon's position still carries the day. "The Defense Department has a specific position -- they want to have the canal open -- that's the only thing they care about. They would like to have an agreement with Noriega no matter what happens in the elections."


The anti-Noriega opposition the United States helped create is now in ruins. On April 6, all of the opposition's remaining clandestine radio equipment was seized by Noriega, and the operator, an American businessman, was arrested. "We 're out of the ball game now," says one distraught exile official, choking back tears.

William Scott Malone, a television producer, has won two national Emmy awards for investigative reporting. Additional research and reporting for this article was provided by Washington-based reporter Anthony Kimery.

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

WashPOST: Code Name Catastrophe

- OPEN SOURCE  US/1

 

January 24, 1989

Code Name Catastrophe

By William Scott Malone and William Cran

THE COLD WAR between the United States and the Soviet Union may be winding down, but the spy war between them continues. And there's new evidence  that America may have suffered greater damage in this secret war than is generally recognized.

The Soviets appear to have obtained access to the most deeply held U.S. secret of all -- the codes used to protect our sensitive government  messages. U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement officials say they base  this analysis on a careful review of the 1985 John Walker spy case, which leads them to two disturbing conclusions:

" The United States hasn't caught all the Soviet code spies. More Walker are probably out there, still undetected. Investigators reached this judgment because of indications that Moscow had other, and perhaps better, sources of U.S. "crypto" secrets than the Walker spy ring.

" The Soviets have broken some supposedly "unbreakable" cipher systems.
Investigators believe that by piecing together technical information  provided by Walker and his associates, the Soviets have been able to  replicate U.S. hardware and read at least some of our secret message  traffic -- a feat that U.S. officials once believed was impossible. " A sign of America's continuing espionage problem came during the past month, with the arrest of U.S. Army Warrant Officer James W. Hall III in Georgia and former Navy chief petty officer Craig D. Kunkle in Virginia. Kunkle, who was arrested during an FBI sting operation two weeks ago, didn't actually pass secrets to the KGB, so he isn't believed to have caused any real damage. But Hall's alleged espionage, if true, was of a far more damaging nature. As an Army signals-intelligence specialist, Hall had access to super-secret U.S. cryptographic machines and keylists, more commonly known as codes and ciphers.

The Walker case showed just how vulnerable these code systems are. John A. Walker Jr., a onetime Navy warrant officer, spied for the KGB for almost 20 years before he was arrested in May 1985, after his ex-wife turned him in to the FBI. Walker had recruited his brother, his 20-year-old son and his best friend into his spy ring.

"It was the greatest case in KGB history," former KGB defector Vitaly Yurchenko told his American debriefers in 1985. "We deciphered millions of your messages. If there had been a war, we would have won it."

"K-Mart has better security than the U.S. Navy," Walker told us during a series of interviews last August for a PBS "Frontline" documentary on the Soviet espionage threat. He noted that he used to tell his partner, Jerry Whitworth, that selling U.S. secrets "was a buyers' market."

What worries Phillip Parker, the former FBI deputy assistant director for
counterintelligence who supervised the Walker case, is that the KGB's handling of Walker demonstrated that he was not their most important agent. "He was just another messenger boy," says Parker. "There are no doubt other John Walkers still out there," agrees a National Security Agency (NSA) official.

From Walker's very first visit to the Soviet Embassy in Washington in December 1967, it was obvious the Soviets were intimately familiar with America's top-secret codes. When Walker, at that first meeting, presented a copy of a Navy keylist stamped "Top Secret Specat [Special Category]," the KGB security officer immediately wanted to know why there was no "Letter of Promulgation" signature on the back of the keylist. It took the
startled spy a few moments to realize that the NSA had recently discontinued the signature practice.

As with the famous Sherlock Holmes case in which the crucial clue was a dog that didn't bark, the most important thing about the Walker case may be the questions the KGB didn't ask him. "I can only deduce that they were getting their information from somewhere else," Walker eventually concluded.

"The NSA boys went pale when I told them about the Russians not wanting anything on the [then most advanced machines]. It meant that it had already been compromised," says Walker. Such a conclusion offers perhaps the most disturbing implication for U.S. security, since a new generationof U.S. code machines had begun to go into service by the early 1980s with the Air Force, Army, Navy and NATO.

