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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/ketcham03122009.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/ketcham03122009.html<br><br>
</a></font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">March 12 ,
2009<br><br>
</font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4><b>Full-Spectrum
Penetration <br><br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">
Israeli Spying in the United States
</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>By CHRISTOPHER
KETCHAM <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=6 color="#990000">S</font>
<font face="Verdana" size=2>cratch a counterintelligence officer in the
U.S. government and they'll tell you that Israel is not a friend to the
United States.<br>
This is because Israel runs one of the most aggressive and damaging
espionage networks targeting the U.S.. <br><br>
The fact of Israeli penetration into the country is not a subject
oft-discussed in the media or in the circles of governance, due to the
extreme sensitivity of the U.S.-Israel relationship coupled with the
burden of the Israel lobby, which punishes legislators who dare to
criticize the Jewish state. The void where the facts should sit is
filled instead with the hallucinations of conspiracy theory -- the kind
in which, for example, agents of the Mossad, Israel’s top intelligence
agency, engineer the 9/11 attacks, while 4,000 Israelis in the Twin
Towers somehow all get word to escape before the planes hit. The
effect, as disturbing as it is ironic, is that the less the truth is
addressed, the more noxious the falsity that spreads.<br><br>
Israel's spying on the U.S., however, is a matter of public record, and
neither conspiracy nor theory is needed to present the
evidence. When the FBI produces its annual report to Congress
concerning "Foreign Economic Collection and Industrial
Espionage," Israel and its intelligence services often feature
prominently as a threat second only to China. In 2005 the FBI noted, for
example, that Israel maintains "an active program to gather
proprietary information within the United States." A key
Israeli method, said the FBI report, is computer intrusion. In
1996, the Defense Intelligence Service, a branch of the Pentagon, issued
a warning that "the collection of scientific intelligence in the
United States [is] the third highest priority of Israeli Intelligence
after information on its Arab neighbors and information on secret U.S.
policies or decisions relating to Israel." <br><br>
In 1979, the Central Intelligence Agency produced a scathing survey of
Israeli intelligence activities that targeted the U.S. government.
Like any worthy spy service, Israeli intelligence early on employed
wiretaps as an effective tool, according to the CIA report. In
1954, the U.S. Ambassador in Tel Aviv discovered in his office a hidden
microphone "planted by the Israelis," and two years later
telephone taps were found in the residence of the U.S. military
attaché. In a telegram to Washington, the ambassador at the time
cabled a warning: "Department must assume that all conversations
[in] my office are known to the Israelis." The former ambassador to
Qatar, Andrew Killgore, who also served as a foreign officer in Jerusalem
and Beirut, told me Israeli taps of U.S. missions and embassies in the
Middle East were part of a "standard operating
procedure."<br><br>
According to the 1979 CIA report, the Israelis, while targeting political
secrets, also devote "a considerable portion of their covert
operations to obtaining scientific and technical intelligence."
These operations involved, among other machinations, "attempts to
penetrate certain classified defense projects in the United
States." The penetrations, according to the CIA report,
were effected using "deep cover enterprises," which the report
described as "firms and organizations, some specifically created
for, or adaptable to, a specific objective." At the time, the
CIA singled out government-subsidized companies such as El Al airlines
and Zim, the Israeli shipping firm, as deep cover enterprises.
<br><br>
Other deep cover operations included the penetration of a U.S. company
that provided weapons-grade uranium to the Department of Defense during
the 1960s; Israeli agents eventually spirited home an estimated 200
pounds of uranium as the bulwark in Israel’s secret nuclear weapons
program. Moles have burrowed on Israel’s behalf throughout the U.S.
