Objective Peckham

As he walked through the busy streets of London, Bilal el-Berjawi was glancing over his shoulder. Everywhere he went, he suspected he was being followed. Within a few years — 4,000 miles away in remote Somalia — he would be dead, killed by a secret U.S. drone strike.

A small and stocky British-Lebanese citizen with a head of thick dark hair, Berjawi had grown up much like any other young boy in the United Kingdom’s capital city, attending school during the day and playing soccer with friends in his free time. But by his early 20s he was leading no ordinary life. He was suspected of having cultivated ties with senior al Qaeda militants in East Africa, his British citizenship was abruptly revoked, and he was placed on a U.S. kill list.

In January 2012, Berjawi met his sudden end, about 10 miles northwest of Mogadishu, when a missile crashed into his white car and blasted it beyond recognition.

At the time of Berjawi’s death, the Associated Press reported that the missile strike targeting him had been carried out by a drone, citing an anonymous U.S. official. The Economist criticized the secrecy surrounding the attack and questioned whether it had amounted to a “very British execution.”

Now, a classified U.S. document obtained by The Intercept shines new light on the circumstances surrounding Berjawi’s death. It reveals that the U.S. government was monitoring him for at least five years as he traveled between London and Somalia; that he was targeted by a covert special operations unit running a fleet of more than two dozen drones, fighter jets, and other aircraft out of East Africa; and that cellphone surveillance facilitated the strike that killed him.

The document, a case study included in a secret 2013 report by the Pentagon’s Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Task Force, does not mention Berjawi by name, instead referring to a target code-named “Objective Peckham.” But it contains enough specific details about the target’s movements and the time and place of the attack that killed him to confirm his identity beyond doubt.

The Intercept has pieced together the final years of Berjawi’s life based on the Pentagon case study, public records, interviews with individuals who knew him, and a transcript of a long conversation Berjawi had in April 2009 with members of Cage, a London-based rights group, in which he discussed his encounters with security agencies in the U.K. and Kenya.

The story of Berjawi’s life and death raises new questions about the British government’s role in the targeted assassination of its own citizens — also providing unique insight into covert U.S. military actions in the Horn of Africa and their impact on al Qaeda and its affiliate in the region, al Shabaab.

The Surveillance Engine

The National Security Agency is secretly providing data to nearly two dozen U.S. government agencies with a “Google-like” search engine built to share more than 850 billion records about phone calls, emails, cellphone locations, and internet chats, according to classified documents obtained by The Intercept.

The documents provide the first definitive evidence that the NSA has for years made massive amounts of surveillance data directly accessible to domestic law enforcement agencies. Planning documents for ICREACH, as the search engine is called, cite the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration as key participants.

ICREACH contains information on the private communications of foreigners and, it appears, millions of records on American citizens who have not been accused of any wrongdoing. Details about its existence are contained in the archive of materials provided to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Earlier revelations sourced to the Snowden documents have exposed a multitude of NSA programs for collecting large volumes of communications. The NSA has acknowledged that it shares some of its collected data with domestic agencies like the FBI, but details about the method and scope of its sharing have remained shrouded in secrecy.

ICREACH has been accessible to more than 1,000 analysts at 23 U.S. government agencies that perform intelligence work, according to a 2010 memo. A planning document from 2007 lists the DEA, FBI, Central Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency as core members. Information shared through ICREACH can be used to track people’s movements, map out their networks of associates, help predict future actions, and potentially reveal religious affiliations or political beliefs.

The creation of ICREACH represented a landmark moment in the history of classified U.S. government surveillance, according to the NSA documents.

“The ICREACH team delivered the first-ever wholesale sharing of communications metadata within the U.S. Intelligence Community,” noted a top-secret memo dated December 2007. “This team began over two years ago with a basic concept compelled by the IC’s increasing need for communications metadata and NSA’s ability to collect, process and store vast amounts of communications metadata related to worldwide intelligence targets.”

