Why Google made the NSA
Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet—
part 2
by Nafeez Ahmed
INSURGE INTELLIGENCE,
a new crowd-funded investigative journalism project, breaks the
exclusive story of how the United States intelligence community funded,
nurtured and incubated Google as part of a drive to dominate the world
through control of information. Seed-funded by the NSA and CIA, Google
was merely the first among a plethora of private sector start-ups
co-opted by US intelligence to retain ‘information superiority.
The
origins of this ingenious strategy trace back to a secret
Pentagon-sponsored group, that for the last two decades has functioned
as a bridge between the US government and elites across the business,
industry, finance, corporate, and media sectors. The group has allowed
some of the most powerful special interests in corporate America to
systematically circumvent democratic accountability and the rule of law
to influence government policies, as well as public opinion in the US
and around the world. The results have been catastrophic: NSA mass
surveillance, a permanent state of global war, and a new initiative to
transform the US military into Skynet.
READ PART ONE
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Mass
surveillance is about control. It’s promulgators may well claim, and
even believe, that it is about control for the greater good, a control
that is needed to keep a cap on disorder, to be fully vigilant to the
next threat. But in a context of rampant political corruption, widening
economic inequalities, and escalating resource stress due to climate
change and energy volatility, mass surveillance can become a tool of
power to merely perpetuate itself, at the public’s expense.
A
major function of mass surveillance that is often overlooked is that of
knowing the adversary to such an extent that they can be manipulated
into defeat. The problem is that the adversary is not just terrorists.
It’s you and me. To this day, the role of information warfare as
propaganda has been in full swing, though systematically ignored by much
of the media.
Here, INSURGE INTELLIGENCE
exposes how the Pentagon Highlands Forum’s co-optation of tech giants
like Google to pursue mass surveillance, has played a key role in secret
efforts to manipulate the media as part of an information war against
the American government, the American people, and the rest of the world:
to justify endless war, and ceaseless military expansionism.
The war machine
In September 2013, the website of the Montery Institute for International Studies’ Cyber Security Initiative (MIIS CySec) posted a final version of a paper on ‘cyber-deterrence’ by CIA consultant Jeffrey Cooper, vice president of the US defense contractor SAIC and a founding member
of the Pentagon’s Highlands Forum. The paper was presented to then NSA
director Gen. Keith Alexander at a Highlands Forum session titled ‘Cyber
Commons, Engagement and Deterrence’ in 2010.
MIIS
CySec is formally partnered with the Pentagon’s Highlands Forum through
an MoU signed between the provost and Forum president Richard O’Neill,
while the initiative itself is funded by George C. Lee: the Goldman
Sachs executive who led the billion dollar valuations of Facebook,
Google, eBay, and other tech companies.
Cooper’s
eye-opening paper is no longer available at the MIIS site, but a final
version of it is available via the logs of a public national security conference
hosted by the American Bar Association. Currently, Cooper is chief
innovation officer at SAIC/Leidos, which is among a consortium of
defense technology firms including Booz Allen Hamilton and others
contracted to develop NSA surveillance capabilities.
The Highlands Forum briefing for the NSA chief was commissioned under contract
by the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, and based on
concepts developed at previous Forum meetings. It was presented to Gen.
Alexander at a “closed session” of the Highlands Forum moderated by MIIS
Cysec director, Dr. Itamara Lochard, at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies (CSIS) in Washington DC.
Like
Rumsfeld’s IO roadmap, Cooper’s NSA briefing described “digital
information systems” as both a “great source of vulnerability” and
“powerful tools and weapons” for “national security.” He advocated the
need for US cyber intelligence to maximize “in-depth knowledge” of
potential and actual adversaries, so they can identify “every potential
leverage point” that can be exploited for deterrence or retaliation.
“Networked deterrence” requires the US intelligence community to develop
“deep understanding and specific knowledge about the particular
networks involved and their patterns of linkages, including types and
strengths of bonds,” as well as using cognitive and behavioural science
to help predict patterns. His paper went on to essentially set out a
theoretical architecture for modelling data obtained from surveillance
and social media mining on potential “adversaries” and “counterparties.”
A
year after this briefing with the NSA chief, Michele Weslander
Quaid — another Highlands Forum delegate — joined Google to become chief
technology officer, leaving her senior role in the Pentagon advising
the undersecretary of defense for intelligence. Two months earlier, the
Defense Science Board (DSB) Task Force on Defense Intelligence published its report on Counterinsurgency (COIN), Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (IRS) Operations. Quaid
was among the government intelligence experts who advised and briefed
the Defense Science Board Task Force in preparing the report. Another
expert who briefed the Task Force was Highlands Forum veteran Linton
Wells. The DSB report itself had been commissioned by Bush appointee
James Clapper, then undersecretary of defense for intelligence — who had
also commissioned Cooper’s Highlands Forum briefing to Gen. Alexander.
Clapper is now Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, in which
capacity he lied under oath to Congress by claiming in March 2013 that
the NSA does not collect any data at all on American citizens.
Michele
Quaid’s track record across the US military intelligence community was
to transition agencies into using web tools and cloud technology. The
imprint of her ideas are evident in key parts of the DSB Task Force
report, which described its purpose as being to “influence investment
decisions” at the Pentagon “by recommending appropriate intelligence
capabilities to assess insurgencies, understand a population in their
environment, and support COIN operations.”
The
report named 24 countries in South and Southeast Asia, North and West
Africa, the Middle East and South America, which would pose “possible
COIN challenges” for the US military in coming years. These included
Pakistan, Mexico, Yemen, Nigeria, Guatemala, Gaza/West Bank, Egypt,
Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, among other “autocratic regimes.” The report
argued that “economic crises, climate change, demographic pressures,
resource scarcity, or poor governance could cause these states (or
others) to fail or become so weak that they become targets for
aggressors/insurgents.” From there, the “global information
infrastructure” and “social media” can rapidly “amplify the speed,
intensity, and momentum of events” with regional implications. “Such
areas could become sanctuaries from which to launch attacks on the US
homeland, recruit personnel, and finance, train, and supply operations.”
The
imperative in this context is to increase the military’s capacity for
“left of bang” operations — before the need for a major armed forces
commitment — to avoid insurgencies, or pre-empt them while still in
incipient phase. The report goes on to conclude that “the Internet and
social media are critical sources of social network analysis data in
societies that are not only literate, but also connected to the
Internet.” This requires “monitoring the blogosphere and other social
media across many different cultures and languages” to prepare for
“population-centric operations.”
The
Pentagon must also increase its capacity for “behavioral modeling and
simulation” to “better understand and anticipate the actions of a
population” based on “foundation data on populations, human networks,
geography, and other economic and social characteristics.” Such
“population-centric operations” will also “increasingly” be needed in
“nascent resource conflicts, whether based on water-crises, agricultural
stress, environmental stress, or rents” from mineral resources. This
must include monitoring “population demographics as an organic part of
the natural resource framework.”
Other
areas for augmentation are “overhead video surveillance,” “high
resolution terrain data,” “cloud computing capability,” “data fusion”
for all forms of intelligence in a “consistent spatio-temporal framework
for organizing and indexing the data,” developing “social science
frameworks” that can “support spatio-temporal encoding and analysis,”
“distributing multi-form biometric authentication technologies [“such as
fingerprints, retina scans and DNA samples”] to the point of service of
the most basic administrative processes” in order to “tie identity to
all an individual’s transactions.” In addition, the academy must be
brought in to help the Pentagon develop “anthropological,
socio-cultural, historical, human geographical, educational, public
health, and many other types of social and behavioral science data and
information” to develop “a deep understanding of populations.”
A
few months after joining Google, Quaid represented the company in
August 2011 at the Pentagon’s Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA)
Customer and Industry Forum.
The forum would provide “the Services, Combatant Commands, Agencies,
coalition forces” the “opportunity to directly engage with industry on
innovative technologies to enable and ensure capabilities in support of
our Warfighters.” Participants in the event have been integral to
efforts to create a “defense enterprise information environment,”
defined as “an integrated platform which includes the network,
computing, environment, services, information assurance, and NetOps
capabilities,” enabling warfighters to “connect, identify themselves,
discover and share information, and collaborate across the full spectrum
of military operations.” Most of the forum panelists were DoD
officials, except for just four industry panelists including Google’s
Quaid.
DISA officials have attended the Highlands Forum, too — such as Paul Friedrichs, a technical director and chief engineer of DISA’s Office of the Chief Information Assurance Executive.
Knowledge is Power
Given
all this it is hardly surprising that in 2012, a few months after
Highlands Forum co-chair Regina Dugan left DARPA to join Google as a
senior executive, then NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander
was emailing Google’s founding executive Sergey Brin to discuss
information sharing for national security. In those emails, obtained
under Freedom of Information by investigative journalist Jason Leopold,
Gen. Alexander described Google as a “key member of [the US military’s]
Defense Industrial Base,” a position Michele Quaid was apparently
consolidating. Brin’s jovial relationship with the former NSA chief now
makes perfect sense given that Brin had been in contact with
representatives of the CIA and NSA, who partly funded and oversaw his
creation of the Google search engine, since the mid-1990s.
