Out of control Russian spacecraft plunging back to Earth: Official reveals unmanned cargo craft has 'started descending'

Posted by George Freund on April 29, 2015

Nasa reported that a video camera on Progress showed it to be spinning at a 'rather significant rate'. Current estimates suggest it is completing one rotation every five seconds

Progress M-27M will fall to Earth in a matter of days, experts have said
The ISS-bound spacecraft suffered a glitch after launching yesterday
It is now spinning out of control with 'nowhere to go' except down
And one expert told MailOnline there was no chance of saving it

By JONATHAN O'CALLAGHAN and ELLIE ZOLFAGHARIFARD FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 11:16 GMT, 29 April 2015 | UPDATED: 15:24 GMT, 29 April 2015

The Russian spacecraft that went rogue yesterday has begun an unstoppable descent into Earth's atmosphere, experts have said.

Roscosmos, the Russian Space Agency, was trying to save the unmanned Progress M-27M spacecraft after a major malfunction caused it to spin out of control.

But an official claimed that the spacecraft had 'nowhere else to go' apart from back into Earth's atmosphere - and an expert told MailOnline: 'It's gone.'

Speaking ahead of an official Roscosmos statement expected later today, the source told AFP: 'It has started descending. It has nowhere to go.

'It is clear that absolutely uncontrollable reactions have begun.'

It emerged yesterday that officials were struggling to contact the spacecraft, meaning they could not be sure what the problem was - or how to resolve it.

WHAT WENT WRONG?

'Almost immediately after spacecraft separation, a series of telemetry problems were detected with the Progress 59,' Nasa spokesperson Rob Navias said during a televised broadcast from Mission Control.

Orbital parameters were due to be sent from a Russian Ground Site, allowing for a eight 'rendevous burns' to be performed over the next five hours of flight.

But, once Progress had arrived on orbit, only confirmation of its solar array deployment and some of the navigational antennas were made.

Meanwhile, Nasa's Mission Control reported that a video camera on Progress showed it to be spinning at a 'rather significant rate.'



Roscosmos' problems began shortly after a Russian Soyuz 2-1A rocket launched the latest Progress resupply vehicle to the ISS. 'Almost immediately after spacecraft separation, a series of telemetry problems were detected with the Progress 59,' a Nasa spokesperson said during a televised broadcast from Mission Control

Progress is not designed to be able to return to Earth, so if it does re-enter Earth's atmosphere it's likely most of it would burn up during the intense heat of re-entry as it lacks a heat shield.

However, if the spacecraft can not be brought back under partial control, and the tumbling spacecraft is left to re-enter of its own accord, then some pieces of it could make it to the ground.

'A safe docking with the ISS is not possible.

We are working out different options for a water landing,' Igor Komarov, head of Roskosmos, was quoted by agency LifeNews as saying at a press conference today.

With more than two thirds of Earth covered by water, and only three per cent of land
containing urban areas, it's highly unlikely any part of the spacecraft would cause damage.

But with estimates for its re-entry ranging from two days to a week and a half, it's not clear yet where it would re-enter and spread its debris.



An expert told MailOnline the spacecraft was unresponsive to commands, most of its sensors had failed and its fuel was heavily depleted - meaning regaining control is difficult.

There also seems to be a debris cloud in its vicinity, possibly from an explosion. All the signs indicate that there will be no chance of recovering it.

‘It’s gone,’ UK space expert Dr Duncan Law-Green from the University of Leicester said.

Current theories as to what happened include a collision with the third stage of the rocket, or an explosion on Progress itself.

The cargo spacecraft was due to dock with the ISS six hours after taking off from Kazakhstan yesterday at 8:09am BST (3:09am EDT), bringing 2.5 tons of supplies including food.

But shortly after launching, an unknown glitch caused the spacecraft to begin spinning wildly out of control, as seen in dramatic footage that showed Earth rotating past the camera.

Flight controllers were unable to receive data from the spacecraft, which appeared to have entered the wrong orbit.



Roscosmos will try to make contact with the spacecraft tonight as it makes another series of passes over Russian ground stations. Docking with the ISS has been abandoned for now

While Russia's Mission Control has failed to stabilise the ship so far, it said it had not yet given up on partially saving the unmanned spacecraft.

Mission Control spokesman Sergei Talalasov told the Interfax news agency on Wednesday that flight controllers were still trying to restore communication with the Progress.

Russia's space agency and Nasa both said the six crew members on board the orbiting space station have sufficient supplies and are in no danger.

A secondary docking date tomorrow had been proposed, but this now seems impossible - as does any other docking date.

'Specialists have recognised that Progress is hopeless. Controlled de-orbiting is impossible,' another source said.

'There have been no improvements,' a mission control spokesman told AFP.

Earlier a Russian mission control source said: 'Only a miracle can save the spacecraft.'

'We have scheduled two more communication sessions to soothe our conscience,' said the official, but hopes are virtually zero of salvaging the craft which contained supplied for the International Space Station.



The dizzying footage (pictured), which was taken from the Progress 59 spacecraft, shows the Earth and sun moving in and out of the frame

Meanwhile, the Joint Space Operations Centre at the US Vandenberg Air Force in California detected 44 items of debris of unknown origin in orbit close to ailing Progress space ship.

This suggests an explosion on the spacecraft during or after the launch.

Deputy premier Dmitry Rogozin admitted: 'We're all worrying about our cargo spacecraft.'

The controllers on Tuesday sought but failed to change the flight plan and extend the vessel's journey to two days instead of six hours in a bid to fix the glitch.

'It's the first time that we have such a combination of emergency situations.'

The spacecraft will only remain in orbit for a matter of days if Russian flight controllers are unable to stabilise the craft and restore the system that allows them to send and receive data.

Because of the loss of connection, the flight controllers were unable to confirm the deployment of the navigational antennas needed for docking, Nasa and a duty officer at Russia's Mission Control said.




The spacecraft was scheduled to dock with the International Space Station six hours after take off, but that plan has now been 'indefinitely abandoned'. Pictured left is a cargo ship in the same family, Progress M-59, as seen from the International Space Station (right) during docking

The Progress is carrying about 2.5 tons of cargo, including fuel, equipment, oxygen and food, to the space station, which currently has a six-person crew from Russia, the United States and Italy.

The cargo ship also is delivering a copy of the Banner of Victory, the banner raised over the Reichstag in Berlin by victorious Soviet soldiers in 1945. Russia is planning extensive celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany in World War II.

Roscosmos' problems began shortly after a Russian Soyuz 2-1A rocket launched the Progress resupply vehicle.

Orbital data was due to be sent from a Russian Ground Site, allowing for a eight 'rendezvous burns' to be performed over the next five hours of flight.

But, once Progress had arrived on orbit, only confirmation of its solar array deployment and some of the navigational antennas were made.



