“Any kind of blacklisting countries like this will probably ruin effective local partnerships that are already in place,” said Ali Soufan, a former FBI special agent who served as one of the central U.S. officers targeting al Qaeda in the years leading up to 9/11. “When you’re operating in conflict zones in places like Yemen or in places like Iraq or Syria or Libya, you need local support,” he told The Intercept in an interview. “You need local help. You need people to assist you, to translate for you, to show you the lay of the land. Unfortunately, if this ban is seen as an anti-Muslim ban, or if this ban is blacklisting a whole entire population, that will end up fighting back on the much-needed, local cooperation that we depend on.”

Soufan was in the FBI from 1997 to 2005, when he served as a supervisory special agent. In 2005, Soufan resigned from the FBI because of what he alleged was the CIA’s refusal to share crucial counterterrorism intelligence. Soufan believes the CIA had information that if shared could have thwarted the 9/11 attacks. In 2009, Soufan rose to prominence after testifying in front of the U.S. Senate and penning an anti-torture Op-Ed in the New York Times. He has become an outspoken critic of torture on not only moral grounds, but because he has deemed it ineffective and counterproductive to intelligence gathering. Despite his criticism of torture, Soufan opposed prosecuting CIA personnel who participated in the torture program and has often voiced support for the agency.

Referring to Trump’s overt support for torture, Soufan said, “He’s not putting any lipstick on a pig. He’s just trying to sell a pig to the nation. I think there is overwhelming support for the idea that torture is not only illegal, but it’s also immoral and ineffective.”

In 2002, Soufan interrogated terrorist Abu Zubaydah for four months, obtaining what he called crucial and accurate intelligence from him, including the central role Khalid Sheikh Mohammed played in the planning of 9/11. In August 2002, however, the CIA snatched Zubaydah from the FBI and sent him to a CIA black site where he was waterboarded more than 80 times. Despite the intelligence gathered by Soufan from Zubaydah without torture, the CIA claimed it was their waterboarding that extracted the intelligence. “There was no actionable intelligence that was generated because of torture,” said Soufan. “Abu Zubaydah lied after 83 sessions of waterboarding. He claimed that he was a number three of al Qaeda, even though he wasn’t an al Qaeda member. And later on, when they went back to him and they said, ‘Why did you lie?’ He said, ‘Well, you were torturing me. I told you what you want to hear.’”

“You don’t want to get the information that you want to hear,” Soufan added. “You want to get the truth.”

Soufan pointed out that torture is illegal under U.S. law, though he recognized that Trump seems to believe his executive orders override such quaint facts. “The president can put any executive order that he wants, but in order to change the law, he needs Congress,” said Soufan. “And I really doubt you’re going have a congressional debate that authorizes the president to use torture. I would like to watch that hearing and see how they will try to sell it to the American people.”

Jeremy Scahill’s interview with Ali Soufan can be heard on Episode 2 of The Intercept’s new weekly podcast, Intercepted, on February 1.

Subscribe to the Intercepted podcast on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, and other platforms.

The post Former Senior FBI Counterterrorism Agent Slams Trump on Torture and Muslim Ban appeared first on The Intercept.

The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill speaks with Seymour Hersh at his home in Washington, D.C. two days after Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Hersh denounced news organizations as “crazy town” for their uncritical promotion of the pronouncements of the director of national intelligence and the CIA, given their track records of lying and misleading the public.

“The way they behaved on the Russia stuff was outrageous,” Hersh said when I sat down with him at his home in Washington, D.C., two days after Trump was inaugurated. “They were just so willing to believe stuff. And when the heads of intelligence give them that summary of the allegations, instead of attacking the CIA for doing that, which is what I would have done,” they reported it as fact. Hersh said most news organizations missed an important component of the story: “the extent to which the White House was going and permitting the agency to go public with the assessment.”

Hersh said many media outlets failed to provide context when reporting on the intelligence assessment made public in the waning days of the Obama administration that was purported to put to rest any doubt that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the hacking of the DNC and Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s emails.

The declassified version of the report, which was released January 7 and dominated the news for days, charged that Putin “ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election” and “aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.” According to the report, the NSA was said to have had a lower confidence level than James Clapper and the CIA about the conclusion that Russia intended to influence the election. Hersh characterized the report as full of assertions and thin on evidence.

“It’s high camp stuff,” Hersh told The Intercept. “What does an assessment mean? It’s not a national intelligence estimate. If you had a real estimate, you would have five or six dissents. One time they said 17 agencies all agreed. Oh really? The Coast Guard and the Air Force — they all agreed on it? And it was outrageous and nobody did that story. An assessment is simply an opinion. If they had a fact, they’d give it to you. An assessment is just that. It’s a belief. And they’ve done it many times.”

Hersh also questioned the timing of the U.S. intelligence briefing of Trump on the Russia hack findings. “They’re taking it to a guy that’s going to be president in a couple of days, they’re giving him this kind of stuff, and they think this is somehow going to make the world better? It’s going to make him go nuts — would make me go nuts. Maybe it isn’t that hard to make him go nuts.” Hersh said if he had been covering the story, “I would have made [John] Brennan into a buffoon. A yapping buffoon in the last few days. Instead, everything is reported seriously.”

Few journalists in the world know more about the CIA and U.S. dark ops than Hersh. The legendary journalist broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, the Abu Ghraib torture, and secret details of the Bush-Cheney assassination program.

In the 1970s, during the Church Committee investigations into the CIA’s involvement in coups and assassinations, Dick Cheney — at the time a top aide to President Gerald Ford — pressured the FBI to go after Hersh and seek an indictment against him and the New York Times. Cheney and then-White House Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld were furious that Hersh had reported, based on information from inside sources, on a covert incursion into Soviet waters. They also wanted retaliation for Hersh’s exposé on illegal domestic spying by the CIA. The aim of targeting Hersh would be to frighten other journalists from exposing secret or controversial actions by the White House. The attorney general rebuffed Cheney’s requests, saying it “would put an official stamp of truth on the article.”

White House press secretary Sean Spicer calls on a reporter during the daily briefing at the White House in Washington, Jan. 24, 2017.

Photo: Susan Walsh/AP

Although critical of the Russia coverage, Hersh condemned the Trump administration’s attacks on the news media and its threats to limit the ability of journalists to cover the White House. “The attack on the press is straight out of national socialism,” he said. “You have to go back into the 1930s. The first thing you do is destroy the media. And what’s he going to do? He’s going to intimidate them. The truth is, the First Amendment is an amazing thing and if you start trampling it the way they — I hope they don’t do it that way — this would be really counterproductive. He’ll be in trouble.”

Hersh also said he is concerned about Trump and his administration assuming power over the vast surveillance resources of the U.S. government. “I can tell you, my friends on the inside have already told me there’s going to be a major increase in surveillance, a dramatic increase in domestic surveillance,” he said. He recommended that anyone concerned about privacy use encrypted apps and other protective means. “If you don’t have Signal, you better get Signal.”

While expressing fears about Trump’s agenda, Hersh also called Trump a potential “circuit breaker” of the two-party political system in the U.S. “The idea of somebody breaking things away, and raising grave doubts about the viability of the party system, particularly the Democratic Party, is not a bad idea,” Hersh said. “That’s something we could build on in the future. But we have to figure out what to do in the next few years.” He added: “I don’t think the notion of democracy is ever going to be as tested as it’s going to be now.”

In recent years, Hersh has been attacked for his investigative reports on a variety of policies and actions authorized by the Obama administration, but he has never backed down from his aggressive approach to journalism. His reporting on the raid that killed Osama bin Laden dramatically contradicted the administration’s story, and his investigation on the use of chemical weapons in Syria cast doubts on the official claim that Bashar al Assad ordered the attacks. Although he has received many awards for his work, Hersh said praise and condemnation have no impact on his work as a journalist.

Jeremy Scahill’s interview with Seymour Hersh can be heard on The Intercept’s new weekly podcast, Intercepted, which premieres January 25.

Top photo: Journalist Seymour Hersh in Perugia, Italy, on April 1, 2009.

The post Seymour Hersh Blasts Media for Uncritically Promoting Russian Hacking Story appeared first on The Intercept.