To assess the damage done by Walker and the other spies, it's necessary to understand a bit about the arcane science of cryptology. Experts say there are two basic elements to a modern code system: the logic and the key. The humming, Navy-gray code machines contain what is in essence an electronic formula (or algorithm) called the logic. The key is a list of numbers and letters that set the machine and tell the logic formula when to commence. To maximize security, U.S. keylists are changed every 24 hours.

The machines themselves, along with their associated "technical manuals," while closely guarded, are usually not top-secret, because they are distributed around the world and their designers assume they will eventually be lost or stolen. The NSA has long presumed that no machine by itself could be used to read a coded message -- without that day's
keylist. Keylists thus become the object of intense classification and protection.

"In the context of communications information, the keylist is considered the ultimate," recalled Walker's convicted cohort Jerry Whitworth in an interview for the "Frontline" documentary. "The only other thing that's better would be the keylist, tech manual and the equipment. Then you've got the whole shebang."

"Obviously you can't steal the equipment," explains Walker, "so the next best thing would be to give them the technical manual. From the technical manual, you can build the equipment by a process of [reverse] engineering."

Walker did just that. Using a Minox camera, he supplied the Soviets with all the technical manuals he could lay his hands on. "They got the original technical manuals from me and I provided them with amendments [and] modifications to that equipment as they occurred over the years," says Walker. "When Mr. Whitworth took over, he continued to provide those changes basically to the [KWR-]37 and to the [KW-]7" code machines.

The Soviets still needed the daily keylists, but Walker, and later Whitworth, kept them amply supplied. Whitworth let his pride show when discussing a $ 10,000 bonus Walker paid him for providing "months" of continuous keylists. "The bonus thing came up over a period of having years of consistency -- not months, but years," he says.

The NSA had thought that even if this sort of breach occurred, the damage would be limited. Earl David Clark, the former chief of NSA's Office of Communications Security, testified during Whitworth's trial in 1986: "We design our systems [so] that without a key, we are highly confident that no one can read these communications . . . . You would only be able to exploit those communications for which you have that logic [tech manual]
and keying material in which those communications were encrypted. [You] could not read tomorrow's traffic if [you] didn't have tomorrow's key . . . ."

Clark's confidence may have been misplaced. According to Navy officials, the internal design logic of some machines was indeed compromised by the Walker spy ring, and the Soviets were able to read secret U.S. messages without the keylists. Adm. James D. Watkins, then chief of naval operations, obliquely acknowledged the compromise during a June 1985 press briefing. According to Watkins, loss of the cryptographic logic designs was "the most serious area of compromise. Some technical design communications information has probably been lost."

Four months later, after Walker began cooperating with damage-assessment officials, then Navy secretary John Lehman was more specific: "We assume that the Soviets were able to compromise the design logic of some of the cryptographic machines, which would enable them in some cases to crack the code without key cards. And we assume they have."

One of the compromised systems was the most widely used code machine of all, the KW-7, a fact recently confirmed to us by four past or present NSA officials. Although the KW-7 has been replaced, it was once the mainstay of crypto-communications for the entire government. It was also used to communicate with many of our NATO allies. In addition to the KW-7, two NSA officials said that the reliability of the Navy's older KWR-37, used for
one-way, shore-to-ship "Fleet Broadcast" messages, has also been completely written off.

These two code machines were not compromised by the so-called "brute-force" method, which entails having supercomputers run through every possible keylist combination. Rather, the Soviets apparently had so much material -- including the KW-7 hardware, keylists and plain-text versions of messages sent on the system -- that they were able to exploit "design flaws" in the KW-7's logic that allowed them to do what the NSA
had once believed impossible -- "break" the machine's code formula without use of the daily keylist.

"The Soviets have always been reputed to be rather good in code breaking," says David Kahn, author of "The Codebreakers." "It's known that three things seem to be associated with success in code-breaking: musicianship, chess and mathematics. What are the three things the Russians are best at?"

Collectively, Walker and Whitworth supplied some six virtually continuous years of keylists for the KW-7 and KWR-37. Walker says he also provided the Soviets the technical manuals, complete with the precise schematics of the design logic, for the KW-7 and the KWR-37 systems. All subsequent KW-7 and KWR-37 equipment modifications were provided by Whitworth, both spies now confirm.

