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News Network – February 26, 2007
Private intelligence companies are gathering
in Florida to plan their global operations
with Neocon officials in close attendance
Sam Urquhart
It’s a new age of the privateer.
A gathering of today’s buccaneers and freelance adventurers will be taking place next week on the Florida coast. This week, a (self-declared) important section of the ‘intelligence community’ will be meeting in St. Petersburg, Florida for its second “International Intelligence Summit,” where they will be discussing how best to fight their Global War on Terror. Among them will be a motley crew of Iranian exiles, Israeli intelligence officials, repentant Islamists, neocon warriors and scions of the British secret service.
It’s certainly a crowd of buccaneers which repays further investigation.
More and more operations traditionally carried out by arms of the U.S. government are now being outsourced to private companies. From peacekeeping to intelligence gathering, security details to country studies – there has been a trend since the mid 1990s to shift work away from public employees to better paid, less heavily scrutinized private contractors. Officials routinely slip from highly paid positions at government contractors, to positions within government itself. The lines are becoming ever more blurred.
But outside of that process, private military and intelligence companies are thriving in the shadow of the Global War on Terror. In fact, they are not just thriving in its shadow, they have been constantly lobbying to make that war bigger, more bloody, more high-tech and most crucially of all, more expensive. It is hard to separate neocon officials from neocon private military contractors, or from radical think-tanks which provide them with an intellectual veneer.
Much of the intelligence that led us all to war with Iraq came from a tiny nucleus of emigres, think tank hacks and well placed officials. They in turn can be traced back to public relations agents that they hold in common. Benador Associates, for example, handles the public schedules of Michael Ledeen (the U.S.’ number one Iran hawk), Richard Perle (the U.S.’ number one Iraq hawk), Kenneth Timmerman (Mr “it’ll be a cakewalk”), Charles Krauthammer, Iraqi emigre Kanan Makiya, Israeli neocon Natan Sharansky and ex CIA chief turned uber-hawk James Woolsey.
Benador Associates is part of a wider cluster of institutions that has expanded since 2001 and exerts a key influence in pushing the U.S. media and political system towards war. The Orwellian-named Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, for example which was founded in 2002 under the wing of those who around the same time resurrected the Cold War-era Committee on the Present Danger, which then gathered together extremist hawks to confront Soviet Russia. The FDD has found no trouble attracting funds to wage war against today’s ‘terror’ – attracting $250,000 from healthcare magnate Leonard Abramson and a staggering $1.5 million from Ameriquest capital, a firm widely reviled as a predatory mortgage lender. With that small fortune, the FDD has thrust itself into the media spotlight (averaging seven media appearances by its staff per day in the international media in 2007) and onto American university campuses “at a time when college campuses are under the sway of apologists for terrorism” according to its non-profit tax return.
A number of workhorses have emerged from this stable, not least of them is the Intelligence Summit – a meeting point for likeminded hawks, gadflies and corporate representatives with a common passion for war.
How not to frame Saddam
One of the keynote speakers at 2006’s Intelligence Summit was Michael Shrimpton, a British lawyer whose bio boasts that he “negotiated the national security aspects of the Pinochet case with the late Lt-General Vernon Walters, formerly Deputy Director of the CIA.” That would be when Augusto Pinochet sojourned in London while he received medical treatment for “dementia” and Spanish prosecutors sought his extradition on murder charges, before the ex-Chilean dictator miraculously recovered on returning to his native land. Apparently, Shrimpton also uncovered evidence linking Saddam to 9-11 (although the rest of the world doesn’t seem to know about these revelations). According to his bio, Shrimpton “also played a major role in uncovering the Iraqi Air Force’s acquisition of a Boeing 767 simulator, stolen from Kuwait Airways at Kuwait Airport in August 1990” while “He was of course fully aware of the significance of this discovery, given the cockpit commonality between the Boeing 757 and 767, and Al Qaeda’s restriction to these two types on 9-11.”
There is no evidence that this claim was taken seriously, but that hasn’t dented Shrimpton’s media reputation. The BBC has been the most recent media outlet to use him as a source, regarding renewed interest in the death of David Kelly, who Shrimpton alleges fell victim to an assasination by intelligence services.