DeVos is married to Richard DeVos, the heir to the Amway Corporation fortune. She is also the sister of Blackwater founder Erik Prince, who is secretly advising the Trump team on intelligence matters, as The Intercept reported Tuesday. The Prince and DeVos families’ merger through marriage was reminiscent of the monarchies of old Europe, and since the 1980s they have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into Republican campaign coffers and the war chests of far-right religious organizations, at least one of which — the Family Research Council — has been designated an anti-LGBTQ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

As Mother Jones pointed out:

The Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation gave $275,000 to Focus on the Family from 1999 to 2001 but hasn’t donated since; it gave an additional $35,760 to the group’s Michigan and D.C. affiliates from 2001 to 2010. The Prince Foundation donated $5.2 million to Focus on the Family and $275,000 to its Michigan affiliate from 2001 to 2014. (It also gave $6.1 million to the Family Research Council, which has fought against same-sex marriage and anti-bullying programs — and is listed as an “anti-LGBT hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The FRC used to be a division of Focus on the Family before it became an independent nonprofit, with Dobson serving on its board, in 1992.)

During Tuesday’s hearing, the Democratic senators protested Republican chair Lamar Alexander’s unprecedented ruling that senators would only be permitted one round of questioning. Nonetheless, several senators pressed DeVos on the contributions made by her and other family members through their foundations. DeVos, clearly prepared for such questions, assured the committee that she has nothing to do with the contributions made by her mother’s foundation, the Prince Foundation (formerly known as the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation). DeVos said that her immediate family — presumably meaning her husband and children — had nothing to do with the financing of anti-gay causes and groups and that she has never supported “conversion therapy” for gay people.

Newly elected Democratic Sen. Margaret Hassan pressed DeVos on these claims. She asked DeVos directly if she was on the board of her mother’s foundation during the period in which large donations were made to Focus on the Family. DeVos said that she was not on the foundation’s board.

When I heard that, I pulled up the 990 tax documents of the Prince Foundation, which I investigated for my book “Blackwater.” Betsy DeVos was clearly listed as a vice president of the foundation’s board, along with her brother Erik, for many years, at least until 2014. DeVos was a vice president during the precise period Hassan was referring to. I then began a tweet storm about this lie:

Betsy DeVos just told Sen. Hassan she isn't on the board of her mom's foundation. She was vice president for several years! I have the 990s pic.twitter.com/x4A2Wx4Sdh

— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) January 18, 2017

Betsy DeVos lied repeatedly during this hearing. She was VP of her mom's foundation when they poured money into anti-gay organizations.

— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) January 18, 2017

. @SenHassan just asked DeVos about *several years* of Prince foundation 990s & her listing as VP. DeVos said it was clerical error. My god.

— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) January 18, 2017

At the very end of the hearing, Sen. Patty Murray, the ranking Democrat on the committee, allocated the small time she had left to Hassan, who proceeded to reference the 990 tax forms. DeVos then made an astonishing claim. These government tax forms, filed by her own mother’s foundation, were incorrect. For years. Many years. “That was a clerical error. I can assure you I have never made decisions on my mother’s behalf on her foundation’s board.”

The idea that her own mother’s foundation would accidentally list her as a vice president for years as result of a clerical error is just not believable. The Democrats should go to town on this obvious attempt to mislead the Senate. This alone should disqualify DeVos, though there is a vast ocean of other reasons they could fish from.

Correction: Jan. 18, 2017

A previous version of this article referred to the Americans with Disabilities Act. DeVos gave her views on the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

Top photo: Betsy DeVos looks over her papers before her confirmation hearing for secretary of education before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington on Jan. 17, 2017.

The post Trump Education Nominee Betsy DeVos Lied to the Senate appeared first on The Intercept.

On election night, Prince’s latest wife, Stacy DeLuke, posted pictures from inside Trump’s campaign headquarters as Donald Trump and Mike Pence watched the returns come in, including a close shot of Pence and Trump with their families. “We know some people who worked closely with [Trump] on his campaign,” DeLuke wrote. “Waiting for the numbers to come in last night. It was well worth the wait!!!! #PresidentTrump2016.” Prince’s sister, billionaire Betsy DeVos, is Trump’s nominee for education secretary and Prince (and his mother) gave large sums of money to a Trump Super PAC.

In July, Prince told Trump’s senior adviser and white supremacist Steve Bannon, at the time head of Breitbart News, that the Trump administration should recreate a version of the Phoenix Program, the CIA assassination ring that operated during the Vietnam War, to fight ISIS. Such a program, Prince said, could kill or capture “the funders of Islamic terror and that would even be the wealthy radical Islamist billionaires funding it from the Middle East, and any of the other illicit activities they’re in.”

Prince also said that Trump would be the best force to confront “Islamic fascism.” “As for the world looking to the United States for leadership, unfortunately, I think they’re going to have to wait till January and hope Mr. Trump is elected because, clearly, our generals don’t have a stomach for a fight,” Prince said. “Our president doesn’t have a stomach for a fight and the terrorists, the fascists, are winning.”

Prince founded the notorious private security firm Blackwater, which rose to infamy in September 2007 after its operatives gunned down 17 Iraqi civilians, including a 9-year-old boy in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. Whistleblowers also alleged that Prince encouraged an environment in which Iraqis were killed for sport. At the height of the Blackwater scandals in 2007, another prominent Trump backer, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, praised Prince, who once worked in his congressional office. “Prince,’’ Rohrabacher said, “is on his way to being an American hero just like Ollie North was.’’

Ultimately, Prince sold Blackwater and now heads up a Hong Kong-based company known as Frontier Services Group. The Intercept has previously reported on Prince’s efforts to build a private air force for hire and his close ties to Chinese intelligence. One of his latest schemes is a proposal to deploy private contractors to work with Libyan security forces to stop the flow of refugees to Europe.

Prince has long fantasized that he is the rightful heir to the legacy of “Wild Bill” Donovan and his Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. After 9/11, Prince worked with the CIA on a secret assassination program, in addition to offering former SEALs and other retired special operators to the State Department and other agencies for personal security.

Blaming leftists and some congressional Democrats for destroying his Blackwater empire, Prince clearly views Trump’s vow to bring back torture, CIA-sponsored kidnapping, and enhanced interrogations, as well as his commitment to fill Guantánamo with prisoners, as a golden opportunity to ascend to his rightful place as a covert private warrior for the U.S. national security state. As we reported last year, “Prince — who portrays himself as a mix between Indiana Jones, Rambo, Captain America, and Pope Benedict — is now working with the Chinese government through his latest ‘private security’ firm.” The Trump presidency could result in Prince working for both Beijing and the White House.

The Blackwater founder has also endorsed some of Trump’s overtures to Russia, saying: “Think about it: If FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, can deal with Stalin to defeat German fascism in World War II, certainly the United States of America could work with Putin to defeat Islamic fascism. We don’t have to agree with the Russians on everything, or even on a lot, but we can at least agree that crushing ISIS in the Middle East is a very good idea.” Prince described Democrats as “anti-Catholic, anti-Evangelical,” saying the DNC hacks and leaks revealed “the disregard, the disdain they have for the average American voter and citizen.”

Prince has a close relationship with Breitbart News and Steve Bannon, Trump’s senior counselor and chief strategist. Prince has appeared frequently — and almost exclusively — on Breitbart Radio. In August, Prince offered praise for Trump’s candidacy, telling Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos: “I even like some of his projects that have gone bankrupt, because people that do things, and build things, and try things, sometimes fail at doing it, and that’s the strength of the American capitalist system.” Prince added: “We have kind of turned our back on the fact that hard work, sacrifice, risk-taking, innovation, is what made America great. Washington did not make America great.”

In September, Prince backed Trump’s proposal to commandeer Iraq’s 2 million barrels of daily oil output. “For Mr. Trump to say, ‘We’re going to take their oil — certainly we’re not going to lift it out of there and take it somewhere else, but putting it into production, and putting a tolling arrangement into place, to repay the American taxpayers for their efforts to remove Saddam and to stabilize the area, is doable, and very plausible,” Prince said on Breitbart Radio.

Prince’s sister, Betsy DeVos, is Trump’s nominee for education secretary and she has all but vowed to embark on a crusade to push a privatization and religious agenda in education that mirrors her brother’s in military and CIA affairs. Prince has long been a contributor to the campaign of fellow Christian warrior Mike Pence, and he contributed $100,000 to the pro-Trump Super PAC Make America Number 1. Prince’s mother, Elsa, pitched in another $50,000. That organization, run by Rebekah Mercer, daughter of billionaire hedge funder Robert Mercer, was one of the strongest bankrollers of Trump’s campaign.

According to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, in December Prince attended the annual “Villains and Heroes” costume ball hosted by Mercer. Dowd wrote that Palantir founder Peter Thiel showed her “a picture on his phone of him posing with Erik Prince, who founded the private military company Blackwater, and Mr. Trump — who had no costume — but joke[d] that it was ‘N.S.F.I.’ (Not Safe for the Internet).”