The search tool was designed to be the largest system for internally sharing secret surveillance records in the United States, capable of handling two to five billion new records every day, including more than 30 different kinds of metadata on emails, phone calls, faxes, internet chats, and text messages, as well as location information collected from cellphones. Metadata reveals information about a communication—such as the “to” and “from” parts of an email, and the time and date it was sent, or the phone numbers someone called and when they called—but not the content of the message or audio of the call.

ICREACH does not appear to have a direct relationship to the large NSA database, previously reported by The Guardian, that stores information on millions of ordinary Americans’ phone calls under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Unlike the 215 database, which is accessible to a small number of NSA employees and can be searched only in terrorism-related investigations, ICREACH grants access to a vast pool of data that can be mined by analysts from across the intelligence community for “foreign intelligence”—a vague term that is far broader than counterterrorism.

Data available through ICREACH appears to be primarily derived from surveillance of foreigners’ communications, and planning documents show that it draws on a variety of different sources of data maintained by the NSA. Though one 2010 internal paper clearly calls it “the ICREACH database,” a U.S. official familiar with the system disputed that, telling The Intercept that while “it enables the sharing of certain foreign intelligence metadata,” ICREACH is “not a repository [and] does not store events or records.” Instead, it appears to provide analysts with the ability to perform a one-stop search of information from a wide variety of separate databases.

In a statement to The Intercept, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed that the system shares data that is swept up by programs authorized under Executive Order 12333, a controversial Reagan-era presidential directive that underpins several NSA bulk surveillance operations that monitor communications overseas. The 12333 surveillance takes place with no court oversight and has received minimal Congressional scrutiny because it is targeted at foreign, not domestic, communication networks. But the broad scale of 12333 surveillance means that some Americans’ communications get caught in the dragnet as they transit international cables or satellites—and documents contained in the Snowden archive indicate that ICREACH taps into some of that data.

Legal experts told The Intercept they were shocked to learn about the scale of the ICREACH system and are concerned that law enforcement authorities might use it for domestic investigations that are not related to terrorism.

“To me, this is extremely troublesome,” said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice. “The myth that metadata is just a bunch of numbers and is not as revealing as actual communications content was exploded long ago—this is a trove of incredibly sensitive information.” Brian Owsley, a federal magistrate judge between 2005 and 2013, said he was alarmed that traditional law enforcement agencies such as the FBI and the DEA were among those with access to the NSA’s surveillance troves. “This is not something that I think the government should be doing,” said Owsley, an assistant professor of law at Indiana Tech Law School. “Perhaps if information is useful in a specific case, they can get judicial authority to provide it to another agency. But there shouldn’t be this buddy-buddy system back-and-forth.”

Jeffrey Anchukaitis, an ODNI spokesman, declined to comment on a series of questions from The Intercept about the size and scope of ICREACH, but said that sharing information had become “a pillar of the post-9/11 intelligence community” as part of an effort to prevent valuable intelligence from being “stove-piped in any single office or agency.”

Using ICREACH to query the surveillance data, “analysts can develop vital intelligence leads without requiring access to raw intelligence collected by other IC [Intelligence Community] agencies,” Anchukaitis said. “In the case of NSA, access to raw signals intelligence is strictly limited to those with the training and authority to handle it appropriately. The highest priority of the intelligence community is to work within the constraints of law to collect, analyze and understand information related to potential threats to our national security.”

Surveillance Proof

As government agencies in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia push for increased surveillance powers, one pioneering American is pushing back.

New York-based entrepreneur Nicholas Merrill is making progress on a project he revealed in April: an encryption-based telecommunications provider designed to be “untappable.” After crowd-funding almost $70,000 in donations, Merrill says that he has held talks with a host of interested venture capitalists and a few “really big companies” apparently interested in partnering up or helping with financial support. Now the “surveillance-proof” software is in development, and he is on track to begin operating a limited service by the end of the year.

