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Jeff Stein | US Intelligence Tapped Author's Phone Calls    [

    Congress Extends Eavesdropping Law
    By Pamela Hess
    The Associated Press

    Tuesday 29 January 2008

    Washington - Congress on Tuesday gave two more weeks of life to a law that allows the government more freedom to eavesdrop on suspected terrorists inside the United States, buying the Senate time to pass a bill to replace it.

    Lawmakers had hastily adopted the law last August when the White House warned of dangerous gaps in its surveillance authority. Civil rights and privacy advocates say the broadly written law, which was to expire Friday, allows the government to eavesdrop on innocent Americans without oversight from a court created for that purpose.

    Senators approved the extension by voice vote Tuesday night, giving them more time to break an impasse over how to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. That 1978 law dictates when the government needs court approval to conduct electronic surveillance inside the United States. Earlier in the day, the House voted in favor of the 15-day extension.

    While the idea of a two-week extension at first gained little if any support from the White House, the administration deemed it acceptable by day's end.

    "While we maintain that Congress has had sufficient time to conclude its work, we have indicated to congressional leaders that we will accommodate this request so that Congress can live up to its commitment to passing a bill that gives the intelligence community the tools they need to protect the nation," White House deputy press secretary Tony Fratto said Tuesday night. "Congress should complete its work before departing for its next break."

    Senate Republican leaders on Tuesday reversed their opposition to extending the existing law, saying they would agree to an extension if the Senate could swiftly pass a new surveillance bill. That legislation, favored by the White House, includes giving retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications companies that allowed the government to wiretap their customers without court permission.

    Some 40 civil lawsuits have been filed against telecommunications companies. They carry with them a threat of crippling financial penalties, which the White House says could bankrupt the companies. The House had passed in October a version of the bill that did not provide retroactive legal immunity.

    President Bush planned to push for a new law in a speech Thursday in Las Vegas. The White House had threatened to veto a proposed 30-day extension, hoping the law's expiration Friday would pressure Congress into passing a surveillance bill that includes telecom immunity.

 

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    Go to Original

    Collateral Damage: Surveillance Aimed at Terrorists Can Easily Go Awry
    By Jeff Stein
    Congressional Quarterly

    Friday 25 January 2008

    U.S. intelligence tapped the telephone calls of Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower, starting in 2002.

    This may well be news to many people, even though Wright revealed the taps himself in a sprawling, 15,000-word article on electronic surveillance in the Jan. 21 edition of The New Yorker magazine.

    Perhaps because the article was not available online it lacked the link-juice to propel it into a frenzy over the "domestic spying" on the Web, the cable news shows and leading American newspapers.

    As far as I can tell, only Pam Hess of the Associated Press picked up on Wright's confrontation with spy chief Michael McConnell over the phone taps, and no major paper ran it. The version of her story that The Washington Post printed recounted McConnell's telling Wright that water boarding would be "torture" if it were done to him, but dropped the five paragraphs Hess wrote on the eavesdropping. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal skipped Wright's wiretap account altogether.

    But The New Yorker's Web site did feature an audio interview with Wright in which he described the visit of FBI agents to his Texas home in 2002 to quiz him about the telephone calls intercepted by U.S. intelligence.

    The encounter came, mind you, amid the constant assurances from the Bush administration that the U.S. has not, and is not, "spying on Americans" or running a "warrantless domestic spying program."

    "Totally untrue!" McConnell told Wright, insisting that the conversations of American citizens with no connections to terrorists would be immediately discarded. U.S. intelligence is after al Qaeda, McConnell and others have repeatedly pledged, not innocent Americans.

    "I'm telling you," the former Air Force general said, "if you're in the United States you have to have a warrant. Authorized by the court. Period!"

    But Wright then told McConnell he had a more-than-professional interest in electronic surveillance.

    "Let me make a disclosure," he told the spy boss. "I have been monitored."

    One of his intelligence sources had revealed to him that he had "read a summary of a telephone conversation that I had from my home with a source in Egypt."

    McConnell said the eavesdropping must have been triggered by getting a call "from some telephone number that's associated with some known outfit."

    The journalist, however, had originated the call.

    What happened next bears repeating, not just because it has gone largely unreported, but because it's the kind of encounter many more Americans can expect if they end up as a target of our distressingly sloppy -- some would say incompetent -- counterterrorism agencies, if Congress extends a law (PL 110-55) enacted last August, that expanded the government's electronic surveillance authority.

    The law, which expires on Feb. 4, in effect turned U.S.-based Internet servers into a mail drop for U.S. intelligence.

    In 2002 Wright was visited by two FBI agents after placing calls in the course of researching The Looming Tower, his Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the rise of al Qaeda and U.S. responses to it, as well as an article on al Qaeda's number two leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

    "They were members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force," he recounted. "They wanted to know about phone calls made to a solicitor in England" who was upset that I was talking to some of her clients, who were jihadis, former members of Zawahiri's terror organization in Egypt, and they wanted to know what we were talking about."

    What startled him, however, was that the visiting gumshoes thought that his daughter, Caroline, had made the calls.

    "Our understanding is that these calls were placed by Caroline Wright," they said.

    But Wright's daughter was off at college at the time. He now worries that "she's now on the link chart as an al Qaeda connection."

    Now that we have a seamless web of databases, it wouldn't be surprising if Caroline Wright finds herself blocked from getting on an airplane, entering the country or renewing her passport.

    Wright confronted McConnell with the FBI visit.

    "Her name is not on any of our phones,' he said, "so how did her name arise?"

    "I don't know," the spy boss said.