intelligence services. Perhaps most infamous was the case of
Jonathan Pollard, a Jewish-American employed as a civilian analyst with
the U.S. Navy who purloined an estimated 800,000 code-word protected
documents from inside the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and
numerous other U.S. agencies. <br><br>
While Pollard was sentenced to life in prison, counterintelligence
investigators at the FBI suspected he was linked to a mole far higher in
the food chain, ensconced somewhere in the DIA, but this suspected
Israeli operative, nicknamed "Mr. X," was never
found. Following the embarrassment of the Pollard affair --
and its devastating effects on U.S. national security, as testified by
then Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger (who allegedly stated that
Pollard "should have been shot") -- the Israeli government
vowed never again to pursue espionage against its ally and chief
benefactor.<br><br>
Fast-forward a quarter century, and the vow has proven empty. In
2004, the authoritative Jane's Intelligence Group noted that Israel's
intelligence organizations "have been spying on the U.S. and running
clandestine operations since Israel was established." The
former deputy director of counterintelligence at FBI, Harry B. Brandon,
last year told Congressional Quarterly magazine that "the Israelis
are interested in commercial as much as military secrets. They have a
muscular technology sector themselves." According to CQ,
"One effective espionage tool is forming joint partnerships with
U.S. companies to supply software and other technology products to U.S.
government agencies."<br><br>
Best-selling author James Bamford now adds another twist in this history
of infiltration in a book published last October,
"<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385521324/counterpunchmaga">
The Shadow Factory,</a>" which forms the latest installment in his
trilogy of investigations into the super-secret National Security
Agency. Bamford is regarded among journalists and intelligence
officers as the nation’s expert on the workings of the NSA, whose inner
sanctums he first exposed to the public in 1982. (So precise is his
reporting that NSA officers once threw him a book party, despite the fact
that he continually reveals their secrets.) <br><br>
The agency has come a long way in the half-century since its founding in
1952. Armed with digital technology and handed vast new funding and
an almost limitless mandate in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Bamford
writes, the NSA has today "become the largest, most costly, and most
technologically sophisticated spy organization the world has ever
known." The NSA touches on every facet of U.S. communications,
its mega-computers secretly filtering "millions of phone calls and
e-mails" every hour of operation. For those who have followed
the revelations of the NSA’s "warrantless wiretapping" program
in the
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.htm">New
York Times</a> in 2005 and the
<a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120511973377523845.html?mod=hps_us_whats_news%E2%80%9D">
<i>Wall Street
Journal</a></i>
<a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120511973377523845.html?mod=hps_us_whats_news%E2%80%9D">
last year</a>, what Bamford unveils in "The Shadow Factory" is
only confirmation of the worst fears: "There is now the
capacity," he writes of the NSA’s tentacular reach into the private
lives of Americans, "to make tyranny total."<br><br>
Much less has been reported about the high-tech Israeli wiretapping firms
that service U.S. telecommunications companies, primarily AT&T and
Verizon, whose networks serve as the chief conduits for NSA
surveillance. Even less is known about the links between those
Israeli companies and the Israeli intelligence services. But what
Bamford suggests in his book accords with the history of Israeli spying
in the U.S.: Through joint partnerships with U.S. telecoms, Israel may be
a shadow arm of surveillance among the tentacles of the NSA. In
other words, when the NSA violates constitutional protections against
unlawful search and seizure to vacuum up the contents of your telephone
conversations and e-mail traffic, the Israeli intelligence services may
be gathering it up too -- a kind of mirror tap that is effectively a
two-government-in-one violation.<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">***<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>On its face, the overseas outsourcing
of high-tech services would seem de rigueur in a competitive globalized
marketplace. Equipment and services from Israel’s telecom sector
are among the country’s prime exports, courtesy of Israeli entrepreneurs
who have helped pioneer wireless telephony, voicemail and voice
recognition software, instant messaging, phone billing software, and, not
least, "communications interception solutions." Israeli
telecom interception hardware and software is appraised as some of the
best in the world.<br><br>
By the mid-1990s, Israeli wiretap firms would arrive in the U.S. in a big
way. The key to the kingdom was the 1994 Communications Assistance
for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which was Congress’ solution for
wiretapping in the digital age. Gone are the days when
wiretaps were conducted through on-site tinkering with copper
switches. CALEA mandated that telephonic surveillance operate
through computers linked directly into the routers and hubs of telecom
companies -- a spyware apparatus matched in real-time, all the time, to
American telephones and modems. CALEA effectively made spy
equipment an inextricable ligature in telephonic life. Without
CALEA, the NSA in its spectacular surveillance exploits could not have
succeeded.<br><br>
AT&T and Verizon, which together manage as much as 90 percent of the
nation’s communications traffic, contracted with Israeli firms in order
to comply with CALEA. AT&T employed the services of Narus Inc.,
which was founded in Israel in 1997. It was Narus technology that
AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein, a 22-year technician with the company,
famously unveiled in a 2006 affidavit that described the operations in
AT&T’s secret tapping room at its San Francisco facilities.