Merrill’s ultimate aim is to create a telecommunications infrastructure that inhibits mass surveillance. First, he is building an Internet provider that will use end-to-end encryption for Web browsing and email. Then he plans to roll out a mobile phone service that will enable users to encrypt calls, making them difficult to intercept. The key to decrypt the communications would be held by each individual customer, not Merrill’s company. Because the telecom firm would be unable to access the communications, law enforcement agencies that want to read or listen to communications would be forced to serve warrants or court orders on individuals directly. “This would make it impossible to do blanket, dragnet surveillance of all the customers of a telecommunications carrier,” Merrill says.

The idea for the project is not to help bad guys evade detection, though undoubtedly that’s how some critics will see it. Rather, Merrill is particularly keen to develop the technology to help journalists and human rights organizations—groups, he says, “whose right to confidentiality is more or less accepted under the law.”

Merrill has a strong record of defending user privacy. In 2004, he became the first ISP executive to successfully challenge a secret FBI “national security letter” demanding he hand over customer information. His willingness to question the constitutionality of the secret letter at the time put him at odds with most major telecoms providers, which have a poor track record when it comes to protecting customer privacy. In 2005 and 2006, a number of companies were revealed to have handed over troves of customer data and opened up wiretaps to the National Security Agency, sometimes without a warrant.

Today, Merrill admits prospective funders of his latest project have expressed concerns that it could lead to a confrontation with powerful actors (“It’s challenging to go up against some of the forces that are trying to open up all communications to wiretapping,” he says). But he is trying to address this by showing that government and law enforcement agencies could themselves benefit from his technology. Cybersecurity and privacy are part of the same problem but framed differently, he believes. Both could be addressed at once by ubiquitous encryption of communications and data transfer—protecting user privacy while also helping prevent malicious hackers from stealing information.

Some establishment figures have already been won over by Merrill’s argument. The advisory board of his nonprofit research institute, Calyx, which is developing the technology, includes a former NSA technical director and a former federal prosecutor who is also ex-CIA. Whether he can get the backing of current members of the U.S. law enforcement community, though, is another matter altogether. Merrill’s technology could be seen as creating extra barriers for law enforcement and the authorities would likely oppose it for that reason. Existing U.S. wiretapping law, called CALEA, states that telecom providers "shall not be responsible for decrypting" communications if they don't possess "the information necessary to decrypt.” But that may change under reforms proposed by the FBI, which is actively seeking more surveillance powers.

As governments increasingly move toward expanding their power to conduct electronic surveillance, it is inevitable that innovative technologists, software developers, and cryptographers will work to help people protect the privacy of their personal communications. Earlier this week the NSA’s chief tried to quell concerns over allegations that it is building a huge domestic surveillance center in Utah, dismissing whistle-blowers’ claims as “baloney.” Given the NSA’s recent history, however, it is likely many Americans will remain skeptical about the spy agency’s reassurances—and some will turn to encryption.

Merrill aims to launch his telecommunications firm first in the United States before tackling the international market, where there are also mounting concerns about government surveillance schemes. “We’re not trying to force people to use our service,” Merrill says. “What we’re trying to do is re-envision how the telecommunications industry could work if privacy and encryption technology was built in from the beginning.”

This article first appeared at Slate.com

Syria: Crisis and Intervention

The Syrian forces’ bombardment of Homs reached new levels of brutality last week, posing a major dilemma for Western governments. With reports of indiscriminate attacks on civilians sparking international outrage, there were clear echoes of the civil war in Libya a year ago. But as revolutionary fighters in the region have repeatedly asked for outside assistance, nations including Britain and America have been hesitant to directly intervene. This, some believe, means "back-channel" covert action from Western forces is increasingly inevitable - and could already be underway.

The situation in Syria hit crisis point two weeks ago, when embattled leader Bashar al-Assad’s military began shelling the city of Homs in the west of the country. Though Assad denied responsibility, activists said hundreds of civilians – including many children – died in the attacks, while some of the few journalists on the ground reported seeing some of the most gruesome scenes since unrest began in the country in January 2011.