Progress M-27M suffered the major malfunction moments after launch at 3:09 a.m. EDT (07:09 GMT) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan

Meanwhile, Nasa's Mission Control reported that a video camera on Progress showed it to be spinning at a 'rather significant rate.'

The dizzying footage, which was taken from the Progress 59 spacecraft, shows the Earth and sun moving in and out of the frame.

'Almost immediately after spacecraft separation, a series of telemetry problems were detected with the Progress 59,' Nasa spokesperson Rob Navias said during a televised broadcast from Mission Control.

'No confirmation of navigational antenna deploy or of the pressurisation of the manifold system for the propulsion system on the spacecraft was received.'

Russian spacecraft, including those used to send astronauts to the ISS, recently have acquired the capability to take a more direct six-hour route to the orbiting outpost.

But they still have the option of the longer, traditional route lasting two days.

'The crew on board the International Space Station has pressed ahead with maintenance work today as well as biomedical experiment activities,' said Navias.

'Both the Russian and USOS segments of the station continue to operate normally and are adequately supplied well beyond the next planned resupply flight,' Nasa said in a statement.



The cargo ship launched this morning on a Soyuz 2-1A rocket (pictured). Progress is carrying about 2.5 tons of cargo, including fuel, equipment, oxygen and food, to the space station, which currently has a six-person crew from Russia, the United States and Italy

Aside from Progress, there are several other cargo spacecraft available for the ISS.

Two have been taken out of service in the last year - Esa retired its unmanned vehicle, the ATV, while Nasa's other supplier, Orbital Sciences, is still grounded following a launch explosion last October at Virginia.

However, SpaceX's Dragon capsule recently successfully carried cargo to the station, and Japan's HTV is scheduled to take more cargo into orbit later this year - alongside other Progress flights.

So while the potential loss of an entire load of supplies on Progress is a serious blow to the International Space Station, it is not detrimental to the crew on board.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3060656/Out-control-Russian-spacecraft-plunging-Earth-Official-reveals-unmanned-cargo-craft-started-descending.html#ixzz3YizkkIo1

Exposing the Global Surveillance System    ~ & this was way back in 1997 ,folks !!!

1st February 1997 http://www.nickyhager.info/exposing-the-global-surveillance-system/