In
July 2014, Quaid spoke at a US Army panel on the creation of a “rapid
acquisition cell” to advance the US Army’s “cyber capabilities” as part
of the Force 2025 transformation initiative. She told
Pentagon officials that “many of the Army’s 2025 technology goals can
be realized with commercial technology available or in development
today,” re-affirming that “industry is ready to partner with the Army in
supporting the new paradigm.” Around the same time, most of the media
was trumpeting the idea that Google was trying to distance
itself from Pentagon funding, but in reality, Google has switched
tactics to independently develop commercial technologies which would
have military applications the Pentagon’s transformation goals.
Yet Quaid is hardly the only point-person in Google’s relationship with the US military intelligence community.
One
year after Google bought the satellite mapping software Keyhole from
CIA venture capital firm In-Q-Tel in 2004, In-Q-Tel’s director of
technical assessment Rob Painter — who played a key role in In-Q-Tel’s
Keyhole investment in the first place — moved to Google. At In-Q-Tel,
Painter’s work focused on identifying, researching and evaluating “new
start-up technology firms that were believed to offer tremendous value
to the CIA, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the Defense
Intelligence Agency.” Indeed, the NGA had confirmed that its
intelligence obtained via Keyhole was used by the NSA to support US
operations in Iraq from 2003 onwards.
A
former US Army special operations intelligence officer, Painter’s new
job at Google as of July 2005 was federal manager of what Keyhole was to
become: Google Earth Enterprise. By 2007, Painter had become Google’s
federal chief technologist.
That year, Painter told the Washington Post that Google was “in the beginning stages” of selling advanced secret versions
of its products to the US government. “Google has ramped up its sales
force in the Washington area in the past year to adapt its technology
products to the needs of the military, civilian agencies and the
intelligence community,” the Post reported.
The Pentagon was already using a version of Google Earth developed in
partnership with Lockheed Martin to “display information for the
military on the ground in Iraq,” including “mapping out displays of key
regions of the country” and outlining “Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods in
Baghdad, as well as US and Iraqi military bases in the city. Neither
Lockheed nor Google would say how the geospatial agency uses the data.”
Google aimed to sell the government new “enhanced versions of Google
Earth” and “search engines that can be used internally by agencies.”
White House records
leaked in 2010 showed that Google executives had held several meetings
with senior US National Security Council officials. Alan Davidson,
Google’s government affairs director, had at least three meetings with
officials of the National Security Council in 2009, including White
House senior director for Russian affairs Mike McFaul and Middle East
advisor Daniel Shapiro. It also emerged from a Google patent application
that the company had deliberately been collecting ‘payload’ data from
private wifi networks that would enable the identification of
“geolocations.” In the same year, we now know, Google had signed an
agreement with the NSA giving the agency open-ended access to the
personal information of its users, and its hardware and software, in the
name of cyber security — agreements that Gen. Alexander was busy
replicating with hundreds of telecoms CEOs around the country.
Thus,
it is not just Google that is a key contributor and foundation of the
US military-industrial complex: it is the entire Internet, and the wide
range of private sector companies — many nurtured and funded under the
mantle of the US intelligence community (or powerful financiers embedded
in that community) — which sustain the Internet and the telecoms
infrastructure; it is also the myriad of start-ups
selling cutting edge technologies to the CIA’s venture firm In-Q-Tel,
where they can then be adapted and advanced for applications across the
military intelligence community. Ultimately, the global surveillance
apparatus and the classified tools used by agencies like the NSA to
administer it, have been almost entirely made by external researchers
and private contractors like Google, which operate outside the Pentagon.
This
structure, mirrored in the workings of the Pentagon’s Highlands Forum,
allows the Pentagon to rapidly capitalize on technological innovations
it would otherwise miss, while also keeping the private sector at arms
length, at least ostensibly, to avoid uncomfortable questions about what
such technology is actually being used for.
But
isn’t it obvious, really? The Pentagon is about war, whether overt or
covert. By helping build the technological surveillance infrastructure
of the NSA, firms like Google are complicit in what the
military-industrial complex does best: kill for cash.
As
the nature of mass surveillance suggests, its target is not merely
terrorists, but by extension, ‘terrorism suspects’ and ‘potential
terrorists,’ the upshot being that entire populations — especially
political activists — must be targeted by US intelligence surveillance
to identify active and future threats, and to be vigilant against
hypothetical populist insurgencies both at home and abroad. Predictive analytics and behavioural profiles play a pivotal role here.
Mass surveillance and data-mining also now has a distinctive operational purpose
in assisting with the lethal execution of special operations, selecting
targets for the CIA’s drone strike kill lists via dubious algorithms,
for instance, along with providing geospatial and other information for
combatant commanders on land, air and sea, among many other functions. A
single social media post on Twitter or Facebook is enough to trigger
being placed on secret terrorism watch-lists solely due to a vaguely
defined hunch or suspicion; and can potentially even land a suspect on a
kill list.
The push for
indiscriminate, comprehensive mass surveillance by the
military-industrial complex — encompassing the Pentagon, intelligence
agencies, defense contractors, and supposedly friendly tech giants like
Google and Facebook — is therefore not an end in itself, but an
instrument of power, whose goal is self-perpetuation. But there is also a
self-rationalizing justification for this goal: while being great for
the military-industrial complex, it is also, supposedly, great for
everyone else.
The ‘long war’
No
better illustration of the truly chauvinistic, narcissistic, and
self-congratulatory ideology of power at the heart of the
military-industrial complex is a book by long-time Highlands Forum
delegate, Dr. Thomas Barnett, The Pentagon’s New Map. Barnett
was assistant for strategic futures in the Pentagon’s Office of Force
Transformation from 2001 to 2003, and had been recommended to Richard
O’Neill by his boss Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski. Apart from becoming a
New York Times bestseller,
Barnett’s book had been read far and wide in the US military, by senior
defense officials in Washington and combatant commanders operating on
the ground in the Middle East.
Barnett
first attended the Pentagon Highlands Forum in 1998, then was invited
to deliver a briefing about his work at the Forum on December 7th 2004,
which was attended by senior Pentagon officials, energy experts,
internet entrepreneurs, and journalists. Barnett received a glowing review in the Washington Post from
his Highlands Forum buddy David Ignatius a week later, and an
endorsement from another Forum friend, Thomas Friedman, both of which
helped massively boost his credibility and readership.
Barnett’s vision is neoconservative to the root. He sees the world as divided into essentially two realms:
The Core, which consists of advanced countries playing by the rules of
economic globalization (the US, Canada, UK, Europe and Japan) along with
developing countries committed to getting there (Brazil, Russia, India,
China, and some others); and the rest of the world, which is The Gap, a
disparate wilderness of dangerous and lawless countries defined
fundamentally by being “disconnected” from the wonders of globalization.
This includes most of the Middle East and Africa, large swathes of
South America, as well as much of Central Asia and Eastern Europe. It is
the task of the United States to “shrink The Gap,” by spreading the
cultural and economic “rule-set” of globalization that characterizes The
Core, and by enforcing security worldwide to enable that “rule-set” to
spread.
These two functions
of US power are captured by Barnett’s concepts of “Leviathan” and
“System Administrator.” The former is about rule-setting to facilitate
the spread of capitalist markets, regulated via military and civilian
law. The latter is about projecting military force into The Gap in an
open-ended global mission to enforce security and engage in
nation-building. Not “rebuilding,” he is keen to emphasize, but building
“new nations.”
For Barnett,
the Bush administration’s 2002 introduction of the Patriot Act at home,
with its crushing of habeas corpus, and the National Security Strategy
abroad, with its opening up of unilateral, pre-emptive war, represented
the beginning of the necessary re-writing of rule-sets in The Core to
embark on this noble mission. This is the only way
for the US to achieve security, writes Barnett, because as long as The
Gap exists, it will always be a source of lawless violence and disorder.
One paragraph in particular sums up his vision:
“America as global cop creates security. Security creates common rules. Rules attract foreign investment. Investment creates infrastructure. Infrastructure creates access to natural resources. Resources create economic growth. Growth creates stability. Stability creates markets. And once you’re a growing, stable part of the global market, you’re part of the Core. Mission accomplished.”
Much
of what Barnett predicted would need to happen to fulfill this vision,
despite its neoconservative bent, is still being pursued under Obama. In
the near future, Barnett had predicted, US military forces will be
dispatched beyond Iraq and Afghanistan to places like Uzbekistan,
Djibouti, Azerbaijan, Northwest Africa, Southern Africa and South
America.