The Soviets had also obtained actual working versions of these machines. The United States lost both KW-7 and KWR-37 machines in January 1968, when North Korean gunboats seized the U.S. spy ship USS Pueblo for allegedly violating their territorial waters, and at least one other KW-7 was lost in Vietnam in the early 1970s, according to court testimony and Navy documents. So the "design logic" was unquestionably compromised, even when later modified.

The NSA's position at the time, according to former communications security chief Clark, was that even with one of the seized KW-7s, the Soviets "wouldn't be able to decrypt it unless they had a correct key." But within weeks after the Pueblo was seized, the KGB's codebreaking Department 16 had the KW-7's worldwide keylists, courtesy of their newly
recruited spy, Warrant Officer John Walker.

While the Soviets never told Walker how successful their U.S. codebreaking efforts had been, they did once tell him when their KWR-37 replica machine had stopped reading secret U.S. messages in early 1980. Walker and Whitworth subsequently decided the problem stemmed from a new security device called a "Card Reader Insert Board," into which a keylist was placed and then reattached to the machine. Whitworth then sketched this new board and sent it on to Walker.

"I provided a diagram, a tracing . . . of the card reader," Whitworth admits when pressed. "That's true." The Soviets had no further complaints about reading the KWR-37 Fleet Broadcast messages.

By early 1984, the KGB's wish-list for Walker was narrowing. During a chilly meeting outside a Vienna mens' shop, Walker's KGB handler told him they still wanted "7 subsystems" (KW-7 hardware modifications), as well as naval operational orders and plans.

And, in a request that once again seemed to demonstrate the Soviets still had better access to U.S. secrets than either Walker or Whitworth, the KGB agent asked for copies of something called an "NCM," which Walker says stood for some sort of "crypto-related 'National Command Memorandum.'" Neither Walker nor Whitworth had ever heard of this item before.

Fortunately, Walker and Whitworth did not have NSA "crypto clearances," and therefore never had access to the so-called "Blue Channel," used for super-sensitive "special intelligence" information. The Navy employs an entirely separate communications system on ships and bases for such messages, although the systems did use some of the same equipment, including the KW-7 and the KWR-37.

The severe damage done by the Walker ring probably ended several years before they were caught. In the early 1980s, the NSA introduced various safeguards, including canister-type keylist dispensers, that prevented someone from removing a keylist and later returning it; "limited" technical manuals, which contained no logic diagrams; and unphotographable types of keylists for the Navy's new, advanced code machines.

Walker now says the creators of those inovations "should be awarded medals." High praise indeed.

But the demise of the Walker ring didn't stop the KGB. At about the same time Walker's crypto supply to the Soviets ended, Army Warrant Officer James Hall had just come on line in Berlin. As a signals-intelligence specialist for the NSA's military subsidiary, the Army Security Agency, Hall had access to a broad array of U.S. crypto systems, including the
KW-7, according to sources. U.S. sources say that Hall has apparently admitted supplying "important signal-intelligence information" to the KGB's proxies in East Germany from late 1982 to early 1988. Hall is now said to be cooperating with authorities.

What's ominous is that early last year, Hall apparently was told by his Soviet controllers "to cool off his activities." "Hall was flushed," concludes one intelligence source. "There's still someone else out there."

The likelihood that the codebreakers of the KGB's Department 16 were "not only able to copy, but were able to solve" U.S. codes, deeply worries Kean College mathematics professor Cipher Deavours, long close to the secret world of codes and the editor of Cryptologia. "The main assumptions under which the National Security Agency [operates] is that even if the enemy has possession of the machine, he won't be able to read any traffic without the key. That assumption was wrong. And our entire crypto-design
philosophy is built on that."

"You have to assume they're certainly not arresting everybody," says Walker, from his cell in the isolation block of the most secure federal prison at Marion, Ill. "There are obviously other spy rings out there and other players. The fact that there were cryptographic systems and other types of systems that they didn't want is clearly evidence that they had
other sources."

William Scott Malone and William Cran are Emmy-award-winning producers for PBS' "Frontline." They spent almost a  year investigating the Walker case for the upcoming "The Spy Who Broke The Code," which will air next Tuesday on PBS.

http://www.navyseals.com/code-name-catastrophe

Scandal Almost Sank Secret Cambodia War

- OPEN SOURCE
US/1

 [ed.note: Corrupt officials in Afghanistan? US/1 is shocked…shocked.

