Ray McGovern talking:
I’m reminded of George W. Bush’s exit interview, where he was asked why he thought waterboarding is all right, and he said, “Well, the lawyer—the lawyers told me it was OK, and I have to rely on the lawyers’ advice.” Well, here you can always get lawyers to justify things that are illegal. You know, laws that are illegal sounds like an oxymoron, but when they’re unconstitutional, they are ipso facto illegal. And that’s what you had here. You had General Hayden, who was head of the NSA, summoned in by Dick Cheney before 9/11—and that’s important, OK?—and said, “You know, we know this First Amendment or this First Commandment out there at NSA: ‘Thou shalt not eavesdrop on Americans without a court warrant.’ We know about that. Forget about it, General Hayden. Forget about it.”
Cheney was interested in all kinds of getting information. You know, he was preparing the war in Iraq and all that kind of thing. But there was one telecom that resisted that. That was Qwest, OK? The others all cooperated. This is before 9/11. We know about that room out there on Folsom Street in San Francisco, you know? They all had this backdoor into. Now, when 9/11 happened, it went on steroids, of course. Now, who is Hayden? He’s an Air Force general. And when it came out that he had been suborned into doing this, two of his predecessors as head of NSA really demurred. Bill Odom, general of the U.S. Army, said he should have been court-martialed on the spot, and the president should have been impeached. Odom is an incredibly—well, he’s died now, but he was an incredibly conservative guy, but he was head of NSA
For violating his oath of office to defend the Constitution, specifically the Fourth Amendment. Now, Hayden earned his spurs by doing this work, and when Porter Goss turned out to be a really feckless head of the CIA, they needed somebody else, and, “Oh, well, Hayden, he could be—he can be persuaded to come in and do our work for us.” Now, before he was even named head of the CIA, he held a press conference, after James Risen and Lichtblau revealed all this warrantless wiretapping,
what happened was, Hayden was asked to explain everything, OK? “Explain it all to the American public.” And he got up before the national press conference, and Jonathan Landay said, “You know, how were you using the criteria for this eavesdropping? The Fourth Amendment says probable cause.” And General Hayden said, “No, it doesn’t. No, the Fourth Amendment doesn’t say probable cause.” This is before the National Press Club. And Jonathan Landay says, “Well, I think it does.” And then Hayden says, “Well, look, there’s one amendment that we at NSA knew by heart, and that was the Fourth Amendment doesn’t say probable cause.” Here’s what the Fourth Amendment says: The people shall not be—shall be secure from “unreasonable searches and seizures … and no Warrants shall issue, [without] probable cause,” particularly defining the areas to be searched and the people or things to be seized. Probable cause is part of the Fourth. Anyhow, he did such a good job that he was nominated to be head of the CIA, OK? And that’s the rest of the story. He did this bidding, and now—then, of course, he had to explain torture and all that kind of stuff. He did a great job. And now he’s the CNN and Fox News commentator on all this kind of stuff and defending it to the hilt. So, General Hayden is really the fellow that started all this.
Not only did Bill Odom, his predecessor as head of NSA, say he should be court-martialed, but right here in New York at the New York Public Library, before Hayden, before Hayden was nominated or before he was—the nomination hearings took place, James Risen and the sainted Bobby Ray Inman—now, I say “sainted” because he was widely admired as the intelligence professional. I mean, this is the go-to guy. He couldn’t even abide Bill Casey. You know, he’s the paragon of virtue here. He got up in the New York Public Library and said, “What General Hayden did clearly violated the law. I know that. I helped craft the FISA law. As a matter of fact, I added a sentence that nothing is permitted unless it’s expressly permitted in this law.”
So, you know—now, what happened? I knew about that thing because somebody blogged it. I’m waiting in—to go into an interview in New York because I had been in this debate with Donald Rumsfeld. And what happens is, I’m waiting, and in rushes Bobby Inman. It’s the day before the nomination hearing for Hayden to be head of the CIA. And people kind of know—there’s a little buzz that Inman had said that Hayden had violated the law, OK? So he brushes in, and I said, “Well, hi, Admiral Inman.” And, oh, [inaudible] and puts on a tie, and he goes in. And he’s asked, “What do you think of—what do you think of General Hayden being nominated for the head of the CIA?” And he said, “Oh, you couldn’t pick a better person. You couldn’t pick a—this fellow is an expert. He’s a [inaudible]—couldn’t”—now, as he came out, I said, “Hey, what about—how does that square with what you said in the New York Public Library 10 days ago?” What he said—and then they said, “McGovern, it’s your turn, you know.” So I couldn’t follow—I would have followed them out.