Barnett’s Pentagon
briefing was greeted with near universal enthusiasm. The Forum had even
purchased copies of his book and had them distributed to all Forum
delegates, and in May 2005, Barnett was invited back to participate in
an entire Forum themed around his “SysAdmin” concept.
The
Highlands Forum has thus played a leading role in defining the
Pentagon’s entire conceptualization of the ‘war on terror.’ Irving
Wladawsky-Berger, a retired IMB vice president who co-chaired the
President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee from 1997 to 2001,
described his experience of one 2007 Forum meeting in telling terms:
“Then there is the War on Terror, which DoD has started to refer to as the Long War, a term that I first heard at the Forum. It seems very appropriate to describe the overall conflict in which we now find ourselves. This is a truly global conflict… the conflicts we are now in have much more of the feel of a battle of civilizations or cultures trying to destroy our very way of life and impose their own.”
The
problem is that outside this powerful Pentagon-hosted clique, not
everyone else agrees. “I’m not convinced that Barnett’s cure would be
any better than the disease,” wrote
Dr. Karen Kwiatowski, a former senior Pentagon analyst in the Near East
and South Asia section, who blew the whistle on how her department
deliberately manufactured false information in the run-up to the Iraq
War. “It would surely cost far more in American liberty, constitutional
democracy and blood than it would be worth.”
Yet
the equation of “shrinking The Gap” with sustaining the national
security of The Core leads to a slippery slope. It means that if the US
is prevented from playing this leadership role as “global cop,” The Gap
will widen, The Core will shrink, and the entire global order could
unravel. By this logic, the US simply cannot afford government or public
opinion to reject the legitimacy of its mission. If it did so, it would
allow The Gap to grow out of control, undermining The Core, and
potentially destroying it, along with The Core’s protector, America.
Therefore, “shrinking The Gap” is not just a security imperative: it is
such an existential priority, that it must be backed up with information
war to demonstrate to the world the legitimacy of the entire project.
Based
on O’Neill’s principles of information warfare as articulated in his
1989 US Navy brief, the targets of information war are not just
populations in The Gap, but domestic populations in The Core, and their
governments: including the US government. That secret brief, which
according to former senior US intelligence official John Alexander was
read by the Pentagon’s top leadership, argued that information war must
be targeted at: adversaries to convince them of their vulnerability;
potential partners around the world so they accept “the cause as just”;
and finally, civilian populations and the political leadership so they
believe that “the cost” in blood and treasure is worth it.
Barnett’s
work was plugged by the Pentagon’s Highlands Forum because it fit the
bill, in providing a compelling ‘feel good’ ideology for the US
military-industrial complex.
But
neoconservative ideology, of course, hardly originated with Barnett,
himself a relatively small player, even though his work was extremely
influential throughout the Pentagon. The regressive thinking of senior
officials involved in the Highlands Forum is visible from long before
9/11, which was ceased upon by actors linked to the Forum as a powerful
enabling force that legitimized the increasingly aggressive direction of
US foreign and intelligence policies.
Yoda and the Soviets
The
ideology represented by the Highlands Forum can be gleaned from long
before its establishment in 1994, at a time when Andrew ‘Yoda’
Marshall’s ONA was the primary locus of Pentagon activity on future
planning.
A widely-held myth
promulgated by national security journalists over the years is that the
ONA’s reputation as the Pentagon’s resident oracle machine was down to
the uncanny analytical foresight of its director Marshall. Supposedly,
he was among the few who made the prescient recognition that the Soviet
threat had been overblown by the US intelligence community. He had, the
story goes, been a lone, but relentless voice inside the Pentagon,
calling on policymakers to re-evaluate their projections of the USSR’s
military might.
Except the
story is not true. The ONA was not about sober threat analysis, but
about paranoid threat projection justifying military expansionism. Foreign Policy’s Jeffrey Lewis
points out that far from offering a voice of reason calling for a more
balanced assessment of Soviet military capabilities, Marshall tried to
downplay ONA findings that rejected the hype around an imminent Soviet
threat. Having commissioned a study concluding that the US had
overestimated Soviet aggressiveness, Marshall circulated it with a cover
note declaring himself “unpersuaded” by its findings. Lewis charts how
Marshall’s threat projection mind-set extended to commissioning absurd
research supporting staple neocon narratives about the (non-existent)
Saddam-al-Qaeda link, and even the notorious report by a RAND consultant
calling for re-drawing the map of the Middle East, presented to the
Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board on the invitation of Richard Perle in
2002.
Investigative journalist Jason Vest
similarly found from Pentagon sources that during the Cold War,
Marshall had long hyped the Soviet threat, and played a key role in
giving the neoconservative pressure group, the Committee on the Present
Danger, access to classified CIA intelligence data to re-write the National Intelligence Estimate on Soviet Military Intentions. This
was a precursor to the manipulation of intelligence after 9/11 to
justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Former ONA staffers
confirmed that Marshall had been belligerent about an imminent Soviet
threat “until the very end.” Ex-CIA sovietologist Melvin Goodman, for
instance, recalled that Marshall was also instrumental in pushing for
the Afghan mujahideen to be provided with Stinger missiles — a move
which made the war even more brutal, encouraging the Russians to use
scorched earth tactics.
Enron, the Taliban and Iraq
The
post-Cold War period saw the Pentagon’s creation of the Highlands Forum
in 1994 under the wing of former defense secretary William Perry — a
former CIA director and early advocate of neocon ideas like preventive
war. Surprisingly, the Forum’s dubious role as a government-industry
bridge can be clearly discerned in relation to Enron’s flirtations with
the US government. Just as the Forum had crafted the Pentagon’s
intensifying policies on mass surveillance, it simultaneously fed
directly into the strategic thinking that culminating in the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq.
On November 7th 2000, George W. Bush ‘won’ the US presidential elections. Enron and its employees had given over $1 million
to the Bush campaign in total. That included contributing $10,500 to
Bush’s Florida recount committee, and a further $300,000 for the
inaugural celebrations afterwards. Enron also provided corporate jets
to shuttle Republican lawyers around Florida and Washington lobbying on
behalf of Bush for the December recount. Federal election documents
later showed that since 1989, Enron had made a total of $5.8 million in
campaign donations, 73 percent to Republicans and 27 percent to
Democrats — with as many as 15 senior Bush administration officials owning stock in Enron, including defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, senior advisor Karl Rove, and army secretary Thomas White.
Yet
just one day before that controversial election, Pentagon Highlands
Forum founding president Richard O’Neill wrote to Enron CEO, Kenneth
Lay, inviting him to give a presentation at the Forum on modernizing the
Pentagon and the Army. The email from O’Neill to Lay was released as
part of the Enron Corpus, the emails obtained by the Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission, but has remained unknown until now.
The
email began “On behalf of Assistant Secretary of Defense (C3I) and DoD
CIO Arthur Money,” and invited Lay “to participate in the Secretary of
Defense’s Highlands Forum,” which O’Neill described as “a
cross-disciplinary group of eminent scholars, researchers,
CEO’s/CIO’s/CTO’s from industry, and leaders from the media, the arts
and the professions, who have met over the past six years to examine
areas of emerging interest to all of us.” He added that Forum sessions
include “seniors from the White House, Defense, and other agencies of
government (we limit government participation to about 25%).”
Here,
O’Neill reveals that the Pentagon’s Highlands Forum was, fundamentally,
about exploring not just the goals of government, but the interests of
participating industry leaders like Enron. The Pentagon, O’Neill went
on, wanted Lay to feed into “the search for information/ transformation
strategies for the Department of Defense (and government in general),”
particularly “from a business perspective (transformation, productivity,
competitive advantage).” He offered high praise of Enron as “a
remarkable example of transformation in a highly rigid, regulated
industry, that has created a new model and new markets.”
O’Neill
made clear that the Pentagon wanted Enron to play a pivotal role in the
DoD’s future, not just in the creation of “an operational strategy
which has information superiority,” but also in relation to the DoD’s
“enormous global business enterprise which can benefit from many of the
best practices and ideas from industry.”
“ENRON
is of great interest to us,” he reaffirmed. “What we learn from you may
help the Department of Defense a great deal as it works to build a new
strategy. I hope that you have time on your busy schedule to join us for
as much of the Highlands Forum as you can attend and speak with the
group.”
That Highlands Forum
meeting was attended by senior White House and US intelligence
officials, including CIA deputy director Joan A. Dempsey, who had
previously served as assistant defense secretary for intelligence, and
in 2003 was appointed by Bush as executive director of the President’s
Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, in which capacity she praised
extensive information sharing by the NSA and NGA after 9/11. She went on
to become executive vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton, a major Pentagon contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan that, among other things, created the Coalition Provisional Authority’s database to track what we now know were highly corrupt reconstruction projects in Iraq.