Shortly after the wave of bombings commenced, on 4 February, a United Nations (UN) resolution to remove Assad from power was tabled. The resolution was quickly vetoed by China and Russia, allies of the Assad regime, dashing hopes of a quick solution. Yet while the international community failed to reach a consensus on how to respond, some reports have suggested unofficial, secret efforts are already underway to assist revolutionary forces – known as the Free Syrian Army – on the outskirts of the country.

Late last year, an article appeared in respected Paris publication Le Canard Enchaîne – France’s version of British investigative magazine Private Eye – containing leaked information. Quoting senior military intelligence sources, it reported that British and French secret services were already at work in northern Lebanon and Turkey, establishing contacts with Syrian soldiers who had fled after defecting from Assad’s army. It added that French special operations teams were “already prepared, in Turkey, should they get the order, to train these deserters in urban guerrilla warfare.”

This revelation was compounded by a series of details divulged by former US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer Philip Giraldi in December. Citing insider sources, Giraldi, who served in the CIA for 18 years, wrote in a US magazine that the agency was actively assisting Syrian dissidents and rebels in the region, and that unmarked planes had been used to fly in small arms seized from toppled Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. According to him, the arms were distributed to Syrian anti-government fighters from a US airbase in Adana, southern Turkey, near the Syrian border.

“I’m fairly confident that there has been what the intelligence community calls ‘a finding’ on Syria, which has authorised the intelligence and special ops elements to undertake operations basically against the Syrian government,” Giraldi says, speaking to me on the phone from Virginia in eastern America. “That means the White House is on board saying that we will be doing things that will be deniable but which we approve of.”

America is known to have wanted regime change in Syria for some time, as it considers the country a state sponsor of terrorism. A secret US government document published by whistleblower organisation WikiLeaks in 2011 revealed that as recently as 2006 the US was plotting to undermine the Assad regime. The document, authored by a US diplomat in Damascus, noted: “If we are ready to capitalize, they [the Syrian regime] will offer us opportunities to disrupt his [Assad’s] decision-making, keep him off balance, and make him pay a premium for his mistakes.”

With this in mind, Giraldi believes it is “implausible” to think US special forces are not already operating in Syria, and cites it as one of what he calls America’s “secret wars”, which cause him concern. Questioning the wisdom of getting involved in a conflict in the country, he argues that very little is known about the fragmented Syrian rebel forces and their motivations. This reflects a much wider fear that, if Assad is to fall, the militias – made up of differing religious groups – could turn on each other in the struggle for power, leading to even greater bloodshed.

“When you don’t know what you’re getting in to, you would probably be better served by not doing it,” Giraldi says. “It could well be that the British, French and American governments know a lot more about Syria than we do, but I don’t know about that. I was in the intelligence profession and I know how thin this stuff can be.”

The pattern developing in Syria appears similar to how the civil war unfolded in Libya last year. Both before and after a UN resolution imposed a no fly zone over the country, secret intelligence agents from both Britain’s MI6 and America’s CIA were known to be on the ground. MI6, accompanied by elite Special Air Service (SAS) soldiers, reportedly helped direct airstrikes, met with Libyan rebel leaders and gathered information about the locations of key Gaddafi military sites.

According to former SAS officer Robin Horsfall, the role of elite British soldiers was crucial in helping rebels topple Gaddafi. Horsfall, who served for six years as part of the elite unit and took part in the Iranian Embassy Siege in London in 1980. He believes, like in Libya, UN forces or “subversive support” will be essential for any successful overthrow of Assad. But he doubts British special forces are currently engaged directly in helping Syrian fighters given the current stalemate over the UN resolution.

“To be seen to be training a cadre of revolutionaries and supplying them with information and weapons in a place like Turkey, where there is free movement of the press, would be a huge political risk and I don’t think they’d be inclined to do that right now,” he says. “There may well be special forces, as there always are, moved close to any flashpoint in the world. But in reality they’re not doing anything. They’re probably close to the theatre [of war] practicing for any eventuality.”

Though Horsfall thinks there is not likely to be British soldiers within the country, he says the presence of British spies is likely. “One of the eventualities that they [the SAS] will be preparing for without any doubt is the evacuation of any diplomats, any VIPs... Also agents – people use the word 'diplomats' but often they are agents working for MI6, who are intelligence gatherers.”

