HAYDEN’S HEROES - (Incompetence and Politicization at the NSA)

[not systems]

http://cryptome.org/nsa-heroes.htm

A Tale of Incompetence and Politicization at America’s Super-Secret Intelligence Agency

By Wayne Madsen - served at the NSA during the Reagan administration.

General Michael Hayden, the man President Bush selected to be the deputy to new National Intelligence Director John Negroponte, has presided over the systematic dismantling and demoralization of America's premier technical intelligence collecting outfit -- the National Security Agency (NSA). According to NSA insiders, Haydenss seven-year tenure at the agency, the longest for any NSA Director, has witnessed the cashiering of experienced analysts, linguists, and field personnel and the crippling of Americass ability protect itself.

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For reasons of communications security, NSA routinely listens in on the communications of executive branch officials, including, at times, the President and the Vice President. In a conversation between Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin, NSA operators overheard Bush asking in a rather inane manner, "You have a Yamantau too?" Bush added, "It's like our "Rock?" The "Rock" is a reference to the Joint Alternate Communications Center, or "Site R," bored into Raven Rock Mountain just across the Maryland border in Pennsylvania, near the town of Waynesboro. It is an underground alternate national command center constructed during the Cold War and the famous "secret undisclosed location" where Vice President Cheney is often transported during states of alert. Unlike Yamantau, Raven Rock is surrounded by a number of tell tale signs that it is a military-critical facility -- satellite parabolic dishes, microwave towers, and various antennas sprout from the side of the mountain. Apparently, Bush got nothing about Yamantau in his phone conversation with Putin, who is a former KGB officer.

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During the last year of the Clinton administration, Viktor Bout was a number one SIGINT target for NSA. However, after Condoleezza Rice took over as National Security Adviser under Bush, she issued a change in orders on Bout. "Look and listen but don't touch" was the new policy. Ever since, Bout has flouted INTERPOL and Belgian and French arrest warrants. Although the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Bout's companies on April 26, 2005 and froze his corporate assets, one of Bout's airlines, Irbis, continued to operate from a U.S.-controlled airbase in northern Iraq. Other Bout companies, which use a fleet of aging Soviet-era military cargo planes, are contracted to a network of seedy multinational private military contractors operating in Iraq. Bout's global enterprises closely intersect with the diamond, white slave trade, arms, and other illicit activities of Israel's Russian Mafia, made up of some 80 Russian and Ukrainian Jewish billionaires and millionaires who have escaped to Israel to avoid prosecution in and extradition to Russia and other countries. Considering the close association between leading neo-conservatives like Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby to fugitive Marc Rich, who is linked to the crime syndicates in Israel, a reason for Rice's dictate "Look and listen but don't touch," with regard to Bout, becomes abundantly clear.

....

The U.S. intelligence community has suffered a spate of mysterious and surprising suicides since the onset of the Iraq war. State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research Iraq analyst John J. Kokal, former CIA officer Dr. Gus Weiss, and Washington's politically and diplomatically connected lobbyist Edward von Kloberg, who once counted Saddam Hussein among his clients, all jumped from the tops of buildings or out of window between November 2003 and May 2005. In addition, CIA officer Ben Miller was told to jump out of an open window at the National Security Council by Iran-contra felon Elliot Abrams, who is now an Assistant National Security Adviser. NSA has apparently been no exception to the suicide epidemic. Before his departure from NSA to serve as Negroponte's deputy, Hayden sent a letter to all NSA employees in which he urged everyone to recognize "stress factors" at work. The letter also described the grief of losing a member of the NSA family from stress. NSA employees took the letter as an indication that there had been a recent suicide among the NSA ranks but no mention was made of the individual's identity.

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[necso]

1. An interesting piece.

And it will be interesting to see where else this gets exposure.

[not systems]

2. kick n/t