Not even Trump is brazen enough to give Prince a public post in his administration. But Prince is operating in the shadows, where he has always been most at home.

Top Photo: Erik Prince listens during an interview in Washington on Jan. 31, 2014.

The post Notorious Mercenary Erik Prince Is Advising Trump From the Shadows appeared first on The Intercept.

Al Banna’s name was floated by anonymous U.S. officials as the target of the October 14, 2011, drone strike that killed Awlaki, a 16-year-old U.S. citizen born in Colorado. Awlaki’s family insists he was having dinner with his teenage cousin and some others in Shebwah, Yemen, when they were killed in the strike. The Obama administration has never explained why Awlaki was killed, other than anonymous officials implying he was with a terror target at the time or that it was a lethal mistake. Awlaki’s estranged father, Anwar al Awlaki, was a radical pro-al Qaeda imam whose sermons influenced and inspired many terrorists in the English speaking world. The elder Awlaki, who was also a U.S. citizen, was an enigmatic figure who supported George W. Bush’s 2000 election campaign, spoke at the Pentagon shortly after 9-11, and went on to become an important propaganda figure for the growing radical Islamist movement after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. He was killed in a U.S. drone strike two weeks before his son was killed.

Home video of Abdulrahman Awlaki playing with his younger siblings in the family’s courtyard in 2009. The 16-year-old U.S. citizen was killed in a drone strike on October 14, 2011, in Yemen.

The younger Awlaki, who was living with his grandparents in Sanaa, had not seen his father in years at the time of his death and has never been linked to any terrorism.

The designation of al Banna by the State Department — and the confirmation he is indeed alive — once again raises an important question of the Obama administration: Why was this 16-year-old U.S. citizen killed in a drone strike authorized by the president of the United States?

Below is an excerpt from my book “Dirty Wars” that deals with Abdulrahman’s killing and the questions around al Banna:

Nasser Awlaki [Abdulrahman’s grandfather] received a phone call from his family in Shabwah. “Some of our relatives went to the place where [Abdulrahman] was killed, and they saw the area where he was killed. And they told us he was buried with the others in one grave because they were blown up to pieces by the drone. So they could not put them in separate graves,” Nasser told me. “They put three or four of them in one grave because they were cut into pieces. The people who were there could recognize only the back of Abdulrahman’s hair. But they could not recognize his face or anything else.” As the horror was setting in that their eldest grandson had been killed just two weeks after the death of their eldest child, Nasser and [his wife] Saleha watched in disbelief as numerous news reports identified Abdulrahman as being twenty-one years old, with anonymous U.S. military officials referring to him as a “military-aged” male. Some reports intimated that he was an al Qaeda supporter and that he had been killed while meeting with Ibrahim al Banna, an Egyptian citizen described as the “media coordinator” for AQAP.

Days after the killing of Abdulrahman, the United States released a statement, as usual feigning ignorance about who was responsible for the strike, even though “unnamed officials” in the United States and Yemen had confirmed the strike to almost all media outlets that inquired. “We have seen press reports that AQAP senior official Ibrahim al Banna was killed last Friday in Yemen and that several others, including the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, were with al Banna at the time,” National Security Council spokesman Thomas Vietor told the press, in a statement that strangely cast Abdulrahman as something between an al Qaeda associate and a hapless tourist. “For over the past year, the Department of State has publicly urged U.S. citizens not to travel to Yemen and has encouraged those already in Yemen to leave because of the continuing threat of violence and the presence of terrorist organizations, including AQAP, throughout the country.”

A still from a home video of Abdulrahman Awlaki playing with his younger siblings in the family’s courtyard in 2009. The sixteen-year-old U.S. citizen was killed in a drone strike on October 14, 2011, in Yemen.

For the Awlaki family, their private pain was overwhelming. After Anwar was killed, “People flocked to our house to pay condolences and show sympathy and I was in state of complete disbelief and denial,” recalled Anwar’s sister, Abir. “They kept on coming for the next two weeks, when we were yet struck again by the murder of Anwar’s oldest son, Abdulrahman. The skinny, smiling, curly-haired boy was murdered; and for what? What was he found guilty of?” she asked. “The shock of losing Abdulrahman only fourteen days after his father was unbearable. I can’t wipe the picture of my father’s reaction upon receiving the news. It is hard — hard for a father to lose his oldest son and then his first and favorite grandchild. The entire house was traumatized and hurt by every sense of the word.”

The CIA claimed that it had not carried out the strike, asserting that the supposed target, Ibrahim Banna, was not on the agency’s hit list. That led to speculation that the strike that killed Abdulrahman and his relatives was a JSOC strike. Senior U.S. officials told the Washington Post that “the two kill lists don’t match, but offered conflicting explanations as to why.” The officials added that Abdulrahman was an “unintended casualty.” A JSOC official told me that the intended target was not killed in the strike, though he would not say who the target was. On October 20, 2011, military officials presented a closed briefing on the JSOC strike to the Senate Armed Services Committee. With the exception of the statements from anonymous U.S. officials, the United States offered no public explanation for the strike. The mystery deepened when AQAP released a statement claiming that Banna was, in fact, still alive. “These lies and allegations announced by the government … are not unusual … the government has falsely declared the death of mujahedeens many times,” the statement declared. The Awlakis began to wonder if perhaps Abdulrahman was, in fact, the target of the strike.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, one of the handful of U.S. lawmakers who would have access to all intelligence on the strike, seemed to suggest that was the case when asked about the killing of the two Awlakis and Samir Khan. “I do know this,” he said on CNN, “the American citizens who have been killed overseas … are terrorists, and, frankly, if anyone in the world deserved to be killed, those three did deserve to be killed.”

Robert Gibbs, Obama’s former White House press secretary and a senior official in the president’s 2012 reelection campaign, was also asked about the strike that killed Abdulrahman. “It’s an American citizen that is being targeted without due process of law, without trial. And, he’s underage. He’s a minor,” reporter Sierra Adamson told Gibbs, during a press gaggle after a presidential debate where Gibbs was serving as a surrogate for Obama. Gibbs shot back: “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well-being of their chil- dren. I don’t think becoming an al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business.”

The Awlakis were left only with questions about why their grandson had been killed. They wondered if somehow the US government had used Abdulrahman to find Anwar. Perhaps, as had happened with the killing of the Yemeni regime’s political opponents in the past, the United States had been fed false intelligence about Abdulrahman’s age and connections to al Qaeda. While emphasizing that they were not prone to conspiracy theories, they told me it was difficult to imagine why Abdulrahman would have been killed, especially if Banna was not there. Who, then, was the target? “It is up to the U.S. government to be sure about the kind of information they get before they make any action against anybody. So I don’t believe it was just an accident. They must have followed him,” Nasser said. “But they wanted to cover up the story, and that’s why they claimed that he was twenty-one years old, in order to justify his killing. Or maybe, as they mentioned, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.” He paused before adding, “I don’t think we can buy this argument.”

An anonymous US official later told the Washington Post that Abdulrahman’s killing was “an outrageous mistake … They were going after the guy sitting next to him.” But no one ever identified who that someone was. As far as the family knows, their son was sitting next to his teenage cousins, none of whom were affiliated with al Qaeda. Decisions on “targets, drones, these are made only by the highest U.S. government authorities, the CIA and all that. Why did they specifically target these guys?” Nasser demanded. “I want answers from the United States government.”

The Obama administration would fight passionately to keep those answers secret, invoking the State Secrets Privilege repeatedly — just as President Bush had done throughout his eight years in office.

Top photo: A Yemeni boy walks past a mural depicting a U.S. drone, with text reading ” Why did you kill my family” in the capital Sanaa in December 2013.

The post Alleged Target of Drone Strike That Killed American Teenager Is Alive, According to State Department appeared first on The Intercept.

“If the american [sic] people are not willing to release some freedoms, they cannot blame the IC when they can’t stop” domestic terror attacks because of the intelligence agencies “having their hands tied by Law [sic] & policy,” the “constituent” wrote. He adds that Americans “cannot have your cake and eat it too,” and then offers what has become a dangerous cliche in the post-Snowden mentality of the intelligence community: “So if one has nothing to hide why would a little government watching for mass protection be such a big question.” The letter ends: “WE SUPPORT YOU.”