He adds: “The great thing now is with mobile phones and the internet, the risks that spies have to take are far less difficult. The main reason being that information is freely available and transmittable from every street in Syria, which is to the great disadvantage of Assad and his regime.”

As bombs continue to rain down on Homs at the time of writing, one of the few certainties about the unfolding Syrian crisis is that there will be more violence. Anti-Assad fighters say they will settle for nothing less than his removal from power – but Assad himself shows no sign of leaving without an almighty fight. If the conflict continues on this path, and a peaceful solution is not negotiated, it certainly seems likely that small teams of elite western soldiers – if they have not yet done so – will help train, arm and coordinate rebel fighters.

“The reality is, I would be very surprised if that sort of back-channel activity wasn’t already happening,” Lord Williams, formally the UN’s most senior official in the Middle East, told the BBC last week. “I would expect the services of some countries to be involved... I think that, in consultation with Turkey, there is scope for further action in that regard.”

How did Anonymous hack the FBI?

In the last twelve months it has attacked government websites in Syria, declared cyber war on a brutal Mexican drug cartel, and exposed an anti-WikiLeaks "dirty tricks campaign" allegedly plotted by a prominent US security firm. But on Friday, Anonymous, a diffuse network of internet hackers, reached a new level when it intercepted and leaked a conference call between FBI agents and Scotland Yard detectives.

The astonishing feat - confirmed as genuine by the FBI - was apparently carried out after the hackers breached email accounts belonging to the authorities. In doing so, they were able to snoop on communications being exchanged between forces involved in a joint international anti-hacking operation across England, Ireland, Holland, France, Denmark, Sweden and America. In a piece of surreal real-life theatre, the tables were embarrassingly and dramatically turned. The investigators became the investigated; the watchers became the watched.

The call in question, which lasts around 16 minutes, is one of the boldest leaks ever produced by the hackers, and it may also be one of the most revelatory. A fascinating glimpse into a highly classified world, it shows the extent to which the Metropolitan police is willing to collaborate with its foreign counterparts as part of cyber-crime investigations, even if doing so means interfering with the British judicial process. At one point during the call, for instance, one of the Scotland Yard detectives tells his FBI colleagues that they secretly delayed an ongoing court case involving two UK-based suspected hackers - Jake Davis and Ryan Cleary - at America's behest.

"Following some discussion with the New York office, we're looking to try and build some time in to allow some operational matters to fulfil on your side of the water," the Scotland Yard detective is quoted as saying. "We've got the prosecution making an application in chambers, i.e. without the defence knowing, to seek a way to try and factor some time in, that won't look suspicious." He goes on: "Hey, we're here to help. We've cocked things up in the past, we know that."

The FBI has previously declined to comment on whether it would pursue extradition of Cleary or Davis, both of whom are facing a series of charges in Britain for their alleged involvement with Anonymous and its affiliated offshoot, LulzSec.

The call suggests, however, that the US could indeed be building its own case against the hackers. Davis in particular, who stands accused of being the audacious LulzSec spokesperson known online as "Topiary", would no doubt be wanted by the Americans. Over a two-month period in 2011, LulzSec perpetrated a series of high-profile attacks on the websites of US-based multi-national corporations and state agencies - including the CIA and the US senate - making it a prime target for cyber-crime investigators within the FBI.

Prior to the leaked call, it was clear that Davis's legal team already suspected US involvement on some level. This was made apparent last month, during a short hearing at Southwark Crown Court, when Gideon Cammerman, Davis's lawyer, expressed concern about outside interference, asking prosecutors that any "letters of request from a foreign jurisdiction" are presented to him when evidence is formally exchanged on 30 March, prior to Davis and Cleary entering pleas on 11 May. (A letter of request is a method used by a foreign court to seek judicial assistance, such as to obtain information or a witness statement from a specified person.)