• Originally published in: Covert Action Quarterly

In the late 1980′s, in a decision it probably regrets, the U.S. prompted New Zealand to join a new and highly secret global intelligence system. Hager’s investigation into it and his discovery of the Echelon dictionary has revealed one of the world’s biggest, most closely held intelligence projects. The system allows spy agencies to monitor most of the world’s telephone, e-mail, and telex communications.
For 40 years, New Zealand’s largest intelligence agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) the nation’s equivalent of the US National Security Agency (NSA) had been helping its Western allies to spy on countries throughout the Pacific region, without the knowledge of the New Zealand public or many of its highest elected officials. What the NSA did not know is that by the late 1980s, various intelligence staff had decided these activities had been too secret for too long, and were providing me with interviews and documents exposing New Zealand’s intelligence activities. Eventually, more than 50 people who work or have worked in intelligence and related fields agreed to be interviewed.
The activities they described made it possible to document, from the South Pacific, some alliance-wide systems and projects which have been kept secret elsewhere. Of these, by far the most important is ECHELON.
Designed and coordinated by NSA, the ECHELON system is used to intercept ordinary e-mail, fax, telex, and telephone communications carried over the world’s telecommunications networks. Unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed during the Cold War, ECHELON is designed primarily for non-military targets: governments, organizations, businesses, and individuals in virtually every country. It potentially affects every person communicating between (and sometimes within) countries anywhere in the world.
It is, of course, not a new idea that intelligence organizations tap into e-mail and other public telecommunications networks. What was new in the material leaked by the New Zealand intelligence staff was precise information on where the spying is done, how the system works, its capabilities and shortcomings, and many details such as the codenames.
The ECHELON system is not designed to eavesdrop on a particular individual’s e-mail or fax link. Rather, the system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications and using computers to identify and extract messages of interest from the mass of unwanted ones. A chain of secret interception facilities has been established around the world to tap into all the major components of the international telecommunications networks. Some monitor communications satellites, others land-based communications networks, and others radio communications. ECHELON links together all these facilities, providing the US and its allies with the ability to intercept a large proportion of the communications on the planet.
The computers at each station in the ECHELON network automatically search through the millions of messages intercepted for ones containing pre-programmed keywords. Keywords include all the names, localities, subjects, and so on that might be mentioned. Every word of every message intercepted at each station gets automatically searched whether or not a specific telephone number or e-mail address is on the list.
The thousands of simultaneous messages are read in “real time” as they pour into the station, hour after hour, day after day, as the computer finds intelligence needles in telecommunications haystacks.
SOMEONE IS LISTENING: The computers in stations around the globe are known, within the network, as the ECHELON Dictionaries. Computers that can automatically search through traffic for keywords have existed since at least the 1970s, but the ECHELON system was designed by NSA to interconnect all these computers and allow the stations to function as components of an integrated whole. The NSA and GCSB are bound together under the five-nation UKUSA signals intelligence agreement. The other three partners all with equally obscure names are the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Britain, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) in Canada, and the Defense Signals Directorate (DSD) in Australia.
The alliance, which grew from cooperative efforts during World War II to intercept radio transmissions, was formalized into the UKUSA agreement in 1948 and aimed primarily against the USSR. The five UKUSA agencies are today the largest intelligence organizations in their respective countries. With much of the world’s business occurring by fax, e-mail, and phone, spying on these communications receives the bulk of intelligence resources. For decades before the introduction of the ECHELON system, the UKUSA allies did intelligence collection operations for each other, but each agency usually processed and analyzed the intercept from its own stations.
Under ECHELON, a particular station’s Dictionary computer contains not only its parent agency’s chosen keywords, but also has lists entered in for other agencies. In New Zealand’s satellite interception station at Waihopai (in the South Island), for example, the computer has separate search lists for the NSA, GCHQ, DSD, and CSE in addition to its own. Whenever the Dictionary encounters a message containing one of the agencies’ keywords, it automatically picks it and sends it directly to the headquarters of the agency concerned. No one in New Zealand screens, or even sees, the intelligence collected by the New Zealand station for the foreign agencies. Thus, the stations of the junior UKUSA allies function for the NSA no differently than if they were overtly NSA-run bases located on their soil.
The first component of the ECHELON network are stations specifically targeted on the international telecommunications satellites (Intelsats) used by the telephone companies of most countries. A ring of Intelsats is positioned around the world, stationary above the equator, each serving as a relay station for tens of thousands of simultaneous phone calls, fax, and e-mail. Five UKUSA stations have been established to intercept the communications carried by the Intelsats.
The British GCHQ station is located at the top of high cliffs above the sea at Morwenstow in Cornwall. Satellite dishes beside sprawling operations buildings point toward Intelsats above the Atlantic, Europe, and, inclined almost to the horizon, the Indian Ocean. An NSA station at Sugar Grove, located 250 kilometers southwest of Washington, DC, in the mountains of West Virginia, covers Atlantic Intelsats transmitting down toward North and South America. Another NSA station is in Washington State, 200 kilometers southwest of Seattle, inside the Army’s Yakima Firing Center. Its satellite dishes point out toward the Pacific Intelsats and to the east.
The job of intercepting Pacific Intelsat communications that cannot be intercepted at Yakima went to New Zealand and Australia. Their South Pacific location helps to ensure global interception. New Zealand provides the station at Waihopai and Australia supplies the Geraldton station in West Australia (which targets both Pacific and Indian Ocean Intelsats).
Each of the five stations’ Dictionary computers has a codename to distinguish it from others in the network. The Yakima station, for instance, located in desert country between the Saddle Mountains and Rattlesnake Hills, has the COWBOY Dictionary, while the Waihopai station has the FLINTLOCK Dictionary. These codenames are recorded at the beginning of every intercepted message, before it is transmitted around the ECHELON network, allowing analysts to recognize at which station the interception occurred.
New Zealand intelligence staff has been closely involved with the NSA’s Yakima station since 1981, when NSA pushed the GCSB to contribute to a project targeting Japanese embassy communications. Since then, all five UKUSA agencies have been responsible for monitoring diplomatic cables from all Japanese posts within the same segments of the globe they are assigned for general UKUSA monitoring. Until New Zealand’s integration into ECHELON with the opening of the Waihopai station in 1989, its share of the Japanese communications was intercepted at Yakima and sent unprocessed to the GCSB headquarters in Wellington for decryption, translation, and writing into UKUSA-format intelligence reports (the NSA provides the codebreaking programs).
“COMMUNICATION” THROUGH SATELLITES: The next component of the ECHELON system intercepts a range of satellite communications not carried by Intelsat.In addition to the UKUSA stations targeting Intelsat satellites, there are another five or more stations homing in on Russian and other regional communications satellites. These stations are Menwith Hill in northern England; Shoal Bay, outside Darwin in northern Australia (which targets Indonesian satellites); Leitrim, just south of Ottawa in Canada (which appears to intercept Latin American satellites); Bad Aibling in Germany; and Misawa in northern Japan.
A group of facilities that tap directly into land-based telecommunications systems is the final element of the ECHELON system. Besides satellite and radio, the other main method of transmitting large quantities of public, business, and government communications is a combination of water cables under the oceans and microwave networks over land. Heavy cables, laid across seabeds between countries, account for much of the world’s international communications. After they come out of the water and join land-based microwave networks they are very vulnerable to interception. The microwave networks are made up of chains of microwave towers relaying messages from hilltop to hilltop (always in line of sight) across the countryside. These networks shunt large quantities of communications across a country. Interception of them gives access to international undersea communications (once they surface) and to international communication trunk lines across continents. They are also an obvious target for large-scale interception of domestic communications.
Because the facilities required to intercept radio and satellite communications use large aerials and dishes that are difficult to hide for too long, that network is reasonably well documented. But all that is required to intercept land-based communication networks is a building situated along the microwave route or a hidden cable running underground from the legitimate network into some anonymous building, possibly far removed. Although it sounds technically very difficult, microwave interception from space by United States spy satellites also occurs.4 The worldwide network of facilities to intercept these communications is largely undocumented, and because New Zealand’s GCSB does not participate in this type of interception, my inside sources could not help either.
NO ONE IS SAFE FROM A MICROWAVE: A 1994 expos of the Canadian UKUSA agency, Spyworld, co-authored by one of its former staff, Mike Frost, gave the first insights into how a lot of foreign microwave interception is done (see p. 18). It described UKUSA “embassy collection” operations, where sophisticated receivers and processors are secretly transported to their countries’ overseas embassies in diplomatic bags and used to monitor various communications in foreign capitals.
Since most countries’ microwave networks converge on the capital city, embassy buildings can be an ideal site. Protected by diplomatic privilege, they allow interception in the heart of the target country. *6 The Canadian embassy collection was requested by the NSA to fill gaps in the American and British embassy collection operations, which were still occurring in many capitals around the world when Frost left the CSE in 1990. Separate sources in Australia have revealed that the DSD also engages in embassy collection. On the territory of UKUSA nations, the interception of land-based telecommunications appears to be done at special secret intelligence facilities. The US, UK, and Canada are geographically well placed to intercept the large amounts of the world’s communications that cross their territories.
The only public reference to the Dictionary system anywhere in the world was in relation to one of these facilities, run by the GCHQ in central London. In 1991, a former British GCHQ official spoke anonymously to Granada Television’s World in Action about the agency’s abuses of power. He told the program about an anonymous red brick building at 8 Palmer Street where GCHQ secretly intercepts every telex which passes into, out of, or through London, feeding them into powerful computers with a program known as “Dictionary.” The operation, he explained, is staffed by carefully vetted British Telecom people: “It’s nothing to do with national security. It’s because it’s not legal to take every single telex. And they take everything: the embassies, all the business deals, even the birthday greetings, they take everything. They feed it into the Dictionary.” What the documentary did not reveal is that Dictionary is not just a British system; it is UKUSA-wide.
Similarly, British researcher Duncan Campbell has described how the US Menwith Hill station in Britain taps directly into the British Telecom microwave network, which has actually been designed with several major microwave links converging on an isolated tower connected underground into the station.