But soon after Clapper’s post, it became clear he did not actually speak for “all of the women and men” in the intelligence community. While the blog is only available to people with proper security clearance, Clapper does welcome commenters. The first two intelligence people to comment on his post took Clapper, and his “constituent,” to the woodshed. “I think it was inappropriate for DNI Clapper to respond in a way that indicates he agrees with the premise of the writer’s letter, namely, that government must expand its domestic “watching” and the people must give up “some ‘rights’ in the interest of the greater good,” one IC commenter posted. “The head of the US Intelligence Community — the business of which is foreign intelligence —should not be taking sides on matters of domestic intelligence policy.”

Another commenter wrote that, like Clapper, he agreed with the letter’s author about “the fact that it is impossible to defend 100% against these kinds of attacks given the restrictions placed on America’s security forces and the freedom and range of targets enjoyed by the attackers.” However, this commenter, who went by the name Wormy, warned against being “too quick to release your freedoms and “rights” in the name of security.”

Among the points Wormy made:

• “Ridding ourselves of certain rights, such as those outlined by the 4th amendment, will absolutely not guarantee our security or freedom from attack.”
• “Always be careful about surrendering rights. History shows that governments don’t have a great track record of giving them back once they’ve taken them. You may think your government is different, but that’s just a perception created by the fact that the American people have fought tooth and nail to see their rights are protected.”

Wormy concludes with the following:

“The Constitution and the Bill of Rights have survived for centuries, defended by courageous man and women both in the armed forces, in various civil rights movements, and just individual citizens standing up for themselves and others. They have made incredible sacrifices and endured tremendous hardships to pass these sacred rights down to you. Do you want to be part of the generation that threw it all out because a group of Islamic radicals is posing a threat to you that statistically doesn’t even come close to the threat posed to you by lightening [sic]?”

We don’t know if Clapper ever responded to Wormy or other commenters. But we do know that Clapper is a big fan of expanding domestic surveillance operations and doing away with some civil liberties in the name of security. Clapper has submitted his resignation, but rest assured his successor will carry the torch of domestic surveillance. Will the Intercept blog continue to secretly publish under the new administration? As Donald Trump would tweet, Stay tuned!

Documents published with this story:

• Documents

The post James Clapper Has a Classified Blog. It’s Called “Intercept.” appeared first on The Intercept.

Both are poison for any country that wishes to rule itself.

So if we’re serious about being a self-governing republic, we have to demand that President Obama declassify as much intelligence as possible that Russia may have intervened in the 2016 presidential election.

Taking Donald Trump’s position — that we should just ignore the question of Russian hacking and “move on” — would be a disaster.

Relying on a hazy war of leaks from the CIA, FBI, various politicians, and their staff is an equally terrible idea.

A congressional investigation would be somewhat better, but that would take years — like the investigations of the intelligence on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction — and would be fatally compromised by the Democrats’ political timidity and GOP opposition.

The only path forward that makes sense is for Obama to order the release of as much evidence as possible underlying the reported “high confidence” of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia both intervened in the election and did so with the intention of aiding Trump’s candidacy.

Intelligence agencies hate, often with good reason, to publicly reveal how they obtain information, or even the information itself, since that can make it clear how they got it. But the government would not need to reveal its most sensitive sources and methods — e.g., which specific Vladimir Putin aides we have on our payroll — to release enough evidence to aid the public debate over interference in our election by a powerful nation state.

And if there were ever a situation in which it was crucial to lean in the direction of more rather than less disclosure, it’s now. Obama should make that clear to the intelligence agencies, and that if forced to he is willing to wield his power as president to declassify anything he deems appropriate.

The current discourse on this issue is plagued by partisan gibberish — there is a disturbing trend emerging that dictates that if you don’t believe Russia hacked the election or if you simply demand evidence for this tremendously significant allegation, you must be a Trump apologist or a Soviet agent.

The reality, however, is that Trump’s reference to the Iraq War and the debacle over weapons of mass destruction is both utterly cynical and a perfectly valid point. U.S. intelligence agencies have repeatedly demonstrated that they regularly both lie and get things horribly wrong. In this case they may well be correct, but they cannot expect Americans to simply take their word for it.

It’s also the case that the U.S. has a long history of interfering in other countries’ elections, and far worse: The U.S. has overthrown democratically elected governments the world over. In fact, in 2006 Hillary Clinton herself criticized the George W. Bush administration for not doing “something to determine who was going to win” in Palestinian elections. It would not be shocking in the least if Russia sought to interfere in the U.S. electoral process.

But let’s have some proof.

In his Farewell Address of 1796, George Washington wrote, “Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. But that jealousy to be useful must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defense against it.” That was good advice then, and it’s good advice now. We have to force our politicians to take it seriously.

And if it comes to pass that the U.S. government refuses to back up these serious claims with evidence, then perhaps a patriotic whistleblower will do the public an important service. Here is our offer at The Intercept: If anyone has solid proof that Russia interfered with U.S. elections, send it to us via SecureDrop and we will verify its legitimacy and publish it.

The post Obama Must Declassify Evidence of Russian Hacking appeared first on The Intercept.

The incoming vice president, Mike Pence, has not elicited the same reaction, instead often painted as the reasonable adult on the ticket, a “counterbalance” to Trump and a “bridge to the establishment.” However, there is every reason to regard him as, if anything, even more terrifying than the president-elect.

Pence’s ascent to the second most powerful position in the U.S. government is a tremendous coup for the radical religious right. Pence — and his fellow Christian supremacist militants — would not have been able to win the White House on their own. For them, Donald Trump was a godsend. “This may not be our preferred candidate, but that doesn’t mean it may not be God’s candidate to do something that we don’t see,” said David Barton, a prominent Christian-right activist and president of Wall Builders, an organization dedicated to making the U.S. government enforce “biblical values.” In June, Barton prophesied: “We may look back in a few years and say, ‘Wow, [Trump] really did some things that none of us expected.’”

Trump is a Trojan horse for a cabal of vicious zealots who have long craved an extremist Christian theocracy, and Pence is one of its most prized warriors. With Republican control of the House and Senate and the prospect of dramatically and decisively tilting the balance of the Supreme Court to the far right, the incoming administration will have a real shot at bringing the fire and brimstone of the second coming to Washington.

“The enemy, to them, is secularism. They want a God-led government. That’s the only legitimate government,” contends Jeff Sharlet, author of two books on the radical religious right, including “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.” “So when they speak of business, they’re speaking not of something separate from God, but they’re speaking of what, in Mike Pence’s circles, would be called biblical capitalism, the idea that this economic system is God-ordained.”

One of Trump’s sons, Don Jr., reportedly said that his father’s vice president would be in charge of domestic and foreign policy, while Trump would focus on the vague mission of “Making America Great Again.” Trump’s campaign subsequently claimed the story was “made up,” though Trump has consistently denied saying things he is on record as saying, so who knows? In any case, the implications of a Pence vice presidency are vast. Pence combines the most horrid aspects of Dick Cheney’s worldview with a belief that Tim LaHaye’s “Left Behind” novels are not fiction, but an omniscient crystal ball.

While Trump has flip-flopped on a variety of issues, Pence has been a reliable stalwart throughout his public life in the cause of Christian jihad.

How the GOP foisted Pence on Trump is undoubtedly a fascinating story that hopefully will some day be revealed. Obviously, Pence gave Trump badly needed credibility with evangelical voters and the GOP establishment, but Pence’s selection portends a governing apocalypse. While Trump has flip-flopped on a variety of issues, from abortion to immigration to war and health care, Pence has been a reliable stalwart throughout his public life in the cause of Christian jihad — never wavering in his commitment to America-First militarism, the criminalizing of abortion, and utter hatred for gay people (unless they go into conversion therapy “to change their sexual behavior,” which Pence has suggested the government pay for).

He supported making the Patriot Act permanent and wants to ban the burning of the U.S. flag. Pence does not believe federal law enforcement agencies should have to get a FISA warrant to conduct domestic surveillance and voted against requiring any warrant for domestic wiretapping. As governor of Indiana, he did quietly sign a bill to limit the use of Stingray devices by local law enforcement, though it was during the early stages of the Snowden revelations and the public concern about government surveillance was intense.

Pence supported giving retroactive immunity to telecom companies implicated in warrantless surveillance. He does not want congressional oversight of CIA interrogations — which Trump believes should include waterboarding and other torture “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” Pence has paid lip service to the illegality of torture but said that “enhanced interrogation” has saved lives. He has characterized relationship-building, non-coercive interrogation strategies as “Oprah Winfrey methods.” Pence is against whistleblower protections that would prohibit retaliation for reporting crimes or misdeeds. In 2002, the ACLU gave him a 7 percent rating on civil rights.