    "That troubles me," Wright responded.

    "It may be troublesome," McConnell said. "It may not be. You don't know."

    Neither the FBI nor the Office of the Directorate of National Intelligence would comment on the incidents Wright described.

    "We don't talk about who we are investigating and not investigating," FBI spokesman Richard Kolko told me Friday.

    But U.S. intelligence officials insist they are not idly "spying" on innocent Americans. And I tend to agree.

    What would be the point?

    No Substitute for Human Intelligence

    On the other hand, the incidents Wright describes, and the open-ended electronic surveillance authority the administration wants, are cause for worry -- just not for the reasons many people think.

    Yes, it troubles me that U.S. intelligence could so cavalierly gather and store names and information that they're not supposed to have, without a warrant no less. There's no guarantee that this or any future administration won't use it.

    James V. Bamford, the acclaimed author of two exhaustive histories of the National Security Agency, respects the codebreakers so much that a critic once dissed him as "the agency's hagiographer."

    But Bamford joined a class action suit last year against the NSA by the American Civil Liberties Union, with the explanation that the NSA, like teenagers, can get into mischief if they're home alone.

    "What greatly concerns me as someone who has written more about NSA than any other writer is that in the past, when NSA was allowed to operate in absolute secrecy, without oversight, it became a rogue agency," he said.

    That's why the administration cannot be allowed to skirt the FISA court, created by a 1978 law (PL 95-511) to screen secret warrant requests by the spy agencies -- and keep them honest.

    The fact is that, in the wake of the Patriot Act (PL 107-56, PL 109-177) and other procedural changes in the surveillance laws, there's no legal red tape holding up time-sensitive counterterror operations, despite incidents McConnell has cited -- and which turned out to be completely unfounded, to put it politely.

    It's just not true, no matter how many times administration officials say it, that critical operations to find the kidnappers of American soldiers in Iraq and an al Qaeda cell in Germany were held up by FISA regulations. McConnell himself said he was mistaken.

    But what really troubles me is that so many, many years after the first terrorist attack here (on the World Trade Center in 1993), our spying agencies apparently still haven't found an effective way to pursue the real bad guys.

    The huge electronic wires they want to wrap us in are no substitute for good human intelligence work out there -- where the bad guys are.

    As former counterterror agent Michael Tanji put it on Wired magazine's Danger Room blog: "It's bad enough that the Director of National Intelligence is trotting out a bogus threat so the government can snoop on all Internet traffic. What's worse is that this kind of mass surveillance is a pretty lame way to catch the honest-to-God bad guys."

    Tanji added, "The fact that we are essentially attempting to gill-net bad guys is a fairly strong indicator that the intelligence community has yet to come up with an effective strategy against information-age threats."

    Out There

    But hey, say the wiretapper wannabees, we can't wait until the college kids we've recruited turn into good spies. The threat is now.

    I say: That's an excuse.

    Hurry up. Every hour and dollar spent wiring up the home front is time, money and attention wasted on building real intelligence networks, the old-fashioned way -- out there.

    "It is simply a case of, as the late Sam Kinison joked, going where the food is," Tanji blogged. "That our intelligence agencies can intercept adversary communications is largely a given. They just want to do it from the convenience of the homeland, not some remote switch in the darkest hinterlands."

    America is a special place, if only for the restrictions we put on the snoopers' desire to intrude into our private conversations without warrants.

    You don't like that? Move to France. Or Pakistan.

    At a conference in Paris a few years ago, I asked a top counterterrorism official if he needed special legislation or judicial warrants to plant spies in mosques or wiretap citizens.

    "Mais non," he replied, looking mystified. What's the point of that?

    Is that the way we want to live?

    Back Channel Chatter

    Last week's column about Russian spying operations here and in Canada drew an underwhelming response. One widely read blogger, Wired's Noah Shachtman, called my report on former Russian master spy Sergei Tretyakov's allegations "a great catch," but except for another dozen pick-ups on the Web, it was ignored.

    Tretyakov's story is told in a new book by former Washington Post reporter Pete Earley, "Comrade J: The Untold Secrets of Russia's Master Spy in America After the End of the Cold War." Tretyakov relates in convincing detail how he and his comrades recruited and managed a dozen spies, including a Pakistani-born Canadian who, he writes, is today "a U.N. senior verification expert," who specializes in the clandestine weapons programs of Iran, Libya and his native Pakistan.

    I identified the official as Tariq Rauf, chief of verification and security-policy coordination at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). As I reported, Rauf had every chance to completely deny the allegations during my conversation with him, but declined. Only later did he e-mail a more emphatic denial that he had worked for Russian intelligence.

    The IAEA, which did not respond to my previous inquiries, apparently needed only an hour or so to thoroughly investigate my allegation and issue a denial. Whether the IAEA checked with Tretyakov -- or CIA and FBI officials, who vetted Tretyakov when he defected in 2001 -- could not be learned. But I doubt it.

    Maybe other media were afraid that naming Rauf as a Russian agent would undermine his boss, IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei, who has long been at odds with the Bush administration, first over Iraq, then Iran. Or maybe there's just not enough hours in a day to chase down all the major national security stories breaking in any given news cycle.

    After all, there's a war or two on.

    Or maybe, as one wag put it to me, the big story would be finding a U.N. diplomat who's NOT on some spy agency's payroll.

    Whatever, I find it mystifying that so few seem to be interested in whether a Russian agent is running nuclear inspections on Iran, which Russia wants to do business with. You, however, now can find more on this by listening to Tretyakov himself, interviewed on WNYC, New York, last week.

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