Shrimpton is a committed “friend of Israel” – being a contributor to the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and a participant in the 2003 “Lawyers Mission to Israel” which set out to “allow participants to explore the military and strategic dangers to the Jewish state from Arab terrorism in an intensive schedule of briefings, tours and exhibitions.” After receiving “briefings from senior commanders of Israel’s intelligence and security services, as well as the other strategic decision-makers who shape and lead Israel’s multifaceted war on terrorism..including the senior commanders of the security services and Mossad” Shrimpton returned to the UK where he immediately penned a passionate attack on the BBC (generously archived here). Attacking the BBC’s perceived willingness to explain Palestinian actions in Raffah [sic] using Palestinian voices, Shrimpton wrote that “It will come as small comfort, but the BBC hates Britain almost as much as it hates Israel” before continuing, “For over 30 years it has rammed the European Union down our throats – the same blood-stained EU that sponsors Palestinian terror and deserves to be treated as a fully paid-up member of the Axis of Evil.” The Israeli Lawyers Mission must have been some operation.
Despite this passion in the face of reason, according to his bio on the Israel speakers bureau Let My People Know, “Michael Shrimpton is a member of the respected Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) and Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London.” Perhaps revealingly, Shrimpton was also “the only Brit to be invited from the UK to attend the swearing-in of America’s respected Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, as Under-Secretary of State for International Security Affairs” in 2001 while he joined the faculty at the American Military University in 2006 in the “Department of National Security, Space and Intelligence Studies.”
Shrimpton fits a pattern amongst attendees of the Intelligence Summit of people who have a record of releasing information which seeks to shift the political terrain towards confrontation against the enemies of Israel. Whether the information is authentic or not does not seem to matter, nor that the bio of Shrimpton, for example, boasts only that he “is believed to have close connections to a number of Western intelligence services.”
Their man not in Tehran, yet
Shrimpton may be something of a gadfly but perhaps more troublingly, another attendee at 2006’s Intelligence Summit was Iranian exile Alireza Jafarzadeh, who has made the extraordinary transition from refugee to being “a FOX News Channel Foreign Affairs Analyst,” while for twelve years he served as “the chief congressional liaison and media spokesperson for the US representative office of Iran’s parliament in exile, the National Council of Resistance of Iran.” In 2003, it was information supplied by Jafarzadeh and his associates which fuelled the drive by the Bush administration to seek stringent sanctions on the Iranian government and, eventually, to a UN security council referral. Information supplied by Jafarzadeh – that Iran was running a secret nuclear weapons programme parallel to its nuclear energy activities – generated sufficient anxiety on the council to make the demand for the cessation of uranium enrichment a shoo-in.
However, as the Guardian reported on 22 February, much of this information has proved incorrect. Julian Borger reported that “most of the tip-offs about supposed secret weapons sites provided by the CIA and other US intelligence agencies have led to dead ends when investigated by IAEA inspectors, according to informed sources in Vienna.”
Along with distributing alarmist (and plain wrong) assertions about the nuclear intentions of the Islamic Republic, Jafarzadeh’s group has made many more accusations that haven’t led anywhere but have increased international attention on Iran. In 2003, for example, the National Council of Resistance in Iran released information claiming that Iran was producing a massive variety of bioweapons ranging from smallpox microbial bombs to anthrax spores and typhoid fever. More recently, he has claimed that the Iranian government has taken 32,000 mercenaries onto its payroll to cause havoc in Iran (an assertion he made on Lou Dobbs’ CNN slot). Whenever these assertions are made, and proved either overblown or plain wrong, Jafarzadeh’s credibility seems to have survived intact.
You get by with a little help from your friends I guess.
Amateur terrorist hunting in Florida
One man who certainly hasn’t got enough friends is Professor Sami al- Arian. The parent organization of the Intelligence Summit is the Intelligence and Homeland Security Education Center (IHEC) – which in turn was once the International Holocaust Education Center (see what they did there?). IHEC boasts that its “educational research has aided in the exposure and subsequent indictment of Professor Sami al-Arian” as well as “other sensitive investigations, which are still ongoing.”