He wants the U.S. to resume the practice of holding new prisoners at Guantánamo Bay or, as Trump put it, they plan “to fill it up.” Pence also supports expanded use of the military tribunal system.

Pence has claimed that he wants to “economically isolate” Iran rather than engage in a military attack. But should Israel decide to conduct pre-emptive strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, he said in 2010, “if the world knows nothing else, let the world know this: that America will stand with Israel.” He supported a failed legislative effort to make it U.S. policy “to use all means necessary to confront and eliminate nuclear threats posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the use of military force.” Both in rhetoric and policy, Pence has compared “radical Islam” to the “evil empire of the Soviet Union” and said that he and Trump will “name the enemy” and “marshal the resources of our nation and our allies to hunt them down and destroy them before they threaten us.”

“We’ll see Roe v. Wade consigned to the ash heap of history where it belongs,” Pence promised.

As has been widely reported, as governor of Indiana, Pence signed a law requiring fetal tissue from abortions to be buried or cremated, making his state one of the most medieval in its approach to reproductive rights. The fetus burial law, which Pence claimed would “ensure the dignified final treatment of the unborn,” was suspended at the 11th hour by a federal judge, who said it was likely unconstitutional. Pence has been at the forefront of the movement to defund Planned Parenthood. “We’ll see Roe v. Wade consigned to the ash heap of history where it belongs,” Pence promised. He has long sought to have 14th Amendment protections applied to fetuses, arguing that they should be declared persons. In Congress, Pence voted to criminally punish doctors who performed late-term abortions, except in cases where the woman’s life was in danger. A doctor who “kills a human fetus” faces up to two years in prison, according to that law.

Pence opposed efforts to widen hate crimes laws to include attacks on LGBT people. He tried to block federal funding of HIV treatments unless they came with a requirement to advocate against gay relationships. Pence opposes non-straight people serving in the military. “Homosexuality is incompatible with military service because the presence of homosexuals in the ranks weakens unit cohesion,” he said.

Pence believes “the only truly safe sex … is no sex” and once (falsely) claimed on CNN that “condoms are a very, very poor protection against sexually transmitted diseases.”

Pence supports the “wall” Trump has said he will build, believes in self-deportation, and has staked out one of the most virulent positions against the U.S. taking in refugees from Syria. In defending a proposed ban on Syrian refugees entering Indiana, Pence said it was necessary to “ensure the safety and security of all Hoosiers.” He has advocated for greater militarization of the so-called war on drugs, including escalated military patrols. Pence denounced activists and others protesting recent police killings of unarmed African-Americans, charging they “seize upon tragedy in the wake of police action shootings.” He said he found it offensive to “use a broad brush to accuse law enforcement of implicit bias or institutional racism and that really has got to stop.” He has said that “police officers are the best of us.”

Pence is a strong supporter of stop-and-frisk programs, which in New York were used overwhelmingly against people of color. “It’s on a sound constitutional footing,” said Pence, who added that he wanted the practice expanded nationwide. “Stop-and-frisk literally saved lives in New York City when it was implemented, and it’s been implemented in cities around the country.”

One interesting difference between Pence and Trump centers on the First Amendment. Trump has made clear he believes in waging war against a free press and has encouraged hostility toward journalists covering his campaign. While in Congress, Pence was a major force behind trying to get a federal shield law to protect journalists’ rights to maintain confidential sources. A former radio talk show host, Pence said he was inspired to act by the case of then-New York Times reporter Judy Miller, who was imprisoned for refusing to answer questions about her sources during the scandal over the outing of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame. No such law was ever passed and the bill provided wide latitude to nullify the protections of journalists in national security situations.

When he joined the ticket with Trump last summer, Pence claimed they were internally reviewing the campaign policy on the treatment of journalists covering Trump events. If anything, the situation worsened as the campaign moved forward.

On health care, Pence is now on board with repealing the Affordable Care Act, though as governor he did embrace the law in a pretty bold act of hypocrisy. He also supported denying non-emergency care for people who cannot afford a Medicare co-payment and opposed expanding the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Pence is what might be termed “climate change curious,” though earlier in his political career, he wrote an essay in which he asserted, “Global warming is a myth. The global warming treaty is a disaster. There, I said it.” More recently, Pence has kind of acknowledged the fact-based nature of human action contributing to climate change but opposes ending any of the industrial, governmental, or corporate practices responsible. He has consistently advocated withdrawing from climate change agreements and treaties. Pence has an impressively atrocious record on environmental issues and a slavish devotion to big energy and big oil companies.

He opposed government assistance to U.S. workers who lost their jobs because of free trade agreements and has supported every neoliberal trade program since his time in public office. Pence was a loud proponent of the Trans-Pacific Partnership until he joined Trump on the ticket, and now he claims to be pondering the “wisdom” of the agreement.

Donald Trump and Mike Pence sit together during an event at the Pastors Leadership Conference at New Spirit Revival Center on Sept. 21, 2016, in Cleveland, Ohio.

Photo: Evan Vucci/AP

Pence opposed imposing restrictions on no-bid contracting, which may help explain his close relationship to Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater. In December 2007, three months after Blackwater operatives gunned down 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, Pence and his Republican Study Committee, which served “the purpose of advancing a conservative social and economic agenda in the House of Representatives,” organized a gathering to welcome Prince to Washington. But their relationship is not just forged in wars. Prince and his mother, Elsa, have been among the top funders of scores of anti-gay-marriage ballot initiatives across the country and have played a key role in financing efforts to criminalize abortion.

Prince has long given money to Pence’s political campaigns, and toward the end of the presidential election, he contributed $100,000 to the pro-Trump/Pence Super PAC Make America Number 1. Prince’s mother kicked in another $50,000. Ironically, Erik Prince — who portrays himself as a mix between Indiana Jones, Rambo, Captain America, and Pope Benedict — is now working with the Chinese government through his latest “private security” firm.

Erik Prince’s father, Edgar, built up a very successful manufacturing business in Holland, Michigan, and became one of the premier bankrollers of what came to be known as the radical religious right. They gave Gary Bauer the seed money to start the Family Research Council and poured money into James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. “Ed Prince was not an empire builder. He was a Kingdom builder,” Bauer recalled soon after the elder Prince’s death. “For him, personal success took a back seat to spreading the Gospel and fighting for the moral restoration of our society.” Erik Prince’s sister Betsy married Dick DeVos, whose father, Richard, founded the multilevel marketing firm Amway and went on to own the Orlando Magic basketball team. The two families merged together like the monarchies of old Europe and swiftly emerged as platinum-level contributors to far-right Christian causes and political figures.

The Prince and DeVos families gave the seed money for what came to be known as the Republican Revolution when Newt Gingrich became House speaker in 1994 on a far-right platform known as the Contract with America. The Prince and DeVos clans also invested heavily in a scheme developed by Dobson to engage in back-door lobbying activities by forming “prayer warrior” networks of people who would call politicians to advocate for Dobson’s religious and political agenda. Instead of lobbying, which the organization would have been prohibited from doing because of its tax and legal status, they would claim they were “praying” for particular policies.

The Princes consistently poured money into criminalizing abortion, privatizing education, blocking gay rights, and other right-wing causes centered around their interpretation of Christianity. The family, especially Erik, was very close to Richard Nixon’s “hatchet man,” Watergate conspirator Charles “Chuck” Colson. The author of Nixon’s enemies list, Colson was the first person sentenced in the Watergate scandal, after pleading guilty to obstruction of justice in the investigation of the dirty tricks campaign against Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War. Colson became a born-again Christian before going to prison, and after his release, he started the Prison Fellowship, which sought to convert prisoners to Christianity to counter what Colson saw as the Islamic menace in U.S. prisons. Erik Prince funded this as well and went on prison visits with Colson.

“There’s a coalescing idea that somehow, obviously, God is doing something with Trump.”

All of these figures, bankrolled by the Prince family, are the ideological and theological ascendants of Mike Pence, who called Colson “a dear friend and mentor.” Colson and his allies viewed the administration of Bill Clinton as a secular “regime” and openly contemplated a faith-based revolution. In the early ’90s, Colson teamed up with conservative evangelical minister-turned-Catholic priest Richard Neuhaus and others to build a unified movement. That work ultimately led in 1994 to the controversial document “Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium.” (Note: I wrote extensively about this in my book “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army” and drew heavily on that for this story.) Pence has described himself as “a born-again, evangelical Catholic.”