The NSA Menwith Hill station, with 22 satellite terminals and more than 4.9 acres of buildings, is undoubtedly the largest and most powerful in the UKUSA network. Located in northern England, several thousand kilometers from the Persian Gulf, it was awarded the NSA’s “Station of the Year” prize for 1991 after its role in the Gulf War. Menwith Hill assists in the interception of microwave communications in another way as well, by serving as a ground station for US electronic spy satellites. These intercept microwave trunk lines and short range communications such as military radios and walkie talkies. Other ground stations where the satellites’ information is fed into the global network are Pine Gap, run by the CIA near Alice Springs in central Australia and the Bad Aibling station in Germany. Among them, the various stations and operations making up the ECHELON network tap into all the main components of the world’s telecommunications networks. All of them, including a separate network of stations that intercepts long distance radio communications, have their own Dictionary computers connected into ECHELON.
In the early 1990s, opponents of the Menwith Hill station obtained large quantities of internal documents from the facility. Among the papers was a reference to an NSA computer system called Platform. The integration of all the UKUSA station computers into ECHELON probably occurred with the introduction of this system in the early 1980s. James Bamford wrote at that time about a new worldwide NSA computer network codenamed Platform “which will tie together 52 separate computer systems used throughout the world. Focal point, or `host environment,’ for the massive network will be the NSA headquarters at Fort Meade. Among those included in Platform will be the British SIGINT organization, GCHQ.”
LOOKING IN THE DICTIONARY: The Dictionary computers are connected via highly encrypted UKUSA communications that link back to computer data bases in the five agency headquarters. This is where all the intercepted messages selected by the Dictionaries end up. Each morning the specially “indoctrinated” signals intelligence analysts in Washington, Ottawa, Cheltenham, Canberra, and Wellington log on at their computer terminals and enter the Dictionary system. After keying in their security passwords, they reach a directory that lists the different categories of intercept available in the data bases, each with a four-digit code. For instance, 1911 might be Japanese diplomatic cables from Latin America (handled by the Canadian CSE), 3848 might be political communications from and about Nigeria, and 8182 might be any messages about distribution of encryption technology.
They select their subject category, get a “search result” showing how many messages have been caught in the ECHELON net on that subject, and then the day’s work begins. Analysts scroll through screen after screen of intercepted faxes, e-mail messages, etc. and, whenever a message appears worth reporting on, they select it from the rest to work on. If it is not in English, it is translated and then written into the standard format of intelligence reports produced anywhere within the UKUSA network either in entirety as a “report,” or as a summary or “gist.”
INFORMATION CONTROL: A highly organized system has been developed to control what is being searched for by each station and who can have access to it. This is at the heart of ECHELON operations and works as follows.
The individual station’s Dictionary computers do not simply have a long list of keywords to search for. And they do not send all the information into some huge database that participating agencies can dip into as they wish. It is much more controlled.
The search lists are organized into the same categories, referred to by the four digit numbers. Each agency decides its own categories according to its responsibilities for producing intelligence for the network. For GCSB, this means South Pacific governments, Japanese diplomatic, Russian Antarctic activities, and so on.
The agency then works out about 10 to 50 keywords for selection in each category. The keywords include such things as names of people, ships, organizations, country names, and subject names. They also include the known telex and fax numbers and Internet addresses of any individuals, businesses, organizations, and government offices that are targets. These are generally written as part of the message text and so are easily recognized by the Dictionary computers.
The agencies also specify combinations of keywords to help sift out communications of interest. For example, they might search for diplomatic cables containing both the words “Santiago” and “aid,” or cables containing the word “Santiago” but not “consul” (to avoid the masses of routine consular communications). It is these sets of words and numbers (and combinations), under a particular category, that get placed in the Dictionary computers. (Staff in the five agencies called Dictionary Managers enter and update the keyword search lists for each agency.)
The whole system, devised by the NSA, has been adopted completely by the other agencies. The Dictionary computers search through all the incoming messages and, whenever they encounter one with any of the agencies’ keywords, they select it. At the same time, the computer automatically notes technical details such as the time and place of interception on the piece of intercept so that analysts reading it, in whichever agency it is going to, know where it came from, and what it is. Finally, the computer writes the four-digit code (for the category with the keywords in that message) at the bottom of the message’s text. This is important. It means that when all the intercepted messages end up together in the database at one of the agency headquarters, the messages on a particular subject can be located again. Later, when the analyst using the Dictionary system selects the four- digit code for the category he or she wants, the computer simply searches through all the messages in the database for the ones which have been tagged with that number.
This system is very effective for controlling which agencies can get what from the global network because each agency only gets the intelligence out of the ECHELON system from its own numbers. It does not have any access to the raw intelligence coming out of the system to the other agencies. For example, although most of the GCSB’s intelligence production is primarily to serve the UKUSA alliance, New Zealand does not have access to the whole ECHELON network. The access it does have is strictly controlled. A New Zealand intelligence officer explained: “The agencies can all apply for numbers on each other’s Dictionaries. The hardest to deal with are the Americans. … [There are] more hoops to jump through, unless it is in their interest, in which case they’ll do it for you.”
There is only one agency which, by virtue of its size and role within the alliance, will have access to the full potential of the ECHELON system the agency that set it up. What is the system used for? Anyone listening to official “discussion” of intelligence could be forgiven for thinking that, since the end of the Cold War, the key targets of the massive UKUSA intelligence machine are terrorism, weapons proliferation, and economic intelligence. The idea that economic intelligence has become very important, in particular, has been carefully cultivated by intelligence agencies intent on preserving their post-Cold War budgets. It has become an article of faith in much discussion of intelligence. However, I have found no evidence that these are now the primary concerns of organizations such as NSA.
QUICKER INTELLIGENCE, SAME MISSION: A different story emerges after examining very detailed information I have been given about the intelligence New Zealand collects for the UKUSA allies and detailed descriptions of what is in the yards-deep intelligence reports New Zealand receives from its four allies each week. There is quite a lot of intelligence collected about potential terrorists, and there is quite a lot of economic intelligence, notably intensive monitoring of all the countries participating in GATT negotiations. But by far, the main priorities of the intelligence alliance continue to be political and military intelligence to assist the larger allies to pursue their interests around the world. Anyone and anything the particular governments are concerned about can become a target.
With capabilities so secret and so powerful, almost anything goes. For example, in June 1992, a group of current “highly placed intelligence operatives” from the British GCHQ spoke to the London Observer: “We feel we can no longer remain silent regarding that which we regard to be gross malpractice and negligence within the establishment in which we operate.” They gave as examples GCHQ interception of three charitable organizations, including Amnesty International and Christian Aid. As the Observer reported: “At any time GCHQ is able to home in on their communications for a routine target request,” the GCHQ source said. In the case of phone taps the procedure is known as Mantis. With telexes it is called Mayfly. By keying in a code relating to Third World aid, the source was able to demonstrate telex “fixes” on the three organizations. “It is then possible to key in a trigger word which enables us to home in on the telex communications whenever that word appears,” he said. “And we can read a pre-determined number of characters either side of the keyword.” Without actually naming it, this was a fairly precise description of how the ECHELON Dictionary system works. Again, what was not revealed in the publicity was that this is a UKUSA-wide system. The design of ECHELON means that the interception of these organizations could have occurred anywhere in the network, at any station where the GCHQ had requested that the four-digit code covering Third World aid be placed.
Note that these GCHQ officers mentioned that the system was being used for telephone calls. In New Zealand, ECHELON is used only to intercept written communications: fax, e-mail, and telex. The reason, according to intelligence staff, is that the agency does not have the staff to analyze large quantities of telephone conversations.
Mike Frost’s expos of Canadian “embassy collection” operations described the NSA computers they used, called Oratory, that can “listen” to telephone calls and recognize when keywords are spoken. Just as we can recognize words spoken in all the different tones and accents we encounter, so too, according to Frost, can these computers. Telephone calls containing keywords are automatically extracted from the masses of other calls and recorded digitally on magnetic tapes for analysts back at agency headquarters. However, high volume voice recognition computers will be technically difficult to perfect, and my New Zealand-based sources could not confirm that this capability exists. But, if or when it is perfected, the implications would be immense. It would mean that the UKUSA agencies could use machines to search through all the international telephone calls in the world, in the same way that they do written messages. If this equipment exists for use in embassy collection, it will presumably be used in all the stations throughout the ECHELON network. It is yet to be confirmed how extensively telephone communications are being targeted by the ECHELON stations for the other agencies.
The easiest pickings for the ECHELON system are the individuals, organizations, and governments that do not use encryption. In New Zealand’s area, for example, it has proved especially useful against already vulnerable South Pacific nations which do not use any coding, even for government communications (all these communications of New Zealand’s neighbors are supplied, unscreened, to its UKUSA allies). As a result of the revelations in my book, there is currently a project under way in the Pacific to promote and supply publicly available encryption software to vulnerable organizations such as democracy movements in countries with repressive governments. This is one practical way of curbing illegitimate uses of the ECHELON capabilities.
One final comment. All the newspapers, commentators, and “well placed sources” told the public that New Zealand was cut off from US intelligence in the mid-1980s. That was entirely untrue. The intelligence supply to New Zealand did not stop, and instead, the decade since has been a period of increased integration of New Zealand into the US system. Virtually everything the equipment, manuals, ways of operating, jargon, codes, and so on, used in the GCSB continues to be imported entirely from the larger allies (in practice, usually the NSA). As with the Australian and Canadian agencies, most of the priorities continue to come from the US, too.
The main thing that protects these agencies from change is their secrecy. On the day my book arrived in the book shops, without prior publicity, there was an all-day meeting of the intelligence bureaucrats in the prime minister’s department trying to decide if they could prevent it from being distributed. They eventually concluded, sensibly, that the political costs were too high. It is understandable that they were so agitated.
Throughout my research, I have faced official denials or governments refusing to comment on publicity about intelligence activities. Given the pervasive atmosphere of secrecy and stonewalling, it is always hard for the public to judge what is fact, what is speculation, and what is paranoia. Thus, in uncovering New Zealand’s role in the NSA-led alliance, my aim was to provide so much detail about the operations the technical systems, the daily work of individual staff members, and even the rooms in which they work inside intelligence facilities that readers could feel confident that they were getting close to the truth. I hope the information leaked by intelligence staff in New Zealand about UKUSA and its systems such as ECHELON will help lead to change.