Responding to concerns raised by Cammerman, a source within the Crown Prosecution Service said that they could not officially comment on the matter of foreign involvement until after 30 March, but stressed both prosecution and defence had a "common interest in the case being tried here [in the UK] effectively," hinting that any possible US extradition request could hinge on the outcome of the British trial.

In the meantime, the key question is whether Anonymous is sitting on more hacked information as explosive as the conference call, which, depending on its content, could have potentially massive repercussions.

To some extent, the authorities on both sides of the Atlantic have now been put on the back foot. Likely rattled and aghast that their own private conversations were hacked by the very hackers they are paid to investigate, they will be apprehensive about what could come next.

Cleary's lawyer, Karen Todner, has starkly warned that "whole cases could be blown apart" as a result of future security breaches; Anonymous, as ever, has promised more revelations are yet to come.

"You think we're done? Fuck no," tweeted one of its most prominent hackers, Sabu, on Friday. "Truth is we're still in the agents (sic) mailbox right now."

This article originally appeared at: http://www.newstatesman.com/the-staggers/2012/02/hackers-fbi-davis-call

A New Cold War?

Chanting “death to England,” they burned the Union Jack, looted offices and smashed a picture of the Queen. It could scarcely have been a more symbolic protest. Outside the British embassy in Iran’s capital city, Tehran, a furious crowd gathered last week to demand the UK’s diplomats leave the country immediately. “Britain should wait for the coming moves of the great Iranian nation, which intends to settle an old score with Britain for years of plotting against Iran,” said the protesters, who some claimed had been put up to the task by their government. “We will not come short of our righteous demands.”

The story that led up to the incident reads like the plot of an elaborate spy thriller. Rooted in fear and intense diplomatic wrangling around the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions, it is a murky world of assassination plots, secret agents and covert operations that many believe could be a prelude to military strikes.

Ever since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, which saw the authoritarian, American-backed ruler Mohammad Reza Pahlavi overthrown as part of a popular uprising, relations between the west and Iran have been fraught. Pahlavi had been installed in 1953, historic documents show, as part of a coup involving UK and US secret intelligence operatives amid the Cold War.

Once the new regime came in to power after Pahlavi’s departure, Iran, a newly crowned Islamic state, became increasingly isolated. Western nations imposed severe economic sanctions on the country over allegations that it was funding terrorist groups, with billions of dollars worth of assets frozen. A series of conflicts in the region throughout the 1980s saw Britain and America supply weapons – some chemical and biological – to Saddam Hussein’s regime during the Iran-Iraq war, and during the same period the US shot down an Iranian passenger plane, killing 290 civilians.

In recent years, the bitterness between the west and Iran has reached a new and unprecedented level. A pivotal moment came in 2002 – the same year George W. Bush famously declared Iran was a key player in his “Axis of Evil” – when an Iranian dissident revealed the existence of a secret underground uranium enrichment facility, leading to claims the country was attempting to develop nuclear weapons.

This was followed last month by a significant new report published by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog. Listing a large appendix of previously unpublished evidence sourced from ten international intelligence agencies, the report concluded there were “possible military dimensions” to Iran’s nuclear programme, which it said caused "deep concern."

Some have doubted the credibility of the findings, with the “dodgy dossier” used to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003 still a fresh memory. But Emily Landau, an Iran expert at Israel's Institute for National Security Studies, believes this time the threat is real.

“There is serious incriminating evidence that makes it clear we’re talking about a virtual smoking gun with regards to Iran’s military programme,” she says. “Once Iran becomes a nuclear state, it will become almost invulnerable to attack. And it will be able to stir up a lot of trouble in the Gulf region. It will try to expand its clutch very soon.”

Iran has repeatedly denied claims it is trying to build a nuclear bomb, with its president, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, saying it is an “inhumane weapon” that is against the Islamic religion. According to Landau, however, the regime’s words cannot be trusted.

“For 20 years Iran was cheating, lying and deceiving the international community, working on a nuclear programme while it was a member of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty,” she says. “There is evidence that they were working on a military programme, under government direction, until 2003.”