The ECT manifesto declared:

The century now drawing to a close has been the greatest century of missionary expansion in Christian history. We pray and we believe that this expansion has prepared the way for yet greater missionary endeavor in the first century of the Third Millennium. The two communities in world Christianity that are most evangelistically assertive and most rapidly growing are Evangelicals and Catholics.

The signatories called for a unification of these religions in a common missionary cause, that “all people will come to faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.” They asserted that religion is “privileged and foundational in our legal order” and spelled out the need to defend “the moral truths of our constitutional order.” The document was most passionate in its opposition to abortion, calling abortion on demand “a massive attack on the dignity, rights, and needs of women. Abortion is the leading edge of an encroaching culture of death.” It also called for “moral education” in schools, advocating for educational institutions “that transmit to coming generations our cultural heritage, which is inseparable from the formative influence of religion, especially Judaism and Christianity.”

The ECT signers, according to author Damon Linker — who worked for Neuhaus for years — “had not only forged a historic theological and political alliance. They had also provided a vision of America’s religious and political future. It would be a religious future in which upholding theological orthodoxy and moral traditionalism overrode doctrinal disagreements. And it would be a political future in which the most orthodox and traditionalist Christians set the public tone and policy agenda for the nation.”

In November 1996 — the month Clinton crushed Bob Dole and won re-election — an organ of what Linker termed the theoconservative movement, Richard Neuhaus’s journal First Things, published a “symposium” titled “The End of Democracy?” Acknowledging that it might be viewed as “irresponsibly provocative and even alarmist,” the symposium bluntly questioned “whether we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime.” A series of essays raised the prospect of a major confrontation between the church and the “regime,” at times seeming to predict a civil-war scenario or Christian insurrection against the government, exploring possibilities “ranging from noncompliance to resistance to civil disobedience to morally justified revolution.”

Chuck Colson authored one of the five major essays in the issue, as did the extremist judge Robert Bork, whom Reagan had tried unsuccessfully to appoint to the Supreme Court in 1987. Colson’s essay was titled “Kingdoms in Conflict.” “Events in America may have reached the point where the only political action believers can take is some kind of direct, extra-political confrontation of the judicially controlled regime,” Colson wrote, adding that a “showdown between church and state may be inevitable. This is not something for which Christians should hope. But it is something for which they need to prepare.”

Dobson said the essays “laid an indisputable case for the illegitimacy of the regime now passing itself off as a democracy,” adding, “I stand in a long tradition of Christians who believe that rulers may forfeit their divine mandate when they systematically contravene the divine moral law. … We may rapidly be approaching the sort of Rubicon that our spiritual forebears faced: Choose Caesar or God. I take no pleasure in this prospect; I pray against it. But it is worth noting that such times have historically been rejuvenating for the faith.”

Donald Trump’s grasp of the bible is certainly not up to the standards of Pence and the religious zealots behind him. “Two Corinthians 3:17, that’s the whole ballgame,” Trump declared — in the same way he spits out “Make America Great Again” — in front of an audience at an evangelical college on the campaign trail. People laughed. At him. It is Second Corinthians.

Perhaps that episode is telling. The radical religious right doesn’t need to save Trump’s soul. As they saw in the campaign, Trump has staked out a hateful agenda — one that tracks quite well with the crusades of Pence and his fellow apostles. Even if elements of Trump’s vile rhetoric and his various threats were a psychotic form of performance art, or mere opportunistic political strategy, as some suggest, they have set the stage for the pursuit of a civilizational war that poses a dire threat to vulnerable populations throughout the world. President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and a slew of prominent Democrats have publicly said that Americans should give Trump a chance. With Mike Pence seated at the right hand of the father, running foreign and domestic policy, they will do so at their peril.

The post Mike Pence Will Be the Most Powerful Christian Supremacist in U.S. History appeared first on The Intercept.

While many Democrats are pointing fingers outside their own ranks to make sense of the stunning defeat of Hillary Clinton, few are willing to examine how their choice of nominee and the campaign they ran shaped the result. In this podcast, Intercept Editor-in-Chief Betsy Reed and co-founders Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill break down how we got here and what a Trump presidency means for civil liberties, surveillance, war, abortion rights, and other issues. Below is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation.

Jeremy Scahill: Thanks for joining us. I’m Jeremy Scahill at The Intercept coming to you from American purgatory. The phrase President Trump is going to be a reality for at least the next four years. To discuss how this happened and what it means I’m joined by two of my colleagues, Betsy Reed, who is the editor-in-chief of The Intercept, and Glenn Greenwald, my fellow co-founder of The Intercept and columnist and journalist. Glenn, you wrote a piece in reaction to the election, “Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit” — tell us about that piece.

Glenn Greenwald: It was inspired, essentially, by the immediate effort of the Democratic Party and their spokespeople in the media who had basically devoted themselves single-mindedly to Hillary Clinton’s election over the last 18 months to immediately start searching for everybody they can find to cast blame on, other than themselves, for what is now really the reduction of the Democratic Party into a small fringe minority party.

James Carville said that he doesn’t recall in his lifetime any party being as weak across the board as the Democratic Party. You would think that when a party faces such devastating losses over time, but especially such a crushing defeat like this one to such a weak candidate like Donald Trump, there would be some introspection, some self-examination, and there was almost none of that. There was a desire to just say that it was everybody else’s fault.

I was particularly disturbed by the way that they were casting and maligning essentially all of the people who had committed the sin of voting what they regarded as the wrong way by simply dismissing them all as primitive or troglodyte or racist or misogynist. Even though of course many of them are, many of them are not, and even for the ones that do have that as part of their motive, there are independently of that a lot of long, deep trends that have destroyed the welfare and economic security of tens of millions of people and put them into a mindset where they want to destroy this system of authority that they blame. I think that is what caused Brexit and I think to a large degree that’s what’s caused Trump. It’s urgent that we think about what these policies are that have done that to these people: who it is, who has done it, what the reasons are, and how to stop. Watching them blame the media or WikiLeaks or Putin or Jill Stein or whomever they could find seemed very clearly to be a way of avoiding that conversation. My piece was really about urging everybody to have that conversation.

JS: Right. In some ways it really felt like the closing stages of this election was like the series finale of “The Americans” where Cold War propaganda was dumped out upon the American people. There was some bizarre coalition of Julian Assange, Putin, and Trump all in bed together to subvert the glorious American democracy that would take hold as soon as Hillary Clinton won, and I was, as you do often, Glenn, I was battling people on Twitter who were basically trying to blame the election result on Jill Stein of the Green Party and her voters, and Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party and their voters, and none of the people that were going after third parties in this country wanted to talk about the atrocious policies of the corporatist candidate that the Democrats ran.

No one wants to talk about the fact that the Clintons are perceived as corrupt royalty by a large segment of the U.S. population.

No one wants to talk about the fact that the Clintons are perceived as corrupt royalty by a large segment of the U.S. population: a candidate who was hawkish who deservedly got the endorsement of many leading neocons. Instead it was, “Well, whoever voted for Jill Stein and Gary Johnson, you’re a misogynist and you are responsible for this.” The fact is that according to the exit polls, 9 percent of registered Democrats actually voted for Donald Trump. Seven percent of Republicans voted for Hillary Clinton, but why isn’t there this rage at their own partisan Kool-Aid-drinking base? Instead, it’s like they envision a world that they want where people are only allowed to vote for the candidates that they choose, that these individual people choose. And that exercising your right to vote for a third party somehow means that you are not fully participating in the democratic process and, in fact, you’re sabotaging the anointing of the chosen candidate of the Democratic Party.

I wanted ask Betsy: On this issue we have seen a kind of development on social media but also in columns written by, well, on the one hand, very partisan, life-long Democrats, blaming everyone else except their candidate, but [on the other hand] this was viewed in the sort of mainstream world of feminist writers as a referendum on misogyny and a referendum on sexism — and if you didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton then you are part of electing a women-hating punisher who is going to mercilessly strip away women’s rights in this country. Now, no doubt that Hillary Clinton endured an incredible barrage of sexist motivated attacks that a man certainly would not have received had they run the exact same campaign as Hillary Clinton, but what do you think about that line that is being stated quite bluntly by high-profile feminists that anyone who didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton is part of ensuring an overt misogynist theocracy in the United States?

Betsy Reed: Well, I guess I would say I have somewhat complicated feelings about that because I actually do believe that this election was an absolute tragedy for American feminism. It’s a complete and terrible defeat and I think that what Donald Trump displayed during the campaign and throughout his entire career is just nothing but contempt and hatred toward women. I have a 13-year-old daughter and to try to explain to her how this man could have been elected despite all of that, despite that record, I mean, it’s very difficult, a very painful conversation to have, and I think a lot of women are just shell-shocked about that.