Enron’s
relationship with the Pentagon had already been in full swing the
previous year. Thomas White, then vice chair of Enron energy services,
had used his extensive US military connections to secure a prototype
deal at Fort Hamilton to privatize the power supply of army bases. Enron
was the only bidder for the deal. The following year, after Enron’s CEO
was invited to the Highlands Forum, White gave his first speech
in June just “two weeks after he became secretary of the Army,” where
he “vowed to speed up the awarding of such contracts,” along with
further “rapid privatization” of the Army’s energy services.
“Potentially, Enron could benefit from the speedup in awarding
contracts, as could others seeking the business,” observed USA Today.
That
month, on the authority of defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld — who
himself held significant shares in Enron — Bush’s Pentagon invited
another Enron executive and one of Enron’s senior external financial
advisors to attend a further secret Highlands Forum session.
An
email from Richard O’Neill dated June 22nd, obtained via the Enron
Corpus, showed that Steven Kean, then executive vice president and chief
of staff of Enron, was due to give another Highlands presentation on
Monday 25th. “We are approaching the Secretary of Defense-sponsored
Highlands Forum and very much looking forward to your participation,”
wrote O’Neill, promising Kean that he would be “the centerpiece of
discussion. Enron’s experience is quite important to us as we seriously
consider transformative change in the Department of Defense.”
Steven
Kean is now president and COO (and incoming CEO) of Kinder Morgan, one
of the largest energy companies in North America, and a major supporter
of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline project.
Due
to attend the same Highlands Forum session with Kean was Richard
Foster, then a senior partner at the financial consultancy McKinsey. “I
have given copies of Dick Foster’s new book, Creative Destruction,
to the Deputy Secretary of Defense as well as the Assistant Secretary,”
said O’Neill in his email, “and the Enron case that he outlines makes
for important discussion. We intend to hand out copies to the
participants at the Forum.”
Foster’s firm, McKinsey, had provided strategic financial advice
to Enron since the mid-1980s. Joe Skilling, who in February 2001 became
Enron CEO while Kenneth Lay moved to chair, had been head of McKinsey’s
energy consulting business before joining Enron in 1990.
McKinsey and then partner Richard Foster were intimately involved in crafting the core Enron financial management strategies
responsible for the company’s rapid, but fraudulent, growth. While
McKinsey has always denied being aware of the dodgy accounting that led
to Enron’s demise, internal company documents showed that Foster had
attended an Enron finance committee meeting a month before the Highlands
Forum session to discuss the “need for outside private partnerships to
help drive the company’s explosive growth” — the very investment
partnerships responsible for the collapse of Enron.
McKinsey documents showed that the firm was “fully aware of Enron’s extensive use of off-balance-sheet funds.” As The Independent’s economics editor Ben Chu
remarks, “McKinsey fully endorsed the dubious accounting methods,”
which led to the inflation of Enron’s market valuation and “that caused
the company to implode in 2001.”
Indeed, Foster himself had personally attended six Enron board meetings
from October 2000 to October 2001. That period roughly coincided with
Enron’s growing influence on the Bush administration’s energy policies,
and the Pentagon’s planning for Afghanistan and Iraq.
But Foster was also a regular attendee at the Pentagon’s Highlands Forum — his LinkedIn profile
describes him as member of the Forum since 2000, the year he ramped up
engagement with Enron. He also delivered a presentation at the inaugural
Island Forum in Singapore in 2002.
Enron’s
involvement in the Cheney Energy Task Force appears to have been linked
to the Bush administration’s 2001 planning for both the invasions of
Afghanistan and Iraq, motivated by control of oil. As noted by Prof.
Richard Falk, a former board member of Human Rights Watch and ex-UN
investigator, Enron’s Kenneth Lay “was the main confidential consultant
relied upon by Vice President Dick Cheney during the highly secretive
process of drafting a report outlining a national energy policy, widely
regarded as a key element in the US approach to foreign policy generally
and the Arab world in particular.”
The
intimate secret meetings between senior Enron executives and high-level
US government officials via the Pentagon’s Highlands Forum, from
November 2000 to June 2001, played a central role in establishing and
cementing the increasingly symbiotic link between Enron and Pentagon
planning. The Forum’s role was, as O’Neill has always said, to function
as an ideas lab to explore the mutual interests of industry and
government.
Enron and Pentagon war planning
In February 2001, when Enron executives including Kenneth Lay began participating concertedly in the Cheney Energy Task Force,
a classified National Security Council document instructed NSC staffers
to work with the task force in “melding” previously separate issues:
“operational policies towards rogue states” and “actions regarding the
capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.”
According to Bush’s treasury secretary Paul O’Neill, as quoted by Ron Suskind in The Price of Loyalty (2004),
cabinet officials discussed an invasion of Iraq in their first NSC
meeting, and had even prepared a map for a post-war occupation marking
the carve-up of Iraq’s oil fields. The message at that time from
President Bush was that officials must “find a way to do this.”
Cheney Energy Task Force documents
obtained by Judicial Watch under Freedom of Information revealed that
by March, with extensive industry input, the task force had prepared
maps of Gulf state and especially Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, and
refineries, along with a list titled ‘Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield
Contracts.’ By April, a think-tank report commissioned by Cheney,
overseen by former secretary of state James Baker, and put together by a
committee of energy industry and national security experts, urged the
US government “to conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq
including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic
assessments,” to deal with Iraq’s “destabilizing influence” on oil flows
to global markets. The report included recommendations from Highlands
Forum delegate and Enron chair, Kenneth Lay.
But
Cheney’s Energy Task Force was also busily pushing forward plans for
Afghanistan involving Enron, that had been in motion under Clinton.
Through the late 1990s, Enron was working with California-based US
energy company Unocal to develop an oil and gas pipeline
that would tap Caspian basin reserves, and carry oil and gas across
Afghanistan, supplying Pakistan, India and potentially other markets.
The endeavor had the official blessing of the Clinton administration,
and later the Bush administration, which held several meetings with
Taliban representatives to negotiate terms for the pipeline deal
throughout 2001. The Taliban, whose conquest of Afghanistan had received
covert assistance under Clinton, was to receive formal recognition as
the legitimate government of Afghanistan in return for permitting the
installation of the pipeline. Enron paid $400 million for a feasibility
study for the pipeline, a large portion of which was siphoned off as
bribes to Taliban leaders, and even hired CIA agents to help facilitate.
Then
in summer 2001, while Enron officials were liaising with senior
Pentagon officials at the Highlands Forum, the White House’s National
Security Council was running a cross-departmental ‘working group’ led by
Rumsfeld and Cheney to help complete an ongoing Enron project in India,
a $3 billion power plant in Dabhol. The plant was slated to receive its
energy from the Trans-Afghan pipeline.
The NSC’s ‘Dabhol Working Group,’ chaired by Bush’s national security
adviser Condoleeza Rice, generated a range of tactics to enhance US
government pressure on India to complete the Dabhol plant — pressure
that continued all the way to early November. The Dabhol project, and
the Trans-Afghan pipeline, was by far Enron’s most lucrative overseas deal.
Throughout
2001, Enron officials, including Ken Lay, participated in Cheney’s
Energy Task Force, along with representatives across the US energy
industry. Starting from February, shortly after the Bush administration
took office, Enron was involved in about half a dozen of these Energy Task Force meetings.
After one of these secret meetings, a draft energy proposal was amended
to include a new provision proposing to dramatically boost oil and
natural gas production in India in a way that would apply only to
Enron’s Dabhol power plant. In other words, ensuring the flow of cheap
gas to India via the Trans-Afghan pipeline was now a matter of US
‘national security.’
A month or two after this, the Bush administration gave
the Taliban $43 million, justified by its crackdown on opium
production, despite US-imposed UN sanctions preventing aid to the group
for not handing over Osama bin Laden.
Then in June 2001, the same month
that Enron’s executive vice president Steve Kean attended the Pentagon
Highlands Forum, the company’s hopes for the Dabhol project were dashed
when the Trans-Afghan pipeline failed to materialize, and as a
consequence, construction on the Dabhol power plant was shut down. The
failure of the $3 billion project contributed to Enron’s bankruptcy in
December. That month, Enron officials met with Bush’s commerce
secretary, Donald Evans, about the plant, and Cheney lobbied India’s
main opposition party about the Dhabol project. Ken Lay had also
reportedly contacted the Bush administration around this time to inform
about the firm’s financial troubles.
By August, desperate to pull off the deal, US officials threatened
Taliban representatives with war if they refused to accept American
terms: namely, to cease fighting and join in a federal alliance with the
opposition Northern Alliance; and to give up its demand for local
consumption of the gas. On the 15th of that month, Enron lobbyist Pat
Shortridge told then White House economic advisor Robert McNally that
Enron was heading for a financial meltdown that could cripple the country’s energy markets.