Bob WOODWARD, back in the day, used to say that he sought ‘Holy Shit’ stories.

Member Tony KIMERY, and retired Member Mark PERRY, and Scott MALONE [US/1] ambled in to the Washington Post’s OUTLOOK section back in October 1988. After much cigarette smoke, some yelling, and at least one table pounding, US/1 was later heard to mutter as he was being escorted off the premises: “Yeah…we got a ‘NO Shit’ story--Thai Generals are corrupt?”

Unbeknownst to us, sometime Member David IGNATIUS, then the editor of the Washington Post’s Sunday OUTLOOK section, apparently ambled over to INR-DepSEC Morton ABRAMOWITZ’s office at the State Department for a verbal brief.

To SIRO or not to SIRO, that was the question…[Special Intelligence Reporting Office]

ABRAMOWITZ recorded his outrage at our story about Thai Generals stealing the CIA's Cambodian resistance money in a TOP SECRET cable we recovered the soon enough thereafter:

“They HAVE the ROGER CHANNEL…” ABRAMOWITZ declared on the ROGER CHANNEL, the secret encrypted channel reserved only for the discussion of classified covert operations.

Oh well, never mind. Ben BRADLEE, the Executive Editor of the Washigton Post, did get himself burned in effigy outside the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok, a first for him.

Needless, to say, the Thai generals kept the CIA money...] 

[ROGER, ROGER -- SIRO Out...]

NO DISSEMINATION [lifted], above. Article below is OPEN SOURCE.

    OUTLOOK
    October 30, 1988, Sunday, Final Edition

How Scandal Almost Sank Our Secret Cambodia War

By Mark Perry and William Scott Malone

A $ 3.5-MILLION corruption scandal involving Thai military officers nearly derailed funding last summer for the Reagan administration's covert program to assist non-communist rebels in Cambodia.


The scandal surfaced last spring, when Central Intelligence Agency officers in Thailand involved in running the covert program  uncovered evidence that Thai military officers, and perhaps businessmen, had skimmed money from the U.S. covert-assistance program, which totaled $ 12 million in fiscal 1988.


The CIA then informed the Senate Intelligence Committee, which sent a team of auditors to Thailand to review the program. The auditors reported back to the committee on July 12 about "corruption which had been uncovered" in the Cambodia aid program, according to a late July document prepared by the State Department and made available by a source in the executive branch. The theft of U.S. funds appears to have totaled about $ 3.5 million, according to intelligence sources.


The corruption problem emerged at a delicate time, when the Reagan administration was hoping to expand U.S. support for the resistance forces that are fighting Vietnamese troops in Cambodia. The goal of the program isn't simply to drive out the Vietnamese, but to help develop a non-communist alternative to the communist Khmer Rouge -- so that if the Vietnamese eventually withdraw their troops in a negotiated settlement of the war, the Khmer Rouge won't simply fill the vacuum with another bloody dictatorship.


There had been bipartisan congressional support for the Cambodia program until the money scandal surfaced. Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee were so disturbed by the evidence of corruption that "one group wished to terminate [the] program in view of magnitude of misappropriated funds," according to the July State Department document. The document noted, however, that "a second group was prepared to continue the program, but with strict periodic review."


The latter group won, and the U.S. covert-assistance program has been authorized for fiscal 1989 at $ 8 million, sources say. The July State Department document explained: "[Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman David] Boren, who supported Option B, managed to fend off pressure to end [the] program and, finally succeeded in creating a consensus around its continuation, albeit with continuing [Senate Intelligence Committee] oversight." (A spokesman for the Senate Intelligence Committee declined to comment on any aspect of this story.)


The $ 8-million authorization for this fiscal year represents a cut from last year's $ 12 million level and is less than administration officials had wanted. But the House and Senate Intelligence panels did agree to "front load" the money in the first quarter of fiscal '89, so that the Cambodian resistance will get over $ 3 million, or nearly half the total, by the end of this year.


Rep. Stephen Solarz (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House subcommittee on Asian affairs, said in a telephone interview Friday that the scandal in Thailand had threatened an otherwise popular program. "What happened was an outrage, not only because it involved corrupt  diversions and activities, but because it threatened to undermine support for a movement that may be essential for the survival of Cambodia as an independent nation," Solarz said.