So on one level, I have a lot of empathy for that, and I feel that myself. But at the same time, I think it’s a big mistake not to — as Glenn said — take this moment to reflect a little bit on what this reveals about our movements and about our priorities. And I feel that nominating this candidate [Clinton] who is so deeply compromised, who is so embedded in the corporate elite that has wrecked American democracy was an impossible thing — and a lot of feminists, real feminists, supported Bernie Sanders for exactly this reason. They were not “Bernie bros.” I am 100 percent a feminist and I just could never get on board with Hillary Clinton’s version of feminism. So I think we as feminists need to have a reckoning and a real discussion of what it means to be a feminist because we do face tremendous challenges in the period to come. I mean, PENCE. It’s just a complete nightmare. On a symbolic level Trump is a total disaster but Pence has made his entire political career out of the determination to abolish women’s reproductive rights. So that is an incredibly important struggle in the period to come.

I have a 13-year-old daughter and to try to explain to her how this man could have been elected despite that record of hatred and contempt toward women, I mean, it’s a very painful conversation.

JS: Right, and Mike Pence — clearly it was a very strategically wise decision on the part of the Republicans to sort of foist him onto Trump as his running mate because Mike Pence is from the Rick Santorum wing of the Republican Party, whose primary issues are stopping gay people from marrying each other and stopping women from making their own decisions on what happens with their bodies. Everything else is secondary to that — that is their major obsession.

But to transition from the earlier point that you made, it doesn’t seem like the institutional Democratic Party is learning any lessons from this. There’s other debates going on in the rank and file, ordinary people that are against Trump, but the idea that Howard Dean just threw his hat into the ring to be the next chair of the Democratic National Committee raises a lot of questions about how much introspection they’re actually doing. Keith Ellison, who is very progressive, first Muslim member of the U.S. Congress — African-American congressman from Minneapolis — is being talked about as a potential DNC chair. Glenn, can you talk a little bit about what that represents, the idea that Howard Dean could be the next head of the DNC?

GG: I was thinking about this this morning in terms of what happened in this election and how the Democratic Party in the past has succeeded, and if you look at the last 25 years of Democratic Party politics you find this really interesting trend which is: the Democratic politicians who succeeded, who won the national election, which is Bill Clinton and then Barack Obama, had one thing in common which is that they both ran as these hardcore devoted consummate outsiders. I’m not part of Washington; I’ve never been a part of Washington, in the case of Clinton I’ve only been a southern governor, in the case of Obama I’ve only been a senator for four years, and what I want to do is go in and radically and fundamentally change how this entire place that you all hate and that we all hate, how it functions. And they won.

And if you look at the ones over the same time who have lost, which is Al Gore and John Kerry and now Hillary Clinton, they are exactly the opposites. They were completely incapable of pretending to be outside forces. They were obviously with great accuracy identified as being consummate Washington insiders and so it was obvious to everybody that they would go in and perpetuate and protect and safeguard and continue to be beneficiaries of this Washington establishment and status quo that most of the people in the country hate, and for that reason they lost.

And I think Hillary Clinton was probably, of all of them, the most identifiable as a Washington insider exactly because of all the reasons that her supporters tried to claim she was most qualified and all of that. And yes, she was the most qualified in the sense that she has spent the most time inside Washington, in the most varied capacities. But that’s exactly what made her such a great liability and I think what this reflects is a fundamental flaw in how Democrats think. Especially their spokespeople, the opinion-making elite in the party, the operatives and in the media who live in these coastal cities, regard these institutions as fundamentally good and trustworthy and worthy of admiration, and of course some tinkering and some reform, but by and large they’re forces for good that ought to continue. This is the standard liberal mindset of believing in institutions of authority.

And so when you keep continuously holding yourself out as purveyors of and defenders and protectors of institutions in a culture that most of the people in the country completely despise, of course the country is going to turn its back on you and will reject you because you’re purporting to defend something that they hate.

And Howard Dean, you know people think of him at this fire-breathing liberal and maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t back in 2003 when people remember him, but since 2004 when he lost, he has done nothing but cash in on his political celebrity. He has become the worst part of DC elite corruption. He lobbies for designated terrorist groups like MEK, which is this Iranian cult that has long wanted U.S. intervention in that part of the world. He lobbies for health care and for corporate companies. He claims he’s not technically a lobbyist, though at The Intercept, as Lee Fang wrote, whether he’s technically one or not he certainly acts like one. And to even contemplate the idea that somebody like that this consummate insider who is in bed with every corporate interest, every lobbying interest, could now be the face of the Democratic National Committee — just the mere possibility of anyone talking about that shows how no lessons have been learned.

I actually don’t think he will be the DNC chair; I think the symbolism of Keith Ellison being not only African-American, but the first Muslim elected to Congress, being part of the progressive wing, being a really effective communicator; I think he’ll probably end up being selected — I hope so — but the fact that people are even thinking of Dean reflects this ongoing pathology.

JS: Well and let’s remember that Keith Ellison was one of the few and one of the first members of Congress to openly endorse Bernie Sanders. And Keith Ellison also was a major part of trying to fight against the rigging of the primary system under Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s leadership at the DNC, which of course we now know from a variety of documents and public statements by people, that the whole thing was essentially a fraud intended to ensure that Bernie Sanders was not going to be the nominee and the ironic thing about that is he probably would have been the Democrats’ best chance of beating Donald Trump because Bernie Sanders was perceived as an outsider, despite the fact that he spent so much time in Washington. The ideas he was articulating were ideas that you never heard a high-profile winnable candidate put forward by the Democrats, and so —

BR: — Well, that is a counterfactual that we’ll never know. I mean, because I do believe that you’re right, but I also think that the power of Wall Street is tremendous and they would have been virtually united against him.

JS: Well, I mean, that that may well be true —

GG: — Maybe, maybe, but I think they still they would’ve feared Trump. And yes, they don’t like Sanders ideologically, but they view Trump as this kind of like unpredictable and unstable maniac and they hate instability and unpredictability more than they hate anything else. I think they would’ve hated both. I think Mike Bloomberg probably would have run.

JS: But I think part of the point that I’m making, though — I am not claiming that Bernie Sanders would have won; what I am saying is that I think he would have been a more viable opponent to Donald Trump, for a couple of specific reasons but one very broad reason: I think that a lot of the people — for instance the state of Wisconsin where I’m from — I think a lot of the people, including rank and file union members, that did vote for Trump did so because of the trade policies linked to the Clintons and that Hillary Clinton herself we know called the “gold standard,” as Donald Trump kept repeating about the TPP, jobs are being shipped overseas.

People are hurting. People that are genuinely progressives even I think felt like this was a referendum on the legacy of the Democrats, the institutional Democrats position on trade. That certainly wasn’t the only issue — race, sexism, all of those things played a role; but I do think that Bernie Sanders tapped into the same kind of emotion that Trump did in a kind of parallel universe and I think that that’s worth talking about. Hillary Clinton didn’t say Bernie Sanders name — she tried to avoid saying that man’s name for months and months and what we saw was that when people are allowed to hear those ideas articulated as Sanders did, which are held by wide swaths of the population that never get that kind of a platform, that it resonates with people and so that also is a commentary on the corrupt state of the debate process in this country. The two-party primary system, etc.

The popular vote showed there’s large support in this country for a politics of tolerance, of progressivism, around culture issues, around gender and race. That coalition is going to be an important bulwark against the hate that Trump represents.

BR: I agree with you, Jeremy, but I do think that to some degree there is a discussion among Democratic Party insiders looking back in a Monday-morning quarterbacking way at the tactical missteps of the campaign, and they say, “Oh, you know, she really should’ve listened to Bill and campaigned more in these states,” but I actually think that the problem with Hillary went much deeper because she really was the candidate who believed in TPP, she believed in trade, she was close to Wall Street, she couldn’t have gone there because if she had shown up, they wouldn’t have believed her — and for good reason. So you know I think we have to keep that in mind I also think, though that we should —

JS: — But that’s a bad idea then to have a candidate that you’re like, “Oh well we better not send her among ordinary people because they’re going to see that she’s an empire politician.”

BR: But at a broader level, we need to keep in mind as context the fact that she did win the popular vote in the country. So this is an important discussion about the Rust Belt and these economically punished communities and I think we have to reckon with that, but at the same time, the popular vote showed how there’s large support in this country for a politics of tolerance, of progressivism, around culture issues, around gender and race, and we should keep that in mind because that coalition is going to be an important bulwark against the hate that Trump represents.