(Klein’s affidavit formed the gravamen of a lawsuit against AT&T
mounted by the Electronic Freedom Foundation, but the lawsuit died when
Congress passed the telecom immunity bill last year.) According to
Klein, the Narus supercomputer, the STA 6400, was "known to be used
particularly by government intelligence agencies because of its ability
to sift through large amounts of data looking for preprogrammed
targets." The Narus system, which was maintained by Narus
technicans, also provided a real-time mirror image of all data streaming
through AT&T routers, an image to be rerouted into the computers of
the NSA.<br><br>
According to Jim Bamford, who cites knowledgeable sources, Verizon’s
eavesdropping program is run by a competing Israeli firm called Verint, a
subsidiary of Comverse Technology, which was founded by a former Israeli
intelligence officer in 1984. Incorporated in New York and Tel
Aviv, Comverse is effectively an arm of the Israeli government: 50
percent of its R&D costs are reimbursed by the Israeli Ministry of
Industry and Trade. The Verint technology deployed throughout
Verizon’s network, known as STAR-GATE, boasts an array of Orwellian
capabilities. "With STAR-GATE, service providers can access
communications on virtually any type of network," according to the
company’s literature. "Designed to manage vast numbers of
targets, concurrent sessions, call data records, and communications,
STAR-GATE transparently accesses targeted communications without alerting
subscribers or disrupting service." <br><br>
As with the Narus system, the point is to be able to tap into
communications unobtrusively, in real time, all the time. A Verint
spinoff firm, PerSay, takes the tap to the next stage, deploying
"advanced voice mining," which singles out "a target’s
voice within a large volume of intercepted calls, regardless of the
conversation content or method of communication." Verint’s
interception systems have gone global since the late 1990s, and sales in
2006 reached $374 million (a doubling of its revenues over 2003).
More than 5,000 organizations -- mostly intelligence services and police
units -- in at least 100 countries today use Verint technology.<br><br>
What troubles Bamford is that executives and directors at companies like
Narus and Verint formerly worked at or maintain close connections with
the Israeli intelligence services, including Mossad; the internal
security agency Shin Bet; and the Israeli version of the NSA, Unit 8200,
an arm of the Israeli Defense Forces Intelligence Corps. Unit 8200,
which Bamford describes as "hypersecret," is a key player in
the eavesdropping industrial complex in Israel, its retired personnel
dispersed throughout dozens of companies. According to Ha’aretz,
the Israeli daily, "Many of the [eavesdropping] technologies in use
around the world and developed in Israel were originally military
technologies and were developed and improved by [Unit 8200]
veterans." A former commander of Unit 8200, cited by Bamford,
states that Verint technology was "directly influenced by 8200
technology….[Verint parent company] Comverse’s main product, the Logger,
is based on the Unit’s technology." <br><br>
The implications for U.S. national security, writes Bamford, are
"unnerving." "Virtually the entire American
telecommunications system," he avers, "is bugged by
[Israeli-formed] companies with possible ties to Israel’s eavesdropping
agency." Congress, he says, maintains no oversight of these
companies’ operations, and even their contracts with U.S. telecoms --
contracts pivotal to NSA surveillance -- are considered trade secrets and
go undisclosed in company statements.<br><br>
U.S. intelligence officers have not been quiet in their concerns about
Verint (I reported on this matter in
<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/ketcham09272008.html">
CounterPunch.org last September</a>). "Phone calls are
intercepted, recorded, and transmitted to U.S. investigators by Verint,
which claims that it has to be ‘hands on’ with its equipment to maintain
the system," says former CIA counterterrorism officer Philip
Giraldi. The "hands on" factor is what bothers Giraldi,
specifically because of the possibility of a "trojan" embedded
in Verint wiretap software. A trojan in information security
hardware/software is a backdoor that can be accessed remotely by parties
who normally would not have access to the secure system. <br><br>
Allegations of widespread trojan spying have rocked the Israeli business
community in recent years. "Top Israeli blue chip
companies," reported the AP in 2005, "are suspected of using
illicit surveillance software to steal information from their rivals and
enemies." Over 40 companies have come under scrutiny.