Maybe their site needs a bit of updating. It could certainly do with a little qualification. Professor al-Arian was arrested in 2003 and was charged with aiding Islamic Jihad in the commission of terrorist acts. After a ten year investigation into al-Arian’s work to channel aid to Palestinian causes, the FBI claimed to have evidence that he had assumed the role of Islamic Jihad’s “chief of operations” in North America. Despite an internal investigation into al-Arian’s activities which was carried out by a former president of the American Bar Association and found him innocent of any offenses which could justify his removal from tenure, the FBI pressed on. After his arrest in February 2003, his trial date was set for April 2005, over two years in the future. Meanwhile, then Attorney General John Ashcroft weighed in with a public statement identifying al Arian as the North American head of Islamic Jihad.
As it turned out, when his case came to trial in December 2005, Sami al-Arian was found innocent on eight out of the seventeen charges held against him. In the other charges, the jury remained deadlocked 10-2, also in favor of aquittal – a huge preponderance of opinion which leans towards his innocence. Yet al-Arian remained in custody, and in January 2006 submitted a plea bargain. After almost three years in jail, he agreed to plead guilty on one count of conspiring “to make or receive contributions of funds, goods or services to or for the benefit of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad” while the eight other charges against him were dropped.
So after three years of detention, according to the St Petersburg Times “most of it in solitary confinement,” Sami al-Arian received three more years and “expedited deportation.” Whatever the truth of his role in supporting Islamic Jihad, he was no terrorist kingpin, as the initial charges (and media frenzy) suggested. IHEC and its “educational research” must be credited with stealing at least six years of his life.
If that is the greatest success in ‘terrorist hunting’ that IHEC and Intelligence Summit can produce to sell their services, then it’s a wonder why anybody in the real intelligence services bothers to listen to them. But competence is not the issue. More than anything else, IHEC is an ideologically driven money making machine. The ideology of the War on Terror drives the money making machine, while the money earned in the process goes straight into funding the intellectual apparatus for more and bigger wars.
Leading a private War on Terror
The ranks of its speakers are full of connections to neoconservative think-tanks and the more shadowy arms of the military industrial complex. Pauline Neville-Jones, for example, who serves as Chairman of QinetiQ – a growing contractor of government intelligence functions as well as a high-tech weapons manufacturer – sits on the advisory board alongside Wayne Simmons, an ex U.S. Navy Special operative in a unit “That was not only prepared to die for America, but they were prepared to go anywhere and do virtually anything when ordered.” Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch (a virulently Islamophobic website), sits alongside General Tom McInerny – who runs an advocacy group for the defense industry called Government Reform Through Technology and lobbies to “introduce advanced technology into the public sector.”
But it’s not just industry shills and talking heads who are involved in the Summit. As its website describes, “The Summit recruits active serving members of the government like Harold Rhode, from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, to serve as neutral moderators.” That would be the same Harold Rhode who cut a swathe of destruction through the Department of Defense after his appointment as deputy to arch-neocon Douglas Feith in 2002. According to Sourcewatch, working at the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, “Rhode helped Feith lay down the law about the department’s new anti-Iraq, and broadly anti-Arab, orientation” while he also “worked with Feith to purge career Defense officials who weren’t sufficiently enthusiastic about the muscular anti-Iraq crusade that Paul D. Wolfowitz and Feith wanted.” Second rate analysts were pulled from “nooks and crannies of the Defense Intelligence Agency and other places” according to a former Pentagon analyst, as Rhode reshaped the strategic wing of the Pentagon ready for war with Iraq.
It would be certainly interesting to know what aspects of the summit were taken on board by members of the U.S. government and intelligence services.
I wonder what Harold Rhode and any other “neutral moderators” made of the contribution of private security consultant Ali Koknar who suggested that governments deploy “pseudo-terrorists” to flush out the bad guys. As Koknar began his speech in 2006, “Deployment of ‘Pseudo Terrorists’ (PTs) is recommended as a ‘quick and dirty’ solution to the lingering absence of actionable human intelligence, which the US counterterrorism effort suffers from” before adding that “In places such as Central Iraq, Eastern Afghanistan, and Northwest Pakistan, where traditional intelligence sources are scarce due to local support for the terrorist cause, PTs may prove to be a vital factor in providing the actionable intelligence necessary for the United States to successfully counter terrorists.”