Tombstone Shadow (CCR)

Tombstone Shadow (CCR)          ~  fucking neat !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Clearance1967

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUvfGCYX9PQ

Uploaded on May 5, 2007

Blues tune from "Green River" album

MPAA Pirated Clips From Google Commercials To Make Its Own MPAA Propaganda Videos

from the can't-make-this-stuff-up dept   ...no shit  :o   ...prof ???

And here's another one from the Sony archives, this time noticed by Parker Higgins. It involves an email thread between Sony TV's Chief Marketing Officer Sheraton Kalouria and the company's top intellectual property lawyer Leah Weil (with top TV exec Steve Mosko included in the cc: field). In the email, they're discussing a new "reputational initiative" by the MPAA. From other emails, it appears that the MPAA finally realized that its reputation was toxic, and figured that rather than, maybe, figuring out why that is, it would put together a marketing campaign to improve the public's view of the MPAA. Here were the four goals of the campaign:

• Fill the knowledge gap about our industry
• Change consumer perceptions
• Claim our rightful position as innovators
• Reframe our consumer message in a positive tone

I note that "stop suing our customers and biggest fans" and "stop trying to censor parts of the web or destroy innovations that challenge our business model" didn't make the list. That's too bad, as either of those steps might actually, you know, help improve the MPAA's reputation.

But the really amazing thing about the campaign? Apparently at least some of the video involved unauthroized copying of content from... Google. The same Google that the MPAA and studios had dubbed "Goliath" and who they were hell bent on destroying because of the misleading belief that Google helped people infringe on their copyrights. Here was Kalouria's email to Weil:

Also, I was somewhat horrified that their creative shop used footage from Google commercials in their “Swipe-o-matic”. I kid you not…some of those scenes of people being “moved” by movies are from a current Google campaign...!

Weil only responded with a single word:

Yikes!!!

Yes. If you've been following along with the home game, you know that the MPAA is really, really against copyright infringement (or at least that's what it would have you believe). And it believes that Google is the single-biggest problem in the copyright world these days. And yet, when it's time for the MPAA to put together some of its own propaganda to put some spit and polish on its down in the dumps reputation, what does it do? Make use of Google's footage and pretend that the people being "moved" are actually being moved by the MPAA's movies.

Apparently, infringing on the works of others is okay for the MPAA when it does it itself. And that's leaving out the extreme irony of using Google's ad footage as well. It's unclear if this MPAA film ever saw the light of day, but it would be fascinating to see if anyone has it...

THE SPACE SCARPBOOK: RUSSIA’S SPACE COMMAND FINDS SPY SATELLITES DISGUISED AS SPACE JUNK… BUT WHAT’S THE REAL STORY HERE?

Posted on April 19, 2015 by Joseph P. Farrell •http://gizadeathstar.com/2015/04/the-space-scarpbook-russias-space-command-finds-spy-satellites-disguised-as-space-junk-but-whats-the-real-story-here/

This is a really unusual story, and several of you sent it to me. Indeed, it's so unusual that I have to comment on what it says, but the really important things are what it is not saying. As usual, it is RT that broke the story on April 12, 2015:Russia's space defense troops spot foreign spying satellites
I want to draw your attention to the curious "reportage" of the first four paragraphs of this article:

"A group of electronic reconnaissance satellites disguised as space junk has been disclosed by Russian aerospace defense troops. The devices were put into orbit to spy specifically on facilities on Russian territory.
“'Most recently, experts of the Main Space Intelligence Center disclosed a tyro group of electronic reconnaissance satellites. This satellite constellation is being developed to carry out communications surveillance of the facilities based inside Russian Federation territory,' commander of the Space Command, Major-General Oleg Maidanovich, informed Zvezda TV channel.
"The developed satellites were disguised as space trash, which is a normal practice, noted the commander.
"Major-General was reluctant to report on state affiliation of the exposed space vehicles, saying 'So far, there is no need for this.”'"(emphasis in the original)