"It is the largest cybercrime case in Israeli history," Boaz
Guttmann, a veteran cybercrimes investigator with the Israeli national
police, told me. "Trojan horse espionage is part of the way of
life of companies in Israel. It’s a culture of
spying."<br><br>
In a wide-ranging four-part investigation into Israel-linked espionage
that aired in December 2001, Carl Cameron, a correspondent at Fox News
Channel, reported the distress among U.S. intelligence officials warning
about possible trojans cached in Verint technology. Sources
told Cameron that "while various FBI inquiries into [Verint] have
been conducted over the years," the inquiries had "been halted
before the actual equipment has ever been thoroughly tested for
leaks." Cameron also cited a 1999 internal FCC document
indicating that "several government agencies expressed deep concerns
that too many unauthorized non-law enforcement personnel can access the
wiretap system." Much of this access was facilitated
through "remote maintenance."<br><br>
The Fox News report reverberated throughout U.S. law enforcement,
particularly at the Drug Enforcement Agency, which makes extensive use of
wiretaps for narcotics interdiction. Security officers at DEA, an adjunct
of the Justice Department, began examining the agency’s own relationship
with Comverse/Verint. In 1997, DEA had transformed its wiretap
infrastructure with the $25 million procurement from Comverse/Verint of a
technology called "T2S2" -- "translation and transcription
support services" -- with Comverse/Verint contracted to provide the
hardware and software. The company was also tasked with
"support services, training, upgrades, enhancements and options
throughout the life of the contract," according to the DEA’s
"contracts and acquisitions" notice. In the wake of the
Fox News investigation, however, the director of security programs at
DEA, Heidi Raffanello, was rattled enough to issue an internal communiqué
on the matter, dated Dec. 18, 2001. Directly referencing Fox News,
she worried that "Comverse remote maintenance" was "not
addressed in the C&A [contracts and acquisitions] process….It remains
unclear if Comverse personnel are security cleared, and if so, who are
they and what type of clearances are on record….Bottom line we should
have caught it." It is not known what resulted from DEA’s
review of the issue of remote maintenance and access by
Comverse/Verint.<br><br>
Bamford devotes a portion of his argument to the detailing of the
operations of a third Israeli wiretap company, NICE Systems, which he
describes as "a major eavesdropper in the U.S." that
"keeps its government and commercial client list very
secret." Formed in 1986 by seven veterans of Unit 8200, NICE
software "captures voice, email, chat, screen activity, and
essential call details," while offering "audio compression
technology that performs continuous recordings of up to thousands of
analog and digital telephone lines and radio channels." NICE
Systems has on at least one occasion shown up on the radar of U.S.
counterintelligence. During 2000-2001, when agents at the FBI and
the CIA began investigating allegations that Israeli nationals
posing as "art students" were in fact conducting espionage on
U.S. soil, one of the Israeli "art students" was discovered to
be an employee with NICE Systems. Among the targets of the art
students were facilities and offices of the Drug Enforcement Agency
nationwide. The same Israeli employee of NICE Systems, who was identified
as a former operative in the Israeli intelligence services, was carrying
a disk that contained a file labeled "DEA Groups." U.S.