A major concern for western governments is that, if Iran was to develop nuclear weapons, it would be able to assert domineering power across the Middle East and beyond, ramping up instability and heightening the potential threat of war. This fear is in part fuelled by a speech made by Ahmedinejad in 2005, in which he said Israel “must be wiped off the map.”

Attempting to address the problem, and due in part to Iran’s apparent lack of cooperation, a coalition of nations, led by the US, Britain and Israel, are believed to have intensified secret intelligence operations in the country. In September 2010 it was revealed that a virus called Stuxnet, reportedly created by western powers in collaboration with Israel, was used to attack and spy on Iranian computer systems. One month later, John Sawers, the head of Britain’s foreign spy agency MI6, said in a rare public speech that “intelligence-led” operations were needed to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

More recently, a series of explosions have been reported at Iranian nuclear plants, sparking rumours of sabotage, while a number of Iranian nuclear scientists have also been assassinated. 40-year-old Majid Shahriari, a top scientist described by Time magazine as the “senior manager of Iran's nuclear effort,” was killed last November after a death squad on motorbikes attached a bomb to his car and detonated it as he drove away. Similar attacks have occurred since, all of which the Iranians claim were orchestrated by MI6 in collaboration with the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Israel’s secret service, the Mossad. UK officials have refused to comment, saying only: “We never discuss intelligence matters.”

Though current intelligence missions remain a tight-lipped secret, David Steele is well equipped to offer an insight into the realities of espionage. The 59-year-old former US spy worked for the CIA during the 1980s as a clandestine case officer, “chasing terrorists” around Latin America. His role in the CIA led him to feel he was the “Cold War equivalent of a Jesuit priest”; however, today his view of the agency, especially its alleged involvement in Iran, is highly critical.

“The president [Barack Obama] would have signed an authorisation for covert action [in Iran] but there are also rumours that the CIA is out of control on the drone program and it might be out of control in other areas,” he says. “Israel has had much too much influence on the US government, often using lies, agents of influence including dual US – Israeli citizens in top policy positions with top secret clearances, and false flag operations. Israel is paranoid and out of control. It wants nothing more than to get the US to do to Iran what Iran got the US to do to Iraq.”

Steele believes allegations of UK and US involvement in assassination plots are “absolutely credible.” He does not deny Iran could be developing a military nuclear programme, but he questions how much of a threat it poses.

“It does not justify the actions that Israel and the west are taking,” he says. “On this issue I believe that Brazil, Turkey, China, and Russia are vastly more intelligent, and have more integrity, than the US government.”

Regardless of whether the nuclear threat posed by Iran is realistic, the situation continues to move in the direction of a military standoff. Last week, just hours after protesters angry about the assassinations and economic sanctions stormed the British Embassy in Tehran, foreign secretary William Hague shut down Iran’s London embassy. “We will discuss these events and further action which needs to be taken in the light of Iran's continued pursuit of a nuclear weapons programme," he said.

Ahmedinejad has since responded by saying he is open to negotiations with the international community over Iran’s nuclear programme. But the country’s supreme leader, 72-year-old Ali Khamenei, who holds ultimate control over Iran and its military ambitions, has remained at all times defiant, casting a worrying cloud of uncertainty over the future.

“Iran has stood up against the will of the biggest arrogant and colonialist powers alone and shattered their resolve," Khamenei said in a statement. “With the awakening of different nations, the puppets of the arrogant powers will leave the scene one after the other and the glory and power of Islam will increase on a daily basis."

This article first appeared in issue no.905 of The Big Issue in the North.

The Inslaw case: Dirtier than Watergate

It was described as dirtier than Watergate, and involved US government dealings with Iraq, Libya, Korea and even the late British publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell. The story is deep, dark and complex; a web of strange dealings and dubious characters, it implicates wealthy arms dealers, Israeli intelligence services, the Soviet KGB, MI5 and the CIA. But unlike Watergate, this scandal, from a particularly dark chapter in American history, has appeared in no Hollywood film and is yet to reach a satisfying conclusion.

