On Sunday, November 17, 1985, a short article appeared on page A12 of the Washington Post under the headline “Managua Said to Get Military Copters.”
The article stated that “Recently stepped-up shipments from Warsaw Pact countries to Nicaragua include at least two Polish Mi2 helicopters that can be used as gunships,” attributing this to “government officials with access to the latest intelligence reports.”
The last of the story’s seven paragraphs clarified that just one of the Polish helicopters actually was “equipped with launchers for air-to-ground rockets.”
This was about the hottest of hot political topics at the time: the battle between Nicaragua’s socialist Sandinista government and the U.S.-backed Contra brigades trying to overthrow it. While the Contras had been directly financed by the U.S. starting in 1981, the first year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, after several years public pressure eventually forced Congress to cut off all military aid.
Sandinista soldiers guard an electrical substation in northern Nicaragua that was attacked by guerrilla Contras.
Photo: Shepard Sherbell/Corbis/Getty Images
That’s what was happening in public. Thanks to the archive of documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, we now know this was happening backstage:
When National Security Agency analyst Deborah Maklowski got into work the Monday after the Post’s article appeared, her branch chief jokingly asked her how much money she’d gotten for it.
That’s because, as Maklowski recounted in 2004 for SIDtoday, the NSA’s internal newsletter, she’d just written a report on this subject and distributed it internally. “The only change” in the Post article from her analysis, according to Maklowski, “was the lack of classification. … The Post had not seen fit to edit my text at all!” (The Intercept is publishing Maklowski’s account today alongside 261 other articles from SIDtoday.)
As Maklowski told the story, she had “been following a deal in the making between Cenzin, the Polish government entity that handled foreign military sales, and the pro-Soviet Sandinista government of Nicaragua. … When I got the specs on this one [helicopter] and saw that it would be equipped with rocket launchers, I put out a report.”
Maklowski continued: “My guess is that the White House, which was looking for anything that would help make a case with Congress for support for the Contras, just unilaterally decided to release the SIGINT [signals intelligence] to the press, without asking and without sanitization, as yet one more piece of evidence of Soviet (well, sort of) support for the Sandinistas.”
Maklowski’s supposition that the Reagan administration was the source of the leak is supported by the Post’s attribution to “government officials with access to the latest intelligence reports.”
So what are the lessons of this brief glimpse behind the NSA curtain?
First, that the Washington Post apparently believed that it was appropriate for it to be handed a government report by an official trying to push administration policy and then just publish it essentially verbatim — without telling their readers this was what they were doing. (The Post did not respond to a request for comment.)
Second, that you can always ignore it when politicians tell us how terribly, terribly wrong it is for anyone to leak classified information.
Photo: Bill Gentile/Corbis/Getty Images
And the Reagan administration wasn’t just talk: The year before, in 1984, it had charged Samuel Morison, a former employee of the Naval Intelligence Support Center, under the Espionage Act for giving satellite images of Soviet nuclear aircraft carriers to the magazine Jane’s Weekly. Morison was convicted and sentenced to two years in prison.
But there’s no evidence Reagan’s Justice Department ever tried to track down the source of the Washington Post article, even though SIGINT is generally seen as some of the most sensitive information intelligence agencies possess. (As of 2000, 60 percent of the President’s Daily Brief was based on SIGINT, according to an NSA document, and Hillary Clinton has been condemned for possibly having emails containing SIGINT on her private email server.)
That didn’t matter. Nor did it matter that Maklowski felt, as she described it in 2004, “outrage at having a fragile SIGINT source put at risk so cavalierly.” What mattered was that powerful politicians are probably the most prolific leakers of classified documents and can do it without consequence. Consequences are for peons who release information that the government prefers not to see the light of day.
What makes the 1985 leak about the Sandinistas’ perfidy especially ridiculous is that the U.S. had, of course, previously used helicopters to attack Nicaragua. For instance, in his autobiography former CIA operations officer Duane Clarridge describes agency helicopters attacking the Nicaraguan coast in 1984.
Moreover, as the Reagan administration’s frustration with congressional restrictions grew, leading it to secretly raise funding for the Contras in the Iran-Contra affair, the Contras themselves bought arms from Poland. Oliver North reportedly found it funny to see a ship in a Polish port loaded with arms for the Contras next to one loaded with arms for the Sandinistas.
Curiously, the author of the 1985 Post story, George C. Wilson, himself played a small but vital role in the publication of the Pentagon Papers, a far more important and public-spirited leak.
After the Washington Post and New York Times received the classified U.S. history of the Vietnam War from Daniel Ellsberg, the Nixon administration went to court to try to prevent the papers from publishing it.
In a secret session, the government argued that one section of the Pentagon Papers would be especially damaging to U.S. national security: a radio transcript that supposedly proved North Vietnam had attacked U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.
According to Washington Post editor Benjamin Bradlee’s book “A Good Life,” “The remarkable George Wilson stunned everyone by pulling out of his back pocket a verbatim record of the intercept, in an unclassified transcript of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings.”
For her part, Maklowski appears to be retired from the NSA and, according to her website, works as a visual artist in “pastel, colored pencil, graphite and mixed media.” She did not respond to multiple requests for comment about her 1985 experience. (The Intercept is naming her because she has previously appeared in public identified as an NSA employee.) The NSA declined to comment.
As for the helicopters themselves, they are presumably long junked, but you can buy an actual cockpit dashboard from an Mi-2 for $499 on eBay.
Top photo: Ronald Reagan’s reflection in a glass shield.
Great piece, man.
I hope you’re not naming her based solely on that document you found through The American Psychology Society. You wouldn’t like it if someone published details about yourself without consulting you first.