counterintelligence officers concluded it was a highly suspicious nexus:
An Israeli national and alleged spy was working for an Israeli wiretap
company while carrying in his possession computer information regarding
the Drug Enforcement Agency -- at the same time this Israeli was
conducting what the DEA described as "intelligence gathering"
about DEA facilities.<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">***<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>A former senior counterintelligence
official in the Bush administration told me that as early as 1999,
"CIA was very concerned about [Israeli wiretapping companies]"
-- Verint in particular. "I know that CIA has tried to monitor
what the Israelis were doing -- technically watch what they were doing on
the networks in terms of remote access. Other countries were
concerned as well," said the intelligence official. Jim
Bamford, who notes that Verint "can automatically access the
mega-terabytes of stored and real-time data secretly and remotely from
anywhere," reports that Australian lawmakers in 2004 held hearings
on this remote monitoring capability. "[Y]ou can access data from
overseas," the lawmakers told a Verint representative during the
hearings, "but [the legislature] seems restricted to access data
within that system." The Australians found this
astonishing. <br><br>
In 2000, the Canadian intelligence service, the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police, conducted "a probe related to allegations that [Israeli]
spies used rigged software to hack into Canada's top secret intelligence
files," according to an article in the Toronto Star. Several
sources in the U.S. intelligence community told me the Canadians liaised
with their American counterparts to try to understand the problem.
<br><br>
According to the Bush administration official who spoke with me,
"the Dutch also had come to the CIA very concerned about what the
Israelis were doing with this." The Dutch intelligence
service, under contract with Verint, "had discovered strange things
were going on -- there was activity on the network, the Israelis
uploading and downloading stuff out of the switches, remotely, and
apparently using it for their own wiretap purposes. The CIA was
very embarrassed to say, ‘We have the same problem.’ But the CIA
didn’t have an answer for them. ‘We hear you, we’re surprised, and
we understand your concern.’" <br><br>
Indeed, sources in the Dutch counterintelligence community in 2002
claimed there was "strong evidence that the Israeli secret service
has uncontrolled access to confidential tapping data collected by the
Dutch police and intelligence services," according to the Dutch
broadcast radio station Evangelische Omroep (EO). In January 2003, the
respected Dutch technology and computing magazine, C’T, ran a follow-up
to the EO story, headlined "Dutch Tapping Room not Kosher." The
article states: "All tapping equipment of the Dutch intelligence
services and half the tapping equipment of the national police force [is]
insecure and is leaking information to Israel."<br><br>
"The key to this whole thing is that Australian meeting,"
Bamford told me in a recent interview. "They accused Verint of
remote access and Verint said they won’t do it again -- which implies
they were doing it in the past. It’s a matter of a backdoor into
the system, and those backdoors should not be allowed to exist. You
can tell by the Australian example that it was certainly a concern of
Australian lawmakers."<br><br>
Congress doesn’t seem to share the concern. "Part of the
responsibility of Congress," says Bamford, "is not just to
oversee the intelligence community but to look into the companies with
which the intelligence community contracts. They’re just very
sloppy about this." According to the Bush administration
intelligence official who spoke with me, "Frustratingly, I did not
get the sense that our government was stepping up to this and grasping
the bull by the horns." Another former high level U.S.
intelligence official told me, "The fact of the vulnerability of our
telecom backbone is indisputable. How it came to pass, why nothing
has been done, who has done what -- these are the incendiary
questions." There is also the fundamental fact that the
wiretap technologies implemented by Verint, Narus and other Israeli
companies are fully in place and no alternative is on the horizon.
"There is a technical path dependence problem," says the Bush
administration official. "I have been told nobody else makes
software like this for the big digital switches, so that is part of the
problem. Other issues," he adds, "compound the
problem" -- referring to the sensitivity of the U.S.-Israel
relationship.<br><br>
And that, of course, is the elephant in the room. "Whether
it’s a Democratic or Republican administration, you don’t bad-mouth
Israel if you want to get ahead," says former CIA counterterrorism
officer Philip Giraldi. "Most of the people in the agency were
very concerned about Israeli espionage and Israeli actions against U.S.
interests. Everybody was aware of it. Everybody hated it. But
they wouldn’t get promoted if they spoke out. Israel has a
privileged position and that’s the way things are. It’s
crazy. And everybody knows it’s crazy."<br><br>
<b>Christopher Ketcham</b> is working on a book about the dissolution of
the United States and its replacement by bioregional republics. He
can be reached at
<a href="mailto:cketcham99@mindspring.com">cketcham99@mindspring.com</a>
<br><br>
<i>This article originally appeared on
<a href="http://www.alternet.org/">Alternet.</a> <br><br>
<br><br>
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