The Bush administration must have anticipated the Taliban’s rejection of the deal, because they had planned
a war on Afghanistan from as early as July. According to then Pakistani
foreign minister Niaz Naik, who had participated in the US-Taliban
negotiations, US officials had told him they planned to invade
Afghanistan in mid-October 2001. No sooner had the war commenced, Bush’s
ambassador to Pakistan, Wendy Chamberlain, called Pakistani’s oil
minister Usman Aminuddin to discuss “the proposed
Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan gas pipeline project,” according to
the Frontier Post, a Pakistani
English-language broadsheet. They reportedly agreed that the “project
opens up new avenues of multi-dimensional regional cooperation
particularly in view of the recent geo-political developments in the
region.”
Two days before
9/11, Condoleeza Rice received the draft of a formal National Security
Presidential Directive that Bush was expected to sign immediately. The
directive contained a comprehensive plan to launch a global war on al-Qaeda,
including an “imminent” invasion of Afghanistan to topple the Taliban.
The directive was approved by the highest levels of the White House and
officials of the National Security Council, including of course Rice and
Rumsfeld. The same NSC officials were simultaneously running the Dhabol
Working Group to secure the Indian power plant deal for Enron’s
Trans-Afghan pipeline project. The next day, one day before 9/11, the
Bush administration formally agreed on the plan to attack the Taliban.
The
Pentagon Highlands Forum’s background link with the interests involved
in all this, show they were not unique to the Bush
administration — which is why, as Obama was preparing to pull troops out
of Afghanistan, he re-affirmed his government’s support for the Trans-Afghan pipeline project, and his desire for a US firm to construct it.
The Pentagon’s propaganda fixer
Throughout
this period, information war played a central role in drumming up
public support for war — and the Highlands Forum led the way.
In
December 2000, just under a year before 9/11 and shortly after George
W. Bush’s election victory, key Forum members participated in an event
at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to explore “the
impact of the information revolution, globalization, and the end of the
Cold War on the US foreign policy making process.” Rather than proposing
“incremental reforms,” the meeting was for participants to “build from
scratch a new model that is optimized to the specific properties of the
new global environment.”
Among the issues
flagged up in the meeting was the ‘Global Control Revolution’: the
“distributed” nature of the information revolution was altering “key
dynamics of world politics by challenging the primacy of states and
inter-state relations.” This was “creating new challenges to national
security, reducing the ability of leading states to control global
policy debates, challenging the efficacy of national economic policies,
etc.”
In other words, how can the Pentagon find a way to exploit the information revolution to “control global policy debates”?
The
meeting was co-hosted by Jamie Metzl, who at the time served on Bill
Clinton’s National Security Council, where he had just led the drafting
of Clinton’s Presidential Decision Directive 68 on International Public
Information (IPI), a new multiagency plan to coordinate US public
information dissemination abroad. Metzl went on to coordinate IPI at the
State Department.
The preceding year, a senior Clinton official revealed to the Washington Times that
Metz’s IPI was really aimed at “spinning the American public,” and had
“emerged out of concern that the US public has refused to back President
Clinton’s foreign policy.” The IPI would plant news stories favorable
to US interests via TV, press, radio and other media based abroad, in
hopes it would get picked up in American media. The pretext was that
“news coverage is distorted at home and they need to fight it at all
costs by using resources that are aimed at spinning the news.” Metzl ran
the IPI’s overseas propaganda operations for Iraq and Kosovo.
Other
participants of the Carnegie meeting in December 2000, included two
founding members of the Highlands Forum, Richard O’Neill and SAIC’s Jeff
Cooper — along with Paul Wolfowitz, another Andrew Marshall acolyte
who was about to join the incoming Bush administration as Rumsfelds’
deputy defense secretary. Also present was a figure who soon became
particularly notorious in the propaganda around Afghanistan and Iraq War
2003: John W. Rendon, Jr., founding president of The Rendon Group (TRG) and another longtime Pentagon Highlands Forum member.
TRG
is a notorious communications firm that has been a US government
contractor for decades. Rendon played a pivotal role in running the
State Department’s propaganda campaigns
in Iraq and Kosovo under Clinton and Metzl. That included receiving a
Pentagon grant to run a news website, the Balkans Information Exchange,
and a US Agency for International Development (USAID) contract to
promote “privatization.”
Rendon’s
central role in helping the Bush administration hype up the
non-existent threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to justify a US
military invasion is now particularly well-known. As James Bamford
famously exposed in his seminal Rolling Stone investigation,
Rendon played an instrumental role on behalf of the Bush administration
in deploying “perception management” to “create the conditions for the
removal of Hussein from power” under multi-million dollar CIA and
Pentagon contracts.
Among
Rendon’s activities was the creation of Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National
Congress (INC) on behalf of the CIA, a group of Iraqi exiles tasked with
disseminating propaganda, including much of the false intelligence about WMD.
That process had begun concertedly under the administration of George
W. H Bush Snr., then rumbled along under Clinton with little fanfare,
before escalating after 9/11 under Bush. Rendon thus played a large role
in the manufacture of inaccurate and false news stories relating to
Iraq under lucrative CIA and Pentagon contracts — and he did so in the
period running up to the 2003 invasion as an advisor
to Bush’s National Security Council: the same NSC, of course, that
planned the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, achieved with input from
Enron executives who were simultaneously engaging the Pentagon Highlands
Forum.
But that is the tip
of iceberg. Declassified documents show that the Highlands Forum was
intimately involved in the covert processes by which key officials
engineered the road to a war on Iraq, based on information warfare.
A redacted 2007 report
by the Pentagon’s Inspector General reveals that one of the contractors
used extensively by the Pentagon Highlands Forum during and after the
Iraq War was none other than The Rendon Group. TRG was contracted by the
Pentagon to organize Forum sessions, determine subjects for discussion,
as well as to convene and coordinate Forum meetings. The Inspector
General investigation had been prompted by accusations raised in
Congress about Rendon’s role in manipulating information to justify the
2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. According to the Inspector General
report:
“… the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration/Chief Information Officer employed TRG to conduct forums that would appeal to a cross-disciplinary group of nationally regarded leaders. The forums were in small groups discussing information and technologies and their effects on science, organizational and business processes, international relations, economics, and national security. TRG also conducted a research program and interviews to formulate and develop topics for the Highlands Forum focus group. The Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration would approve the subjects, and TRG would facilitate the meetings.”
TRG, the Pentagon’s private propaganda arm, thus played a central role in literally running the
Pentagon Highlands Forum process that brought together senior
government officials with industry executives to generate DoD
information warfare strategy.
The
Pentagon’s internal investigation absolved Rendon of any wrongdoing.
But this is not surprising, given the conflict of interest at stake: the
Inspector General at the time was Claude M. Kicklighter, a Bush nominee
who had directly overseen the administration’s key military operations.
In 2003, he was director of the Pentagon’s Iraq Transition Team, and
the following year he was appointed to the State Department as special
advisor on stabilization and security operations in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
The surveillance-propaganda nexus
Even more telling, Pentagon documents obtained by Bamford for his Rolling Stone story
revealed that Rendon had been given access to the NSA’s top-secret
surveillance data to carry out its work on behalf of the Pentagon. TRG,
the DoD documents said, is authorized “to research and analyze
information classified up to Top Secret/SCI/SI/TK/G/HCS.”
‘SCI’
means Sensitive Compartmented Information, data classified higher than
Top Secret, while ‘SI’ designates Special Intelligence, that is, highly
secret communications intercepted by the NSA. ‘TK’ refers to
Talent/Keyhole, code names for imagery from reconnaissance aircraft and
spy satellites, while ‘G’ stands for Gamma, encompassing communications
intercepts from extremely sensitive sources, and ‘HCS’ means Humint
Control System — information from a very sensitive human source. In
Bamford’s words:
“Taken together, the acronyms indicate that Rendon enjoys access to the most secret information from all three forms of intelligence collection: eavesdropping, imaging satellites and human spies.”
So the Pentagon had:
1. contracted Rendon, a propaganda firm;
2. given Rendon access to the intelligence community’s most classified information including data from NSA surveillance;
3.
tasked Rendon to facilitating the DoD’s development of information
operations strategy by running the Highlands Forum process;
4.
and further, tasked Rendon with overseeing the concrete execution of
this strategy developed through the Highlands Forum process, in actual
information operations around the world in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond.