Now, what am I saying? I’m saying that these guys all protect one another. And if it’s necessary to correct the truth by telling a lie so that somebody can get nominated to be head of the CIA, even the best of them, Bobby Ray Inman, will do it. And that’s what happened. And here I was an eyewitness to this. It was really quite an amazing experience.
Mike German talking:
what we keep referring to as NSA programs are actually done in conjunction with the FBI. It’s the FBI that goes and gets the FISA orders that allows the NSA to obtain them. And, in fact, statutorily, under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, it only authorizes the FBI to do it, so this idea that the NSA has a role in these programs is somewhat specious. You know, the FBI also has a role in kind of being the attack dog, right? I mean, part of the reason that the CIA is making a criminal referral to the Department of Justice is so that the FBI will investigate them. And, you know, again, that has a very intimidating factor.
I mean, one of the things that you asked Julia earlier—you know, if you’re not doing anything wrong, what do you fear? Obviously, when I joined the FBI, I gave them an awful lot of private information about me. That was a voluntary choice that I made. They hired me. And, you know, I went about my job for 15 years and never was concerned, because I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I was doing everything right—until I became a whistleblower. And then, all that information is useful to go back to find anything. And there’s actually a saying in the FBI that nobody is administratively pure, that if they want you, they will find someplace where you have filed the wrong form. And I mean they even went after me for arguing that $50 in an undercover operation was not properly authorized before I spent it. You know, so it gets that petty, when they want you. And ultimately, they’ll just say, “He stole money.” They won’t talk about the amount.
And keep in mind that in order to maintain these jobs, you need to have a security clearance. And they don’t need to tell you any reason they withdraw your security clearance. And you automatically lose your job. So once you realize that you are completely vulnerable, it becomes much harder to dissent within these organizations. And I think that’s how you’ve gotten a situation where, you know, everybody who had questions about these programs was quickly pushed out the door. And anybody today thinking, “I can report something,” knows that the retaliation will be swift and brutal.
I was involved in a counterterrorism case post-9/11 that was being mismanaged. And this was about the time that Coleen Rowley, another FBI special agent’s letter about the 9/11 failures had become public. And the president of the United States, George Bush, came on TV and said, “If any counterterrorism agent is aware of problems in a counterterrorism case, we want them to come forward.” And the director of the FBI, Bobby Mueller, said, “You know, if there’s an agent out there who knows of a problem in a counterterrorism case, please come forward.”
And this—it was a case where supporters of an overseas terrorist group were trying to establish links with a domestic white supremacist group, and the tape that had been in this meeting was recorded illegally by an informant. And I found out that the recording was illegal and thought it was my job—I was a law enforcement officer—to report that and, more than anything else, or at least as much as anything else, to preserve the prosecution, right? There’s a way to handle an improperly recorded conversation by segregating it from the investigation that proceeds. So I thought we could quickly address that illegality, put that aside and continue working the investigation. But instead, they papered over it and tried to pretend it didn’t happen and actually wrote false documents and whited out the—literally, whited out the documents. But the only person who received any sort of retaliation was me. And, in fact, the people who were involved in that cover-up actually went to high levels in the FBI, and I was pushed out.
So, you know, I don’t think at the time that I reported it, I had any idea that that’s how it would. And part of it was, you know, I, at that point, had had a pretty successful career doing undercover cases in terrorism, and probably singular career at that point, and thought that my good reputation would protect me. You know, kind of like, “I’m not doing anything wrong; why should I fear?” You know, they can go through—they can look at that $50 I spent, because I know I did it the right way. But the problem was, that actually, in hindsight, made me a better target, because the purpose was to tell every other whistleblower out there—I mean, part of the reason why they’re going on such a name-calling spree with Ed Snowden isn’t because they think they can stop anything Ed Snowden has done. That horse is out of the barn. It’s for the next one, that, you know, if you think that you have an urgent concern you want to report to Congress or you want to report to the public, we are going to go after you with everything we have.