No doubt General Maidanovich was under orders from Moscow to keep the "state affiliation" of the spy satellites-cum-space junk under wraps for the moment. And one can think of any number of "state actors" that would want to spy on Russia: the USA certainly tops the list, but one would have to add pretty much any other major power to that list, for varying reasons: the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, India, China, Japan, Israel. The list is pretty well-known, nor does it really contain any surprises.
Until one reads that statement again, and notes the very strange wording: "(The) Major-General was reluctant to report on (the) state affiliation of the exposed space vehicles, saying 'So far, there is no need for this.'"
State affiliation? This is very strange wording indeed for an article on a Russian state-approved media outlet, nor, in my opinion, was it an accidental choice of words. There are two basic ways to take it: (1) the Russians deliberately chose this strange phraseology to get people like me in the West all worked up over nothing, when what they really meant to say was simply "these are some other nation's direct satellites, we're choosing not to name that nation (even though we all know who it is, elbow jab to the ribs, wink wink), but let's have some fun and let the boys at the KGB...er...FSB run a little psyop and see what western blogsites do with it"; or (2) the Russians chose this strange phraseology because they've noticed something about the satellites that leads them to suspect they belong to another type of space actor, one affiliated with a nation state, but not representing it directly.
On that view, the stakes on Russian comment and its implications are raised considerably, for it would mean - for those willing to parse the comment closely, as I am doing here - that Russia has just announced that there's another player on the block, and it's not the usual suspects, but one affiliated with one of them. Now, while the odds of this being the reading of the remark are probably very low, nonetheless I find it intriguing to explore, for once one says "affiliation," what sort of affiliation and agency would one be dealing with?
One thing that comes to mind are the many defense contractors in the various western countries: Lockheed, British Aerospace or Marconi, Olivetti, Dassault, Mitsubishi, and so on. In that case, one would have the presence of private corporate spy satellites spying on a nation-state(and probably not just Russia), and bypassing the security apparati of their own countries with whom they have long been "affiliated": The USA in Lockheed's case, the UK with British Aerospace and Marconi, Italy with Olivetti, France with Dassault, and so on. If that sounds far-fetched, then think again. One need only recall that for globaloney-ism of all stripes from Marxist through Fascist to the "kinder gentler" globaloney of the West, the nation-state is supposed to be obsolete and will eventually fade away into the glorious global synarchist paradise of corporations and international "regulatory bodies and compacts". Why wouldn't they want to get their communications, surveillance, and weapons assets into space as soon as possible?
But while the corporate "affiliation" seems the most likely interpretation to put on the second possibility, there are others: political parties and religious organizations being the two that spring to mind from the lessons of western history, and the long associations of certain types of religious and political institutions with certain nations. Could private corporate, political party, or religious institutions develop a private launch capability? Certainly, if they were wealthy enough to do so, and held enough influence - via equity - in the technologies corporations to do so. Could such satellites be launched without anyone else detecting them? With chemical rockets, probably not, but with other means of getting satllites up there, possibly.
The bottom line here is this: this is a curious article, one that hardly needed to be written by RT in the way it was phrased, since, as the article itself avers, disguising spy satellites as space junk is a fairly standard practice for people launching spy satellites. And detecting someone else's spy satellites flying overhead is standard behavior as well. Russia, the European powers, China, India, Japan, the USA, all monitor space junk and each other's spy satellites. In short, there was no reason for RT to run an article saying "We found spy satellites flying over our country disguised as space junk." Big deal. A non-story.
....except for that one strange turn of phrase, and that, I'm betting, was the reason they ran the story...

THE PENTAGRAM … ER… PENTAGON IS MISSING MORE BILLIONS

Posted on April 17, 2015 by Joseph P. Farrell •http://gizadeathstar.com/2015/04/the-pentagram-er-pentagon-is-missing-more-billions/

Need a few billion dolllars for your black budget? A few covert operations projects? Then you need to hire the Pentagon to manage your ledgers. Mr. V.T found this article, and it seems that  the Pentagram is missing a few more billions of dollars:
$45 Billion in Tax Dollars Goes Missing in Afghanistan
Now, if you're like me, the idea of missing billions in Afghanistan conjurs all sorts of images, most of them having to do with opium poppies and drug trade, a point driven home by the fact that the article conveniently frames an American soldier and some poppies in the picture at the beginning.
But the real story is here:

"The auditors said DOD handed over data only for $21 billion of the total $66 billion it spent rebuilding the war-torn country. But unlike most cases of missing money in Afghanistan (of which there are plenty), the auditors don’t blame this on corruption or waste—but rather on accounting issues."

And here:

"Out of the total amount DOD has spent in Afghanistan, more than $57 billion has gone to the Afghan Forces – but the Pentagon can only account for about $17 billion."

And finally, here:

"Early this year, the watchdogs released a scathing report revealing the Pentagon had no way to verify whether the annual $300 million going to the Afghan Police Force was ending up in the right hands."

Of course, a mere forty-five billion dollars is but pocket change, compared to the missing 2.3 trillion dollars former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced was missing one day prior to the 9/11 operation. But then, as now, the problem lay with the accounting for the missing funds, and efforts were made in Congress - to little avail - to find out what companies held the contracts to manage the Pentagon's databses, and where the money was.
High octane speculation will tell you where it is, and what is going on: need some money for your black projects? Invade a defenseless and backward nation, establish contracts to "rebuild the infrastructure" and "grow democracy," inflate the costs of all those contracts, and run the excess money back into the black budget, while cooking the books and claiming that there is simply an endemic accounting dyslexia in Washington.  Couple this with hidden bond markets, fraudulent soverign securities (thank you Prime Minister Tanaka), mortgage fraud, non-existent and massively rehypothecated bullion, manipulated foreign exchange and other kinds of markets, illegal drug trade, and one has all the ingredients for a huge system designed to vacuum wealth from the overt global economy to funnel it into a covert one.
The question is, why would one need such enormous sums of money, over such a long period of time?
I suspect many of you have guessed at various answers to that question already, and I suspect that your answers will be much the same as mine.

MLK

The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete

By Chris Anderson 06.23.08 http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory

Illustration: Marian Bantjes

The Petabyte Age:
Sensors everywhere. Infinite storage. Clouds of processors. Our ability to capture, warehouse, and understand massive amounts of data is changing science, medicine, business, and technology. As our collection of facts and figures grows, so will the opportunity to find answers to fundamental questions. Because in the era of big data, more isn't just more. More is different.