TRG
chief executive John Rendon remains closely involved in the Pentagon
Highlands Forum, and ongoing DoD information operations in the Muslim
world. His November 2014 biography
for the Harvard Kennedy School ‘Emerging Leaders’ course describes him
as “a participant in forward-thinking organizations such as the
Highlands Forum,” “one of the first thought-leaders to harness the power
of emerging technologies in support of real time information
management,” and an expert on “the impact of emerging information
technologies on the way populations think and behave.” Rendon’s Harvard
bio also credits him with designing and executing “strategic
communications initiatives and information programs related to
operations, Odyssey Dawn (Libya), Unified Protector (Libya), Global War
on Terrorism (GWOT), Iraqi Freedom, Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan),
Allied Force and Joint Guardian (Kosovo), Desert Shield, Desert Storm
(Kuwait), Desert Fox (Iraq) and Just Cause (Panama), among others.”
Rendon’s work
on perception management and information operations has also “assisted a
number of US military interventions” elsewhere, including Argentina,
Colombia, Haiti, and Zimbabwe — in fact, a total of 99 countries. As a
former executive director and national political director of the
Democrat Party, John Rendon remains a powerful figure in Washington
under the Obama administration.
Pentagon records show
that TRG has received over $100 million from the DoD since 2000. In
2009, the US government cancelled a ‘strategic communications’ contract
with TRG after revelations it was being used to weed out reporters who
might write negative stories about the US military in Afghanistan, and
to solely promote journalists supportive of US policy. Yet in 2010, the
Obama administration re-contracted Rendon to supply serves for “military
deception” in Iraq.
Since
then, TRG has provided advice to the US Army’s Training and Doctrine
Command, the Special Operations Command, and is still contracted
to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the US Army’s Communications
Electronic Command, as well as providing “communications support” to
the Pentagon and US embassies on counter-narcotics operations.
TRG also boasts on its website
that it provides “Irregular Warfare Support,” including “operational
and planning support” that “assists our government and military clients
in developing new approaches to countering and eroding an adversary’s
power, influence and will.” Much of this support has itself been
fine-tuned over the last decade or more inside the Pentagon’s Highlands
Forum.
Irregular war and pseudo-terrorism
The
Pentagon Highlands Forum’s intimate link, via Rendon, to the propaganda
operations pursued under Bush and Obama in support of the ‘Long War,’
demonstrate the integral role of mass surveillance in both irregular
warfare and ‘strategic communications.’
One of the major proponents of both is Prof John Arquilla
of the Naval Postgraduate School, the renowned US defense analyst
credited with developing the concept of ‘netwar,’ who today openly
advocates the need for mass surveillance and big data mining to support pre-emptive
operations to thwart terrorist plots. It so happens that Arquilla is
another “founding member” of the Pentagon’s Highlands Forum.
Much
of his work on the idea of ‘networked warfare,’ ‘networked deterrence,’
‘information warfare,’ and ‘swarming,’ largely produced for RAND under
Pentagon contract, was incubated by the Forum during its early years and
thus became integral to Pentagon strategy. For instance, in Arquilla’s
1999 RAND study, The Emergence of Noopolitik: Toward an American Information Strategy,
he and his co-author David Ronfeldt express their gratitude to Richard
O’Neill “for his interest, support and guidance,” and to “members of the
Highlands Forum” for their advance comments on the study. Most of his
RAND work credits the Highlands Forum and O’Neill for their support.
Arquilla’s
work was cited in a 2006 National Academy of Sciences study on the
future of network science commissioned by the US Army, which found based
on his research that: “Advances in computer-based technologies and
telecommunications are enabling social networks that facilitate group
affiliations, including terrorist networks.” The study conflated risks
from terror and activist groups: “The implications of this fact for
criminal, terror, protest and insurgency networks has been explored by
Arquilla and Ronfeldt (2001) and are a common topic of discussion by
groups like the Highlands Forum, which perceive that the United States
is highly vulnerable to the interruption of critical networks.” Arquilla
went on to help develop information warfare strategies “for the
military campaigns in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq,” according to
military historian Benjamin Shearer in his biographical dictionary, Home Front Heroes (2007).
In his 2005 New Yorker investigation,
the Pulitzer Prize-winning Seymour Hersh referred to a series of
articles by Arquilla elaborating on a new strategy of “countering
terror” with pseudo-terror. “It takes a network to fight a network,”
said Arquilla, drawing on the thesis he had been promoting in the
Pentagon through the Highlands Forum since its founding:
“When conventional military operations and bombing failed to defeat the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya in the 1950s, the British formed teams of friendly Kikuyu tribesmen who went about pretending to be terrorists. These ‘pseudo gangs’, as they were called, swiftly threw the Mau Mau on the defensive, either by befriending and then ambushing bands of fighters or by guiding bombers to the terrorists’ camps.”
Arquilla
went on to advocate that western intelligence services should use the
British case as a model for creating new “pseudo gang” terrorist groups,
as a way of undermining “real” terror networks:
“What worked in Kenya a half-century ago has a wonderful chance of undermining trust and recruitment among today’s terror networks. Forming new pseudo gangs should not be difficult.”
Essentially,
Arquilla’s argument was that as only networks can fight networks, the
only way to defeat enemies conducting irregular warfare is to use
techniques of irregular warfare against them. Ultimately, the
determining factor in victory is not conventional military defeat per se,
but the extent to which the direction of the conflict can be calibrated
to influence the population and rally their opposition to the
adversary. Arquilla’s ‘pseudo-gang’ strategy was, Hersh reported,
already being implemented by the Pentagon:
“Under Rumsfeld’s new approach, I was told, US military operatives would be permitted to pose abroad as corrupt foreign businessmen seeking to buy contraband items that could be used in nuclear-weapons systems. In some cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could be recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or terrorists…
The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls ‘action teams’ in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. ‘Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?’ the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. ‘We founded them and we financed them,’ he said. ‘The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it.’ A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon’s commando capabilities, said, ‘We’re going to be riding with the bad boys.’”
Official
corroboration that this strategy is now operational came with the leak
of a 2008 US Army special operations field manual. The US military, the
manual said, can conduct irregular and unconventional warfare
by using surrogate non-state groups such as “paramilitary forces,
individuals, businesses, foreign political organizations, resistant or
insurgent organizations, expatriates, transnational terrorism
adversaries, disillusioned transnational terrorism members, black
marketers, and other social or political ‘undesirables.’” Shockingly,
the manual specifically acknowledged that US special operations can
involve both counterterrorism and “Terrorism,” as well as:
“Transnational criminal activities, including narco-trafficking, illicit
arms-dealing, and illegal financial transactions.” The purpose of such
covert operations is, essentially, population control — they are
“specifically focused on leveraging some portion of the indigenous
population to accept the status quo,” or to accept “whatever political
outcome” is being imposed or negotiated.
By
this twisted logic, terrorism can in some cases be defined as a
legitimate tool of US statecraft by which to influence populations into
accepting a particular “political outcome” — all in the name fighting
terrorism.
Is this what the Pentagon was doing by coordinating
the nearly $1 billion of funding from Gulf regimes to anti-Assad
rebels, most of which according to the CIA’s own classified assessments
ended up in the coffers of violent Islamist extremists linked to
al-Qaeda, who went on to spawn the ‘Islamic State’?
The
rationale for the new strategy was first officially set out in an
August 2002 briefing for the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board, which
advocated the creation of a ‘Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group’
(P2OG) within the National Security Council. P2OG, the Board proposed,
must conduct clandestine operations to infiltrate and “stimulate
reactions” among terrorist networks to provoke them into action, and
thus facilitate targeting them.
The
Defense Science Board is, like other Pentagon agencies, intimately
related with the Highlands Forum, whose work feeds into the Board’s
research, which in turn is regularly presented at the Forum.
According
to the US intelligence sources who spoke to Hersh, Rumsfeld had ensured
that the new brand of black operations would be conducted entirely
under Pentagon jurisdiction, firewalled off from the CIA and regional US
military commanders, and executed by its own secret special operations
command. That chain of command
would include, apart from the defense secretary himself, two of his
deputies including the undersecretary of defense for intelligence: the
position overseeing the Highlands Forum.
Strategic communications: war propaganda at home and abroad
Within
the Highlands Forum, the special operations techniques explored by
Arquilla have been taken up by several others in directions focused
increasingly on propaganda — among them, Dr. Lochard, as seen
previously, and also Dr. Amy Zalman, who focuses particularly on the
idea of the US military using ‘strategic narratives’ to influence public
opinion and win wars.
Like
her colleague, Highlands Forum founding member Jeff Cooper, Zalman was
schooled in the bowels of SAIC/Leidos. From 2007 to 2012, she was a
senior SAIC strategist, before becoming Department of Defense
Information Integration Chair at the US Army’s National War College,
where she focused essentially on how to fine-tune propaganda to elicit
the precise responses desired from target groups, based on complete
understanding of those groups. As of summer last year, she became CEO of
the World Futures Society.
In
2005, the same year Hersh reported that the Pentagon strategy of
“stimulating reactions” among terrorists by provoking them was underway,
Zalman delivered a briefing to the Pentagon Highlands Forum titled, ‘In Support of a Narrative Theory Approach to US Strategic Communication.’ Since then, Zalman has been a long-time Highlands Forum delegate,
and has presented her work on strategic communications to a range of US
government agencies, NATO forums, as well as teaching courses in
irregular warfare to soldiers at the US Joint Special Operations
University.