There was absolutely no need, or credibility added, to publish her name in this story.
On July 3, 1979, President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. (source: Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998; Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser). Brzezinski believed that, by taking covert action against Soviet occupation, the Russians could be drawn into a very protracted and costly war akin to US involvement in Indochina. From the get go, the CIA was tasked with employing third party arms dealers for the purpose of having them acquire foreign made weaponry which was to be supplied to the Mujahideen. Using third party arms dealers was meant to provide a degree of plausible deniability.
The arms dealers who were tasked to act as middlemen in the acquisition and delivery of foreign made weapons to the Mujahideen succeeded in purchasing arms from China as well as Soviet bloc armories located in Eastern Europe; many communist leaders in eastern bloc countries were corrupt and thus willing to sell Soviet made arms to anyone with hard currency. Cenzin was one of three Polish arms manufacturers who eventually sold weapons to CIA middlemen that were destined for Afghanistan. Thus when the Reagan administration came to power in Jan 1981, the supply lines for foreign made weapons were already very much in place.
Ironically, it was General John Singlaub who was “President Reagan’s administrative chief liaison in the so-called ‘private’ Contra supply effort to oppose Moscow’s and Fidel Castro’s advances in El Salvador and Nicaragua during the Cold War and their support for armed Marxist revolutionary guerrilla movements.” Singlaub had been fired by the Carter administration in 1977 for openly challenging Carter’s far east policies. Under Reagan however, Singlaub was tasked with expanding the flow of arms along Carter’s established supply lines – especially those that were Soviet made as ammunition and spare parts could be most readily acquired in theater from defeated Soviet forces and their proxies. As the 1981 founder of the United States Council for World Freedom, the U.S. chapter of the World Anti-Communist League, Singlaub used his civilian status as a public cover for White House covert operations. It was under Singlaub’s direction that Oliver North expanded Polish weapons purchases to facilitate the CIA funded covert war against the Sandinista government. The fact that Soviet made weapons were being used by anti-communist forces was a source of amusement to both North and Singlaub.
It is against this historical backdrop that Deborah Maklowski’s leaked report must be weighed. Because the CIA and its proxies had already been acquiring arms from Cenzin for years in in effort to advance its covert aims, it was intimately aware of Soviet purchases from Cenzin that were being used in like manner. In fact, It was well known by the west that the Soviet Union had been purchasing Mi-2 helicopters from Cenzin since 1965 for widespread use in former Soviet and Eastern Bloc countries. Thus the purported SIGINT revelation that the Sandinista’s were attempting to acquire an Mi-2 which rocket launchers could be uncritically received by the American public via the CIA’s Washington Post assets. I suspect that that SIGINT revelation was CIA generated and NSA acquired disinformation and that Maklowski was merely an unwitting pawn in a much larger game.
Are you this Karl ?
_______________________________________________
-Mona- ? Vic Perry
December 8 2016, 2:08 p.m.
Karl fucks goats in his mom’s basement, which is why they won’t stamp his hand to let him into Chuck E. Cheese. This is true; I read it on the Internet.
________________________________________
Any foe of Mona’s is a friend of mine Karl .
BTW–I’ll be 78yrs 1/15/2017 so I was very much alive during the 60’s . Got my graduate parchments back then .
“…the Sandinistas’ perfidy” ?
What betrayal by the Sandinistas?
The only “perfidy” I find in this article belongs to the faking U$A.
Reagan signed Executive Order 12333 which greatly expanded intelligence agency power. I think what should be reported now is the abuses happening to people labeled “targeted individuals” who are decent people that did something the govt. didn’t like and are used as guinea pigs for neural and behavioral modification harassment and experimentation. Their lives get disrupted by thugs and get their minds messed up with electronic RF harassment. They get falsely accused of bullsh*t and lose their jobs. All it takes is some stooge/snitch to turn in your name and that’s it.
“Second, that you can always ignore it when politicians tell us how terribly, terribly wrong it is for anyone to leak classified information.”
It’s the President’s prerogative to release information. When intelligence is a tool of foreign policy, the President and his staff are free to wield that tool however they see fit, as long as it’s not for personal (non-political) gain. Congress cannot limit the President’s discretion in this regard, directly or indirectly, as it would be an unconstitutional interference with a power clearly vested in the executive branch.
Releasing the information in contravention of the law, and then protesting when others do the same, doesn’t make the administration hypocrites. Unintended leaks impinge upon their constitutional prerogative and diminish its power. They’re right to protest.
What makes them hypocrites is when they claim the sky is going to fall whenever anything is leaked unintentionally.
What makes them hypocrites is when they punish disfavored leakers out of all proportion to the harm, real or theoretical.
What makes them hypocrites is when they classify anything and everything under the sun, and then act surprised when highly valuable secrets leak with all the mundane stuff.
What makes them hypocrites is when they use their prerogative for blatantly partisan political advantage–it may be constitutionally protected but it definitely sends the wrong message about the sanctity of secrets, and undermines the legitimacy of the executive’s power.
If the Prez has an absolute right to release any classified documents that she arbitrarily and capriciously decides that she wants to release, then our system of classifying those zillions of documents is arbitrary and capricious and, therefore, prohibited under the 1st Amendment. Even if Article II gives her an unfettered unfettered discretionary authority to regulate classified speech, the 1st Amendment prohibits her from using it.
By the way, where does the Constitution give the Prez the right to censor speech by classifying it?
The 1st Amendment says that “Congress shall make no law … abridging freedom of speech.” As Justice Hugo Black would tell us, “No law means no law.”
Classifying speech is an unconstitutional speech regulation.