The End of Theory:
Essay: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete

Feeding the Masses

Chasing the Quark

Winning the Lawsuit

Tracking the News

Spotting the Hot Zones

Sorting the World

Watching the Skies

Scanning Our Skeletons

Tracking Air Fares

Predicting the Vote

Pricing Terrorism

Visualizing Big Data

"All models are wrong, but some are useful."
So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don't have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don't have to settle for models at all.
Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.
The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.
At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn't pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.
Google's founding philosophy is that we don't know why this page is better than that one: If the statistics of incoming links say it is, that's good enough. No semantic or causal analysis is required. That's why Google can translate languages without actually "knowing" them (given equal corpus data, Google can translate Klingon into Farsi as easily as it can translate French into German). And why it can match ads to content without any knowledge or assumptions about the ads or the content.
Speaking at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference this past March, Peter Norvig, Google's research director, offered an update to George Box's maxim: "All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them."
This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.
The big target here isn't advertising, though. It's science. The scientific method is built around testable hypotheses. These models, for the most part, are systems visualized in the minds of scientists. The models are then tested, and experiments confirm or falsify theoretical models of how the world works. This is the way science has worked for hundreds of years.
Scientists are trained to recognize that correlation is not causation, that no conclusions should be drawn simply on the basis of correlation between X and Y (it could just be a coincidence). Instead, you must understand the underlying mechanisms that connect the two. Once you have a model, you can connect the data sets with confidence. Data without a model is just noise.
But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete. Consider physics: Newtonian models were crude approximations of the truth (wrong at the atomic level, but still useful). A hundred years ago, statistically based quantum mechanics offered a better picture — but quantum mechanics is yet another model, and as such it, too, is flawed, no doubt a caricature of a more complex underlying reality. The reason physics has drifted into theoretical speculation about n-dimensional grand unified models over the past few decades (the "beautiful story" phase of a discipline starved of data) is that we don't know how to run the experiments that would falsify the hypotheses — the energies are too high, the accelerators too expensive, and so on.
Now biology is heading in the same direction. The models we were taught in school about "dominant" and "recessive" genes steering a strictly Mendelian process have turned out to be an even greater simplification of reality than Newton's laws. The discovery of gene-protein interactions and other aspects of epigenetics has challenged the view of DNA as destiny and even introduced evidence that environment can influence inheritable traits, something once considered a genetic impossibility.
In short, the more we learn about biology, the further we find ourselves from a model that can explain it.
There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: "Correlation is enough." We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.
The best practical example of this is the shotgun gene sequencing by J. Craig Venter. Enabled by high-speed sequencers and supercomputers that statistically analyze the data they produce, Venter went from sequencing individual organisms to sequencing entire ecosystems. In 2003, he started sequencing much of the ocean, retracing the voyage of Captain Cook. And in 2005 he started sequencing the air. In the process, he discovered thousands of previously unknown species of bacteria and other life-forms.
If the words "discover a new species" call to mind Darwin and drawings of finches, you may be stuck in the old way of doing science. Venter can tell you almost nothing about the species he found. He doesn't know what they look like, how they live, or much of anything else about their morphology. He doesn't even have their entire genome. All he has is a statistical blip — a unique sequence that, being unlike any other sequence in the database, must represent a new species.
This sequence may correlate with other sequences that resemble those of species we do know more about. In that case, Venter can make some guesses about the animals — that they convert sunlight into energy in a particular way, or that they descended from a common ancestor. But besides that, he has no better model of this species than Google has of your MySpace page. It's just data. By analyzing it with Google-quality computing resources, though, Venter has advanced biology more than anyone else of his generation.
This kind of thinking is poised to go mainstream. In February, the National Science Foundation announced the Cluster Exploratory, a program that funds research designed to run on a large-scale distributed computing platform developed by Google and IBM in conjunction with six pilot universities. The cluster will consist of 1,600 processors, several terabytes of memory, and hundreds of terabytes of storage, along with the software, including IBM's Tivoli and open source versions of Google File System and MapReduce.¹ Early CluE projects will include simulations of the brain and the nervous system and other biological research that lies somewhere between wetware and software.
Learning to use a "computer" of this scale may be challenging. But the opportunity is great: The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world. Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all.
There's no reason to cling to our old ways. It's time to ask: What can science learn from Google?
Chris Anderson (canderson@wired.com) is the editor in chief of Wired.

1This story originally stated that the cluster software would include the actual Google File System.
http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory

The CIA and the Media 

by Carl Bernstein

Rolling Stone, Oct. 20, 1977,http://danwismar.com/uploads/Bernstein%20-%20CIA%20and%20Media.htm

In 1953, Joseph Alsop, then one of America's leading syndicated columnists, went to the Philippines to cover an election. He did not go because he was asked to do so by his syndicate. He did not go because he was asked to do so by the newspapers that printed his column. He went at the request of the CIA.

Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty-five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters.

Some of these journalists' relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services -- from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go-betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors-without-portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested it the derring-do of the spy business as in filing articles, and, the smallest category, full-time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements America�s leading news organizations.

The history of the CIA's involvement with the American press continues to be shrouded by an official policy of obfuscation and deception . . . .

Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were William Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the Louisville Courier-Journal and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, The Miami Herald, and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald-Tribune. By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with The New York Times, CBS, and Time Inc.

... From the Agency's perspective, there is nothing untoward in such relationships, and any ethical questions are a matter for the journalistic profession to resolve, not the intelligence community ... .

Many journalists were used by the CIA to assist in this process and they had the reputation of being among the best in the business. The peculiar nature of the job of the foreign correspondent is ideal for such work; he is accorded unusual access, by his host country, permitted to travel in areas often off-limits to other Americans, spends much of his time cultivating sources in governments, academic institutions, the military establishment and the scientific communities. He has the opportunity to form long-term personal relationships with sources and -- perhaps more than any other category of American operative -- is in a position to make correct judgments about the susceptibility and availability of foreign nationals for recruitment as spies.

The Agency's dealings with the press began during the earliest stages of the Cold War. Allen Dulles, who became director of the CIA in 1953, sought to establish a recruiting-and-cover capability within America's most prestigious journalistic institutions. By operating under the guise of accredited news correspondents, Dulles believed, CIA operatives abroad would be accorded a degree of access and freedom of movement unobtainable under almost any other type of cover.

American publishers, like so many other corporate and institutional leaders at the time, were willing us commit the resources of their companies to the struggle against "global Communism." Accordingly, the traditional line separating the American press corps and government was often indistinguishable: rarely was a news agency used to provide cover for CIA operatives abroad without the knowledge and consent of either its principal owner; publisher or senior editor. Thus, contrary to the notion that the CIA era and news executives allowed themselves and their organizations to become handmaidens to the intelligence services. "Let's not pick on some poor reporters, for God's sake," William Colby exclaimed at one point to the Church committee's investigators. "Let's go to the managements. They were witting" In all, about twenty-five news organizations (including those listed at the beginning of this article) provided cover for the Agency.

... Many journalists who covered World War II were close to people in the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime predecessor of the CIA; more important, they were all on the same side. When the war ended and many OSS officials went into the CIA, it was only natural that these relationships would continue.