Her 2005
Highlands Forum briefing is not publicly available, but the thrust of
Zalman’s input into the information component of Pentagon special
operations strategies can be gleaned from some of her published work. In
2010, when she was still attached to SAIC, her NATO paper
noted that a key component of irregular war is “winning some degree of
emotional support from the population by influencing their subjective
perceptions.” She advocated that the best way of achieving such
influence goes far further than traditional propaganda and messaging
techniques. Rather, analysts must “place themselves in the skins of the
people under observation.”
Zalman released another paper
the same year via the IO Journal, published by the Information
Operations Institute, which describes itself as a “special interest
group” of the Associaton of Old Crows. The latter is a professional
association for theorists and practitioners of electronic warfare and
information operations, chaired by Kenneth Israel, vice president of
Lockheed Martin, and vice chaired by David Himes, who retired last year
from his position as senior advisor in electronic warfare at the US Air
Force Research Laboratory.
In this paper, titled ‘Narrative as an Influence Factor in Information Operations,’ Zalman
laments that the US military has “found it difficult to create
compelling narratives — or stories — either to express its strategic
aims, or to communicate in discrete situations, such as civilian
deaths.” By the end, she concludes that “the complex issue of civilian
deaths” should be approached not just by “apologies and
compensation” — which barely occurs anyway — but by propagating
narratives that portray characters with whom the audience connects (in
this case, ‘the audience’ being ‘populations in war zones’). This is to
facilitate the audience resolving struggles in a “positive way,”
defined, of course, by US military interests. Engaging emotionally in
this way with “survivors of those dead” from US military action might
“prove to be an empathetic form of influence.” Throughout, Zalman is
incapable of questioning the legitimacy of US strategic aims, or
acknowledging that the impact of those aims in the accumulation of
civilian deaths, is precisely the problem that needs to change — as
opposed to the way they are ideologically framed for populations
subjected to military action.
‘Empathy,’ here, is merely an instrument by which to manipulate.
In 2012, Zalman wrote an article for The Globalist seeking
to demonstrate how the rigid delineation of ‘hard power’ and ‘soft
power’ needed to be overcome, to recognize that the use of force
requires the right symbolic and cultural effect to guarantee success:
“As long as defense and economic diplomacy remain in a box labeled ‘hard power,’ we fail to see how much their success relies on their symbolic effects as well as their material ones. As long as diplomatic and cultural efforts are stored in a box marked ‘soft power,’ we fail to see the ways in which they can be used coercively or produce effects that are like those produced by violence.”
Given
SAIC’s deep involvement in the Pentagon Highlands Forum, and through it
the development of information strategies on surveillance, irregular
warfare, and propaganda, it is hardly surprising that SAIC was the other
key private defense firm contracted to generate propaganda in the run
up to Iraq War 2003, alongside TRG.
“SAIC executives have been involved at every stage… of the war in Iraq,” reported Vanity Fair,
ironically, in terms of deliberately disseminating false claims about
WMD, and then investigating the ‘intelligence failure’ around false WMD
claims. David Kay, for instance, who had been hired by the CIA in 2003
to hunt for Saddam’s WMD as head of the Iraq Survey Group, was until
October 2002 a senior SAIC vice president hammering away “at the threat
posed by Iraq” under Pentagon contract. When WMD failed to emerge,
President Bush’s commission to investigate this US ‘intelligence
failure’ included three SAIC executives, among them Highlands Forum
founding member Jeffrey Cooper. The very year of Kay’s appointment to
the Iraq Survey Group, Clinton’s defense secretary William Perry — the
man under whose orders the Pentagon’s Highlands Forum was
set-up — joined the board of SAIC. The investigation by Cooper and all
let the Bush administration off the hook for manufacturing propaganda to
legitimize war — unsurprisingly, given Cooper’s integral role in the
very Pentagon network that manufactured that propaganda.
SAIC was also among the many contractors that profited handsomely from Iraqi reconstruction deals, and was re-contracted
after the war to promote pro-US narratives abroad. In the same vein as
Rendon’s work, the idea was that stories planted abroad would be picked
up by US media for domestic consumption.
But
the Pentagon Highlands Forum’s promotion of advanced propaganda
techniques is not exclusive to core, longstanding delegates like Rendon
and Zalman. In 2011, the Forum hosted two DARPA-funded scientists,
Antonio and Hanna Damasio, who are principal investigators in the
‘Neurobiology of Narrative Framing’ project at the University of
Southern California. Evoking Zalman’s emphasis on the need for Pentagon
psychological operations to deploy “empathetic influence,” the new
DARPA-backed project
aims to investigate how narratives often appeal “to strong, sacred
values in order to evoke an emotional response,” but in different ways
across different cultures. The most disturbing element of the research
is its focus on trying to understand how to increase the Pentagon’s
capacity to deploy narratives that influence listeners in a way that
overrides conventional reasoning in the context of morally-questionable
actions.
The project description
explains that the psychological reaction to narrated events is
“influenced by how the narrator frames the events, appealing to
different values, knowledge, and experiences of the listener.” Narrative
framing that “targets the sacred values of the listener, including core
personal, nationalistic, and/or religious values, is particularly
effective at influencing the listener’s interpretation of narrated
events,” because such “sacred values” are closely tied with “the
psychology of identity, emotion, moral decision making, and social
cognition.” By applying sacred framing to even mundane issues, such
issues “can gain properties of sacred values and result in a strong
aversion to using conventional reasoning to interpret them.” The two
Damasios and their team are exploring what role “linguistic and
neuropsychological mechanisms” play in determining “the effectiveness of
narrative framing using sacred values in influencing a listener’s
interpretation of events.”
The
research is based on extracting narratives from millions of American,
Iranian and Chinese weblogs, and subjecting them to automated discourse
analysis to compare them quantitatively across the three languages. The
investigators then follow up using behavioral experiments with
readers/listeners from different cultures to gauge their reaction
different narratives “where each story makes an appeal to a sacred value
to explain or justify a morally-questionable behavior of the author.”
Finally, the scientists apply neurobiological fMRI scanning to correlate
the reactions and personal characteristics of subjects with their brain
responses.
Why is the
Pentagon funding research investigating how to exploit people’s “sacred
values” to extinguish their capacity for logical reasoning, and enhance
their emotional openness to “morally-questionable behavior”?
The
focus on English, Farsi and Chinese may also reveal that the Pentagon’s
current concerns are overwhelmingly about developing information
operations against two key adversaries, Iran and China, which fits into
longstanding ambitions to project strategic influence in the Middle
East, Central Asia and Southeast Asia. Equally, the emphasis on English
language, specifically from American weblogs, further suggests the
Pentagon is concerned about projecting propaganda to influence public
opinion at home.
Lest
one presume that DARPA’s desire to mine millions of American weblogs as
part of its ‘neurobiology of narrative framing’ research is a mere case
of random selection, an additional co-chair of the Pentagon Highlands
Forum in recent years is Rosemary Wenchel, former director of cyber
capabilities and operations support at the Office of the Secretary of
Defense. Since 2012, Wenchel has been deputy assistant secretary for
strategy and policy in the Department of Homeland Security.
As
the Pentagon’s extensive funding of propaganda on Iraq and Afghanistan
demonstrates, population influence and propaganda is critical not just
in far-flung theatres abroad in strategic regions, but also at home, to
quell the risk of domestic public opinion undermining the legitimacy of
Pentagon policy. In the photo above, Wenchel is talking to Jeff Baxter, a
long-time US defense and intelligence consultant. In September 2005,
Baxter was part of a supposedly “independent” study group
(chaired by NSA-contractor Booz Allen Hamilton) commissioned by the
Department of Homeland Security, which recommended a greater role for US
spy satellites in monitoring the domestic population.
Meanwhile,
Zalman and Rendon, while both remaining closely involved in the
Pentagon Highlands Forum, continue to be courted by the US military for
their expertise on information operations. In October 2014, both
participated in a major Strategic Multi-Layer Assessment conference sponsored by the US Department of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, titled ‘A
New Information Paradigm? From Genes to “Big Data” and Instagram to
Persistent Surveillance… Implications for National Security.’ Other
delegates represented senior US military officials, defense industry
executives, intelligence community officials, Washington think-tanks,
and academics.
Rendon
and SAIC/Leidos, two firms that have been central to the very evolution
of Pentagon information operations strategy through their pivotal
involvement in the Highlands Forum, continue to be contracted for key
operations under the Obama administration. A US General Services
Administration document,
for instance, shows that Rendon was granted a major 2010–2015 contract
providing general media and communications support services across
federal agencies. Similarly, SAIC/Leidos has a $400 million 2010–2015 contract
with the US Army Research Laboratory for “Expeditionary Warfare;
Irregular Warfare; Special Operations; Stabilization and Reconstruction
Operations” — a contract which is “being prepared now for recomplete.”