Because the Intelligence Summit gathers together figures from the intelligence services of “emerging democracies,” the U.S. and its allies, the military industrial complex and its ‘academic’ wing, it is particularly alarming from a public interest perspective that the summit is organized and run by a shadowy collection of businesses with no public oversight. As its brochure states, “Attendees and media agree that, except with the express consent of the speaker, all discussions at the Intelligence Summit are on a “not for distribution basis”, that is, the speaker’s words may be quoted, but his or her identity or agency affiliation may not be revealed directly or indirectly.”
So the gathered spooks, wannabe spooks, money men, ideologues and neo-con officials are free to strike whatever bargains, agree whichever strategies and disseminate whatever curious information they wish, safely insulated from press attention. It’s the perfect place to renew and organize a parallel intelligence service. And that is precisely what the Intelligence Summit seeks to do. It’s a hub – which brings together a gaggle of Fox News contributors such as Bill Cowan, John Loftus, Tawfik Hamid and Alireza Jafarzadeh with ex-agents of Mossad or the Israeli military such as Moshe Ya’alon or Yoram Hessel and U.S. government officials such as Harold Rhode.
This year’s model
This year’s Intelligence Summit, which will be taking place in St Petersburg, Florida from 5-7 March, promises to be paranoid feast. With Dr Jill Dekker expounding upon the “Syrian Biological Weapons Threat and Regional Security,” Alireza Jafarzadeh speaking about “Iranian Nuclear Facilities” and the bloodthirsty Wayne Simmons explaining “Joint Agency Operations” there should be something for everybody. Jafarzadeh and ex-CIA analyst Clare Lopez will be double teaming on the “Iranian threat” – Lopez in her role as the head of the estimable Iran Policy Committee, the primary lobby group pushing for the U.S. to ‘unleash’ the mystical terrorists in the Mujaheddin e-Khalq upon the Iranian people.
It also promises to be a laboratory for new foreign interventions. As the website of the summit notes, “Particular emphasis is placed on inviting émigré groups from soon to be emerging democracies.” That’s a quaint way of describing plans for regime change.
So it’s no surprise that if you name a hawk from the push towards Baghdad – Perle, Rhode, Kenneth Timmermann – they’re on board and networking. It would be interesting to know which Bush administration officials will be the “neutral moderators” this time around, but alas that’s “not for distribution” and who knows, which plucky Democrats will be wandering the exhibition hall? As the attendee brochure promises, there is the chance to “mingle with congressional leaders” and “top CEOs.” Who could resist?
But should we be concerned about the Intelligence Summit? After all, on one level, it’s just like any other trade exhibition, albeit with private military contractors displaying their wares, neoconservative fantastists for hire and a general intention to market paranoia for business and governmental customers. There is, however, a sinister side. As mentioned above, the Intelligence Summit is one important node in an expanding private intelligence and military industry. It provides a forum for intelligence services to share information or disinformation outside of any scrutinty. Its organisers are happy to admit its expanding role. As prospective attendees read, “Because it is a private charity, IHEC can respond more rapidly and flexibly than most government agencies and has funded some of the most innovative programs in the war against terrorism.” In other words, because it is a charity (so to speak) IHEC can run off the books intel operations such as the tragic case of Sami al-Arian away from conventional oversight.
Interestingly, with Bill Cowan on the advisory board and both his company WVC3 and its junior ATS Tactical exhibiting prominently at the 2006 show, the Intelligence Summit might have been a useful location to secure funding and other support for an intervention in Somalia. As the Observer newspaper has reported, leaked e-mails from ATS showed that company seeking arms via the Ugandan government and an end to the UN arms embargo on the east African country. Similar schemes could be hatched in the next week on the Florida coast.
So if you are in the Tampa-St Petersburg area, go along and voice your solidarity with the spooks in their Global War on Terror. Or, if you aren’t that way inclined, give ‘em hell and stop them from doing the same again.
http://www.gnn.tv/articles/2949/The_Spooks_of_St_Petersburg
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