Meanwhile, the first postwar generation of journalists entered the profession; they shared the same political and professional values as their mentors. "You had a gang of people who worked together during World War II and never got over it," said one Agency official. "They were genuinely motivated and highly susceptible to intrigue and being on the inside. Then in the Fifties and Sixties there was a national consensus about a national threat. The Vietnam War tore everything to pieces -- shredded the consensus and threw it in the air." Another Agency official observed: "Many journalists didn't give a second thought to associating with the Agency. But there was a point when the ethical issues which most people had submerged finally surfaced. Today, a lot of these guys vehemently deny that they had any relationship with the Agency."

... The CIA even ran a formal training program in the 1950s to teach its agents to be journalists. Intelligence officers were "taught to make noises like reporters," explained a high CIA official, and were then placed in major news organizations with help from management. "These were the guys who went through the ranks and were told, "You're going to be a journalist," the CIA official said. Relatively few of the 400-some relationships described in Agency files followed that pattern, however; most involved persons who were already bona fide journalists when they began undertaking tasks for the Agency. The Agency's relationships with journalists, as described in CIA files, include the following general categories:

- Legitimate, accredited staff members of news organizations - usually reporters. Some were paid; some worked for the Agency on a purely voluntary basis.

- Stringers and freelancers. Most were payrolled by the Agency under standard contractual terms.

- Employees of so-called CIA "proprietaries." During the past twenty-five years, the Agency has secretly bankrolled numerous foreign press services, periodicals and newspapers -- both English and foreign language -- which provided excellent cover for CIA operatives.

- Columnists and commentators. There are perhaps a dozen well-known columnists and broadcast commentators whose relationships with the CIA go far beyond those normally maintained between reporters and their sources. They are referred to at the Agency as "known assets" and can be counted on to perform a variety of undercover tasks; they are considered receptive to the Agency"s point of view on various subjects.

Murky details of CIA relationships with individuals and news organizations began trickling out in 1973 when it was first disclosed that the CIA had, on occasion, employed journalists. Those reports, combined with new information, serve as casebook studies of the Agency's use of journalists for intelligence purposes.

The New York Times -- The Agency's relationship with the Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials. [It was] general Times policy ... to provide assistance to the CIA whenever possible.

... CIA officials cite two reasons why the Agency's working relationship with the Times was closer and more extensive than with any other paper: the fact that the Times maintained the largest foreign news operation in American daily journalism; and the close personal ties between the men who ran both institutions ... .

The Columbia Broadcasting System -- CBS was unquestionably the CIA's most valuable broadcasting asset. CBS president William Paley and Allen Dulles enjoyed an easy working and social relationship. Over the years, the network provided cover for CIA employees, including at least one well-known foreign correspondent and several stringers; it supplied outtakes of newsfilm to the CIA; established a formal channel of communication between the Washington bureau chief and the Agency; gave the Agency access to the CBS newsfilm library; and allowed reports by CBS correspondents to the Washington and New York newsrooms to be routinely monitored by the CIA. Once a year during the 1950s and early 1960s, CBS correspondents joined the CIA hierarchy for private dinners and briefings.

... At the headquarters of CBS News in New York, Paley's cooperation with the CIA is taken for granted by many news executives and reporters, despite the denials. Paley, 76, was not interviewed by Salant's investigators. "It wouldn't do any good," said one CBS executive. "It is the single subject about which his memory has failed."

Time and Newsweek magazines -- According to CIA and Senate sources, Agency files contain written agreements with former foreign correspondents and stringers for both the weekly news magazines. The same sources refused to say whether the CIA has ended all its associations with individuals who work for the two publications. Allen Dulles often interceded with his good friend, the late Henry Luce, founder of Time and Life magazines, who readily allowed certain members of his staff to work for the Agency and agreed to provide jobs and credentials for other CIA operatives who lacked journalistic experience.

... At Newsweek, Agency sources reported, the CIA engaged the services of several foreign correspondents and stringers under arrangements approved by senior editors at the magazine.

... "To the best of my knowledge:" said [Harry] Kern, [Newsweek's foreign editor from 1945 to 1956] "nobody at Newsweek worked for the CIA.... The informal relationship was there. Why have anybody sign anything? What we knew we told them [the CIA] and the State Department.... When I went to Washington, I would talk to Foster or Allen Dulles about what was going on .... We thought it was admirable at the time. We were all on the same side." CIA officials say that Kern's dealings with the Agency were extensive.

... When Newsweek was purchased by the Washington Post Company, publisher Philip L. Graham was informed by Agency officials that the CIA occasionally used the magazine for cover purposes, according to CIA sources. "It was widely known that Phil Graham was somebody you could get help from," said a former deputy director of the Agency. . . . But Graham, who committed suicide in 1963, apparently knew little of the specifics of any cover arrangements with Newsweek, CIA sources said.

... Information about Agency dealings with the Washington Post newspaper is extremely sketchy. According to CIA officials, some Post stringers have been CIA employees, but these officials say they do not know if anyone in the Post management was aware of the arrangements. ...

Other major news organizations -- According to Agency officials, CIA files document additional cover arrangements with the following news gathering organizations, among others: the New York Herald Tribune, Saturday Evening Post, Scripps-Howard Newspapers, Hearst Newspapers, Associated Press, United Press International, the Mutual Broadcasting System, Reuters and The Miami Herald. ...

"And that's just a small part of the list," in the words of one official who served in the CIA hierarchy. Like many sources, this official said that the only way to end the uncertainties about aid furnished the Agency by journalists is to disclose the contents of the CIA files -- a course opposed by almost all of the thirty-five present and former CIA officials interviewed over the course of a year.

The CIA's use of journalists continued virtually unabated until 1973 when, in response to public disclosure that the Agency had secretly employed American reporters, William Colby began scaling down the program. In his public statements, Colby conveyed the impression that the use of journalists had been minimal and of limited importance to the Agency.

He then initiated a series of moves intended to convince the press, Congress and the public that the CIA had gotten out of the news business. But according to Agency officials, Colby had in fact thrown a protective net around his most valuable intelligence assets in the journalistic community.

... After Colby left the Agency on January 28th, 1976, and was succeeded by George Bush, the CIA announced a new policy: "Effective immediately, the CIA will not enter into any paid or contract relationship with any full-time or part-time news correspondent accredited by any U.S. news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station." . . . The text of the announcement noted that the CIA would continue to "welcome" the voluntary, unpaid cooperation of journalists. Thus, many relationships were permitted to remain intact.

The Agency's unwillingness to end its use of journalists and its continued relationships with some news executives is largely the product of two basic facts of the intelligence game: journalistic cover is ideal because of the inquisitive nature of a reporter's job; and many other sources of institutional cover have been denied the CIA in recent years by businesses, foundations and educational institutions that once cooperated with the Agency.

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Published by Rolling Stone

Unknown News note: The above article comes from the printed pages of an old copy of Rolling Stone. The text went through my eyeballs and came out my fingers, but I didn't type every word that originally appeared in the article, just the parts that seemed pertinent. Omissions are indicated by elipses (...). --HH

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