“Oh, of course we love whistleblowers.” But, you know, once they get into power, they do everything they can to suppress any internal dissent, much less external dissent. I mean, part of the issue with me, I didn’t even express external dissent. I was just dissenting within the agency and received this retaliation. So, once you go outside—I mean, I knew once I brought it to Senator Grassley, I was done. I wasn’t going to wait for the next thing. I went ahead and resigned, because I knew that going outside the agency was going to bring that retribution even more.
part of the sort of scandalous accusations against Edward Snowden, you know, the worst thing you could say about somebody in the intelligence community is that they’re a Russian spy. And, you know, Senator Feinstein later clarified that she had never seen anything in her secret briefings that suggested that was true, even though Mike Rogers and others were making this claim. So, I thought, well, it would be interesting—you know, are there Russian spies?
And it didn’t take long to find Jeffrey Delisle, a Canadian naval officer who had access to U.S. signals intelligence because, while the NSA doesn’t share with the American people what it’s doing, it actually does share with a lot of foreign governments, including Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and even Israel. You know, a lot of different countries get the information about us that the NSA is collecting. So, because he had access to that information. He apparently had a crisis in his life and decided to walk into a Russian embassy. I mean, this isn’t trade—this is actually any spy—anybody who reads a spy novel, much less knows anything about spying, would say that’s the only way you’re going to get caught, is to do something that stupid. So his tradecraft was awful. He walks into the Russian embassy. He says, “You know, I have this access. I want to spy. Give me some money.” They pay him the princely sum of $3,000 a month—you know, hardly what you would think this information is worth. And for the next 50 months, every month he would download information onto a thumb drive and take it and then email it to—again, you know, the tradecraft not very good—to his Russian handlers. And he did this for 50 months. So, think of the security breach that—the volume of information.
So when the NSA now talks about Edward Snowden and says, “Oh, my gosh! Now our enemies have access to this information,” the enemies already had access to this information. The only people who are new to this conversation are the American public. And what Ed Snowden did was give us an idea of what all these foreign governments already knew, that we are being spied on to an extent far beyond—you know, I mean, I’ve been in this business now, the privacy advocacy business, for almost 10 years and, you know, testified before the House Judiciary Committee and had Representative Jim Sensenbrenner wave a finger at me: “You can’t prove there are any abuses.” And I had to admit that I couldn’t prove it, but with a law so broad, obviously there are going to be abuses. Well, now we can prove it, and now even Jim Sensenbrenner has said, “This is far beyond what we thought we were authorizing.” So, that public knowledge is so critical to actually controlling these agencies, because obviously all branches of government knew about it. It’s only their reaction to the public that has now changed the conversation.
it’s the supreme irony that the only CIA official who actually exposed the torture regime, and inadvertently let slip the name of one of the torturers, who can be found in northern Virginia—I’ll give you his telephone number and address, if you like—he’s 30 months in a federal penitentiary. But the fellow who revealed the torturer. So, you know, if you want to be cynical or you want to repeat what Mike has said about showing this object lesson, they put him under indictment for violating the Espionage Act of 1917, which was designed for German spies, you know, to get German spies. And here, they threw the book at him. And he did a plea bargain where he got off late with 30 months. He’s got five kids, OK? He lives about two miles away from me. And he’s put away for 30 months, about halfway through his sentence. So, that’s what happens.
he said that waterboarding was going on and that it was torture. And then he said, by the—well, they charged him with giving the name of one of the torturers to the press.
He was kind of a super—a torture supervisor, you know, like a GS-15 torture supervisor—sorry. So, you know, he was very much involved in it. But, you know, one of the other ironies is his name never came out in the press. It was just given to one correspondent, and they got that from all these technical means that we’ve been talking about. And so, Kiriakou made one small mistake in that he gave it to a person who wasn’t very safe in guarding the information, and so they threw the book at him. They wanted to put him away for like 35 years, like they wanted to put Tom Drake away. He plea-bargained, and so he got off light with 30 months.
And so he’s in prison today.
– source democracynow.org
Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst who later helped create Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity to expose the way intelligence was being falsified to “justify” war on Iraq.
Mike German, fellow at NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice. From 1988 to 2004, he served as an FBI agent specializing in domestic counterterrorism. He left after reporting continuing deficiencies in FBI counterterrorism operations to Congress. His recent piece in The Guardian is titled “The NSA Won’t Shut Up About Snowden, But What About the Spy Who Stole More?”