"My impression, based on discussions in Bangkok, is that steps have been taken to prevent similar corruption and diversions in the program," Solarz added. (Solarz is the principal sponsor of an additional, overt program to support the resistance, which provided about $ 3 million last year and is expected to increase to as much as $ 5 million in fiscal '89.)


The Cambodia covert-aid program, which began in 1982 or 1983, has probably been the least controversial -- and least known -- of the Reagan administration's secret operations to confront Soviet-backed proxy forces in the Third World. Under the program, the CIA works through the Thai government to disburse non-lethal aid and training for the non-communist Cambodian resistance fighters. The program is backed by U.S. allies in Southeast Asia who are members of the ASEAN alliance, and some ASEAN members have joined the U.S. in providing funds for the covert effort.


Until the corruption scandal was uncovered, the U.S. approach had simply been to provide money to the Thais and tell them what to buy. This loose arrangement kept the United States from becoming too deeply involved in the program, but it also opened the door to profiteering in Bangkok. Since the scandal emerged, the CIA is said to have established new auditing and administrative procedures to
make sure that U.S. money is spent as intended.


The U.S. ambassador in Bangkok, Daniel A. O'Donohue, has also discussed the corruption problem with Thai government officials, according to intelligence documents. The Thais are said to have expressed regret and changed some of the personnel who were involved in distributing the covert assistance to the Cambodian rebels.


By last month, the Senate Intelligence Committee auditors saw "solid evidence of effective new monitoring procedures" that would prevent a recurrence of the corruption scandal, according to a mid-September intelligence document.


One deadline driving the administration's efforts to boost funding for the program was the visit to the White House Oct. 11 by Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the former ruler of Cambodia and titular leader of the resistance. Sihanouk is attempting to end the nine-year war by three resistance groups against the Vietnamese-backed government of Hun Sen in Phnom Penh. According to intelligence documents, Sihanouk will meet with Hun Sen on Nov. 5 in Paris and again in January.


The Reagan administration spent the weeks before Sihanouk's visit trying to get the maximum aid possible. In late September, Morton Abramowitz, assistant secretary of state for intelligence, sent a message to Ambassador O'Donohue in Bangkok asking for a breakdown of how the resistance would spend $ 3.1 million in U.S. covert aid during the first quarter of fiscal 1989, if Congress would agree to the "front-loading" approach the administration favored.


O'Donohue responded with a memo prepared by CIA officers in Bangkok. The memo noted that the $ 3.1-million figure would be the minimum necessary to provide such items as uniforms, food, and non-lethal field equipment for the resistance under a planned expansion by year end to 35,000 men from 25,000.


The U.S. Embassy memo from Bangkok also noted items that would have to be canceled or reduced sharply under this limited budget, including: Radio Kampuchea; leadership-development and psychological-operations programs for resistance leaders; an intelligence-collection center; and a program to debrief defectors from the Khmer Rouge.


If the first-quarter budget were raised to $ 5 million, the memo noted, the CIA could maintain such programs as the intelligence center, the defector program and a program to train resistance forces in mine detection, demolition, sniping and other specialized skills. A realistic annual budget for the program, the memo advised, would be $ 15 million to $ 20 million a year.


One reason the administration has fought so hard to expand the non-communist resistance is that officials believe the war in Cambodia may be nearing an end-game. Vietnam, prodded by the Soviet Union, appears serious about negotiating a phased withdrawal of its troops from Cambodia. Vietnamese officials have stated publicly their intention to withdraw 50,000 troops from Cambodia by the end of this year and the remaining 50,000 to 70,000 by March 1990.


The nightmare for U.S. officials is that if the Vietnamese withdrew tomorrow, the Khmer Rouge -- with about 35,000 troops -- would be the strongest political and military force in Cambodia. That, in turn, could mean a return to the sort of bloody Khmer Rouge rule that led to the deaths of an estimated 2 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979.

Mark Perry's book on the Joint Chiefs of Staff,   "Four Stars," will be published by Houghton Mifflin next March. Scott Malone is an  Emmy-award-winning documentary producer for PBS Television's "Frontline." 

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

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