It began in the late 1970s, when the Washington-based software developer Inslaw pioneered people-tracking technology, designed to be used by prosecutors to monitor case records. Known as the Prosecutor's Management Information System (PROMIS), the software was developed under grants from the US department of justice. The US government, as it helped fund the creation of PROMIS, had been licensed to use the software on condition that it did not modify, distribute or create derivative versions of it. The government, however, did not stick to this agreement.

Under the Ronald Reagan administration's covert intelligence initiative known as "'Follow the Money", the US National Security Agency (NSA) misappropriated PROMIS for sale to banks in 1982. The version of PROMIS sold by the NSA had been "espionage-enabled" through a back door in the programme, allowing the agency to covertly conduct real-time electronic surveillance of the flow of money to suspected terrorists and other perceived threats to US national interests.

A letter from the US department of justice in 1985, later obtained by Inslaw, documented more plans for the covert sale and distribution of the espionage-enabled version of PROMIS, this time to governments in the Middle East (which would surreptitiously allow the US to spy on foreign intelligence agencies). The letter outlined how sales of the software were to be facilitated by the late Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz and the arms dealers Adnan Khashoggi and Manucher Ghorbanifar. PROMIS should be delivered without "paperwork, customs, or delay", it stated, and all of the transactions paid for through a Swiss bank account.

In the years that followed, friends of then attorney general Edwin Meese, including a Reagan associate, Dr Earl Brian of the government consultancy firm Hadron, Inc, were reportedly allowed to sell and distribute pirated versions of PROMIS domestically and overseas. As a House judiciary committee report found in 1992, these individuals were apparently permitted to do so "for their personal financial gain and in support of the intelligence and foreign policy objectives of the United States".

Brian, who was later jailed for four years on an unrelated fraud charge in 1998, has since denied any association with the Inslaw case. According to the former arms broker and CIA "contract operative" Richard Babayan, however, he was instrumental in selling PROMIS to the governments of Iraq, Libya and Korea. When Brian was unable to market PROMIS further, it is claimed that, with the help of Rafi Eitan, a high-ranking Israeli intelligence officer, the British publisher Robert Maxwell was recruited to assist.

In a sworn affidavit, the investigative author Gordon Thomas recounts how Eitan told him Maxwell alone sold over $500m worth of espionage-enabled versions of PROMIS – including licences to the UK, Australia, South Korea, Canada and the Soviet KGB. The British counter-intelligence agency MI5, according to Eitan (who himself was an adviser to the UK secret service MI6), used PROMIS to track members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), as well as Irish republican political leaders including Gerry Adams.

Inslaw alleges the US government, by selling PROMIS to other governments around the world, engaged in what equates to "multibillion-dollar theft". This claim was supported by two separate courts in 1988, which ruled that it "took, converted, stole" PROMIS from Inslaw "through trickery, fraud and deceit". Three years later, however, a court of appeal overturned both rulings on a "jurisdictional technicality" after pressure from the federal justice department.

Now more than two decades since he pioneered PROMIS, the Inslaw president Bill Hamilton today believes the story illustrates an enduring, fundamental problem at the heart of the US justice system. "[It] chronicles the continued inability of the US government to enforce federal criminal laws in cases involving national security issues, or even to render ordinary civil justice," he says. "National security appears to suspend the checks and balances built into the system of government in the United States, to the detriment of the citizens."

Some, including the US government, have tried to dismiss the Inslaw saga as conspiracy. But a message relayed to Bill Hamilton and his wife from the former chief investigator of the Senate judiciary committee, Ronald LeGrand, seems to confirm that the strange PROMIS affair – which remains unresolved – is much more than just a case of chronic paranoia.

"What Mr and Mrs Hamilton think happened, did happen," LeGrand wrote, conveying information he had received from a trusted government source. "The Inslaw case is a lot dirtier for the Department of Justice than Watergate was, in both breadth and depth. The Department of Justice has been compromised in the Inslaw case at every level."

This article appeared originally at: http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/04/promis-government-inslaw