The empire strikes back
Under
Obama, the nexus of corporate, industry, and financial power
represented by the interests that participate in the Pentagon Highlands
Forum has consolidated itself to an unprecedented degree.
Coincidentally, the very day Obama announced Hagel’s resignation, the DoD issued a media release
highlighting how Robert O. Work, Hagel’s deputy defense secretary
appointed by Obama in 2013, planned to take forward the Defense
Innovation Initiative that Hagel had just announced a week earlier. The
new initiative was focused on ensuring that the Pentagon would undergo a
long-term transformation to keep up with leading edge disruptive
technologies across information operations.
Whatever
the real reasons for Hagel’s ejection, this was a symbolic and tangible
victory for Marshall and the Highlands Forum vision. Highlands Forum
co-chair Andrew Marshall, head of the ONA, may indeed be retiring. But
the post-Hagel Pentagon is now staffed with his followers.
Robert
Work, who now presides over the new DoD transformation scheme, is a
loyal Marshall acolyte who had previously directed and analyzed war
games for the Office of Net Assessment. Like Marshall, Wells, O’Neill
and other Highlands Forum members, Work is also a robot fantasist who lead authored the study, Preparing for War in the Robotic Age, published early last year by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).
Work is also pitched to determine the future of the ONA,
assisted by his strategist Tom Ehrhard and DoD undersecretary for
intelligence Michael G. Vickers, under whose authority the Highlands
Forum currently runs. Ehrard, an advocate of “integrating disruptive technologies
in DoD,” previously served as Marshall’s military assistant in the ONA,
while Mike Vickers — who oversees surveillance agencies like the
NSA — was also previously hired by Marshall to consult for the Pentagon.
Vickers is also a leading proponent of irregular warfare.
As assistant defense secretary for special operations and low intensity
conflict under former defense secretary Robert Gates in both the Bush
and Obama administrations, Vickers’s irregular warfare vision pushed for
“distributed operations across the world,” including “in scores of
countries with which the US is not at war,” as part of a program of
“counter network warfare” using a “network to fight a network” — a
strategy which of course has the Highlands Forum all over it. In his
previous role under Gates, Vickers increased the budget for special
operations including psychological operations, stealth transport,
Predator drone deployment and “using high-tech surveillance and
reconnaissance to track and target terrorists and insurgents.”
To
replacing Hagel, Obama nominated Ashton Carter, former deputy defense
secretary from 2009 to 2013, whose expertise in budgets and procurement
according to the Wall Street Journal is
“expected to boost some of the initiatives championed by the current
Pentagon deputy, Robert Work, including an effort to develop new
strategies and technologies to preserve the US advantage on the
battlefield.”
Back in 1999, after three years as Clinton’s assistant defense secretary, Carter co-authored a study
with former defense secretary William J. Perry advocating a new form of
‘war by remote control’ facilitated by “digital technology and the
constant flow of information.” One of Carter’s colleagues in the
Pentagon during his tenure at that time was Highlands Forum co-chair
Linton Wells; and it was Perry of course that as then-defense secretary
appointed Richard O’Neill to set-up the Highlands Forum as the
Pentagon’s IO think-tank back in 1994.
Highlands
Forum overlord Perry went on to join the board of SAIC, before
eventually becoming chairman of another giant defense contractor, Global
Technology Partners (GTP). And Ashton Carter was on GTP’s board under
Perry, before being nominated to defense secretary by Obama. During
Carter’s previous Pentagon stint under Obama, he worked closely with
Work and current undersecretary of defense Frank Kendall. Defense industry sources
rejoice that the new Pentagon team will “dramatically improve” chances
to “push major reform projects” at the Pentagon “across the finish
line.”
Indeed, Carter’s priority
as defense chief nominee is identifying and acquiring new commercial
“disruptive technology” to enhance US military strategy — in other
words, executing the DoD Skynet plan.
The
origins of the Pentagon’s new innovation initiative can thus be traced
back to ideas that were widely circulated inside the Pentagon decades
ago, but which failed to take root fully until now. Between 2006 and
2010, the same period in which such ideas were being developed by
Highlands Forum experts like Lochard, Zalman and Rendon, among many
others, the Office of Net Assessment provided a direct mechanism to
channel these ideas into concrete strategy and policy development
through the Quadrennial Defense Reviews, where Marshall’s input was primarily responsible for the expansion of the “black” world: “special operations”, “electronic warfare” and “information operations.”
Marshall’s pre-9/11 vision of a fully networked and automated military system found its fruition in the Pentagon’s Skynet study
released by the National Defense University in September 2014, which
was co-authored by Marshall’s colleague at the Highlands Forum, Linton
Wells. Many of Wells’ recommendations are now to be executed via the new
Defense Innovation Initiative by veterans and affiliates of the ONA and
Highlands Forum.
Given that
Wells’ white paper highlighted the Pentagon’s keen interest in
monopolizing AI research to monopolize autonomous networked robot
warfare, it is not entirely surprising that the Forum’s sponsoring
partners at SAIC/Leidos display a bizarre sensitivity about public use
of the word ‘Skynet.’
On a Wikipedia entry
titled ‘Skynet (fictional)’, people using SAIC computers deleted
several paragraphs under the ‘Trivia’ section pointing out real-world
‘Skynets’, such as the British military satellite system, and various
information technology projects.
Hagel’s
departure paved the way for Pentagon officials linked to the Highlands
Forum’s shadow network to consolidate government influence. These
officials are embedded in a longstanding shadow network of political,
industry, media and corporate officials that sit invisibly behind the
seat of government, yet literally write its foreign and domestic
national security policies whether the administration is Democrat of
Republican.
It is this
network that has rendered the American vote pointless. Far from
protecting the public interest or helping to combat terrorism, the
comprehensive monitoring of electronic communications has been
systematically abused to empower powerful vested interests in the
energy, defense, and IT industries.
The
state of permanent global warfare that has resulted is not making
anyone safer, but has spawned a new generation of terrorists in the form
of the so-called ‘Islamic State’ — itself a Frankenstein by-product
of the putrid combination of Assad’s brutality and longstanding US
covert operations in the region. This Frankenstein’s existence is now
being cynically exploited
by private contractors seeking to profit exponentially from expanding
the national security apparatus, at a time when economic volatility has
pressured governments to slash defense spending.
According
to the Securities and Exchange Commission, from 2008 to 2013, the five
largest US defense contractors lost 14 percent of their employees, as
the winding down of US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan led to lack of
business and squeezed revenues. The continuation of the ‘Long War’
triggered by ISIS has, for now, reversed their fortunes. Companies
profiting from the new war include many connected to the Highlands Forum, such as Leidos, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, and Boeing. War is, indeed, a racket.
No more shadows
Yet in the long-run, the information imperialists have already failed.
This investigation is based entirely on open source techniques, made
viable largely in the context of the same information revolution that
enabled Google. The investigation has been funded entirely by members of
the public, through crowd-funding. And the investigation has been
published and distributed outside the circuits of traditional media,
precisely to make the point that in this new digital age, centralized
top-down concentrations of power cannot overcome the power of people,
their love of truth and justice, and their desire to share.
What
are the lessons of this irony? Simple, really: The information
revolution is inherently decentralized, and decentralizing. It cannot be
controlled and co-opted by Big Brother. Efforts to do so will in the
end invariably fail, in a way that is ultimately self-defeating.
The
latest mad-cap Pentagon initiative to dominate the world through
control of information and information technologies, is not a sign of
the all-powerful nature of the shadow network, but rather a symptom of
its deluded desperation as it attempts to ward off the acceleration of
its hegemonic decline.
But
the decline is well on its way. And this story, like so many before it,
is one small sign that the opportunities to mobilize the information
revolution for the benefit of all, despite the efforts of power to hide
in the shadows, are stronger than ever.
Dr Nafeez Ahmed
is an investigative journalist, bestselling author and international
security scholar. A former Guardian writer, he writes the ‘System Shift’
column for VICE’s Motherboard, and is also a columnist for Middle East
Eye. He is the winner of a 2015 Project Censored Award for Outstanding
Investigative Journalism for his Guardian work.
Nafeez
has also written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age,
The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New
Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, New Internationalist, Counterpunch,
Truthout, among others. He is the author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010), and the scifi thriller novel ZERO POINT,
among other books. His work on the root causes and covert operations
linked to international terrorism officially contributed to the 9/11
Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest.
This
exclusive is being released for free in the public interest, and was
enabled by crowdfunding. I’d like to thank my amazing community of
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in-depth investigation. Please support independent, investigative journalism for the global commons.
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