GG: Yeah, she did win the popular vote; I think she probably will end up winning the popular vote by a few hundred thousand votes or so. So a relatively small margin. A big reason why she’s going to win the popular vote is because the number of votes she received in places like New York City and California increase significantly over what even Obama received in large part obviously due to fear and horror over the prospect of a Trump presidency. But I think that that’s really cold comfort for a couple of reasons. Number one is because campaigns don’t cater themselves to the popular vote but to the Electoral College. Who knows what the popular vote total would have been had Trump spent time in California or New York trying to increase his vote total in those places. He instead ignored those as he should have done and we have an Electoral College system, that’s where the campaigns devote themselves to winning.

And then, the other aspect of it is that it isn’t just this election. If you look at like the Democratic Party’s problems, it isn’t just the fact that Hillary Clinton just lost to Donald Trump. They are also a minority in the House, a minority in the Senate. They have a record low number of governorships. And then on the state level in terms of state legislatures and even like county commissions and city councils and school boards Republicans are completely dominant.

So it’s really a systemic failure on the part of the Democratic Party. So yes, Hillary Clinton won a couple hundred thousand more votes because a lot of people in Manhattan and Los Angeles and San Francisco turned out. But I agree with what Betsy just said which is that that we do have to keep in mind that there are a huge number of people in the country who are horrified by and angry about Donald Trump’s views, and we shouldn’t just be so downtrodden that we forget that we have real weapons as people who dissent and as people who want to resist it. And there’s a really good opportunity to galvanize huge numbers of people in a way that might be really like emboldening and clarifying about these political values. So I completely agree with that point I think it’s important to emphasize, but I don’t think that should be used to kind of paper over or diminish how much of a failure the Democratic Party has become in electoral politics in this country at every level.

JS: Well, but also if you look at Hillary Clinton’s concession speech delivered the next day, at the remarks that President Obama made and then, online, the various statements put out by all sorts of prominent Democrats and their backers and their lobbyist, etc. This notion, “Well, Trump is now our president and we have to give him a chance and we have to proceed with an open mind” — to me that’s an utterly ridiculous idea. The idea that you’re going to take someone who has openly espoused a desire to do mass deportation, to shut down the borders, to have a screening process for anyone who happens to be of a particular religion, i.e., Islam, that has openly said that he wants to overturn Roe v. Wade — what chance is there to give this person? I mean to me it shows the bankruptcy of partisan politics and embracing the system that produces these kinds of options. The idea that you don’t just immediately start from the position that this is going to be a disaster and you somehow wait for him to do something, you know, really outrageous — to me actually is a pretty devastating commentary on the state of the establishment Democratic Party.

BR: Yes, just look at the neocons who were so outraged by the prospect of a Trump presidency in the national security world and they’re already turning right around on that, they’re pivoting straight to —

JS: — “praying for our commander in chief” and they’re all going to want positions in that government which actually is —

GG: — And they’re going to get them —

JS: And they’re going to get them. It’s a good transition though to let’s actually now talk about what this means.

Isn’t it reckless and even amoral to start normalizing Trump and telling Americans they should treat him with an open mind? Isn’t our obligation instead to say we don’t accept this and we are going to stand up to it?

GG: No wait before we go on to something else, I think that’s actually a super interesting point that you raise that I just want to explore just a little bit. And I’m actually really interested in what you both have to say because this has been bothering me a lot. So think about this: I’ve just heard anecdotally from friends who have children, who are, like either the children of the same age as Betsy’s daughter or a little bit older like millennials in their college years. People like a lot of young people from Democratic families or liberal families or people who live on the coast are genuinely traumatized, like scared, about the fact that Donald Trump was just elected president and that was in part because he was often depicted as comparable essentially to like the rise of Hitler. Maybe sometimes the rhetoric didn’t go quite that far but that was definitely the tenor of a lot of this. And that wasn’t completely unjustified I mean he’s talking about things like deporting 11 million people and you know banning all Muslims beyond just like the standard Republican horror show about like raging wars on reproductive rights and the LGBT and all of that like genuinely things that are outside of the norm of all political decency.

So I understand why President Obama is shaking hands with him in the Office and [saying] that we need to respect him and give him a chance because there’s this idea that we’re always supposed to have a smooth transition of power. But if you really believe everything that has been said about him over the last six months, including the fact that he’s been turned by Putin and is like an actual agent of a foreign enemy, on top of like all the other things. Isn’t that incredibly reckless and even amoral to start normalizing him that way and telling Americans that they should treat him with respect and an open mind? I mean isn’t our obligation instead to do exactly the opposite and to say, we don’t accept this and we are going to stand up to it. I mean I get that this ritual exists but is it actually appropriate in this case if we really believe in the things that we’ve all been thinking about him and hearing about what he actually is and the threat he poses?

JS: Right. They went so far in the direction of explicitly stating that Putin, the KGB, Russia had successfully infiltrated the U.S. electoral process, and then — that was part of the point I’m getting at — if they are, if they believe that, then what’s with all of this “Well we’ve got to give him a chance he’s our president now?” It really shows the lack of actual principle there in a sort of enslaved mentality toward the empire must always have this peaceful transition of power. If they believe their own propaganda, then this is a completely incongruous response to Trump’s election.

BR: But the reality is there is actually a lot of uncertainty about what Trump will do. I mean it is terrifying. The possibility that he will follow through on some of his promises — he’s made immigration … he said that that’s going to be one of his first priorities. That is genuinely, legitimately terrifying. But he also contradicts himself right and left and he did throughout his whole career. He’s gone back and forth on Snowden and he’s back and forth on everything in the diametrically opposed positions, the guy has assumed. So it is difficult to know, I think, to what extent we do need to fear him. I certainly fear him because I fear the worst.

JS: Andrew Kaczynski who now is at CNN was pointing out that over the past four years Trump has staked out the polar opposite position on the premier issues that ended up being present in this, in this debate: certainly on immigration, on abortion, on gay rights, etc. Yeah, I mean Donald Trump is a wild card of sorts but the thing that I have trouble imagining [is] Trump at these trade meetings. You know with Angela Merkel and other world leaders. I have trouble imagining what’s going to come as a result of the avalanche he’s going to be on the other end of when he starts getting, which he is now, these all-access intelligence briefings. This [is] transitioning into talking about what this means that Trump is now going to be the president of the United States.

When a presidential candidate is elected and they start to receive these briefings from the intelligence community, this is where the dark world of the kind of parallel national security apparatus in the United States thrives. Once someone comes in, particularly someone like Trump, never been in the military, never held elected office. They are going to overwhelm him — intentionally — with all sorts of dark scenarios of what can happen if he doesn’t renew this program or expand this program.

President Obama went through this in 2009 and the end result of those briefings was that he outsourced large portions of what they call the counterterrorism policy to the most unsavory, darkest components of the U.S. national security apparatus. Trump is going to be coming in with Gen. Mike Flynn, certainly as one of his top advisers, who knows if Flynn will end up in a cabinet position? Who is Gen. Flynn? Flynn was the intelligence chief for Gen. Stanley McChrystal when he was running murder incorporated as the head of the Joint Special Operations Command — handpicked by Dick Cheney. That is the guy who is guiding Trump’s worldview on counterterrorism. He is a guy that believes that assassination should be the lead policy of the United States combined with kidnapping and torturing people.

Flynn has criticized Obama’s drone program, not because it’s somehow unconstitutional, but because it’s not as effective as torture. Flynn has said Obama just wants to kill people because he doesn’t want to put them in GITMO, “We’re losing an opportunity to get great intelligence out of these people.” So the fact that Obama has failed to shut Guantanamo, the fact that he never held anyone accountable for the CIA torture, is going to mean that Trump, who already is going to be a malleable character in the face of a dozen and a half intelligence agencies inundating him with all of this stuff, but his hand-picked top advisor is one of the Hall of Famers of the world of dark ops.

And so you know people that say, “Oh well Trump is sort of anti-war, or he’s not going to be interventionist?” Just wait until he gets his 20th, 30th briefing from the generals, the admirals, the unelected non-Senate confirmed national security bureaucracy. We are going to see hellfire with Donald Trump and anyone who thought they were voting for an antiwar candidate is going to be proven mercilessly wrong.

BR: I think the same exact thing is going to be true on trade and economics. I mean he’s already staffing up with all of these deregulators, all the very architects of the policies that devastated millions of Americans in 2008.

JS: Glenn, what about on the issues of civil liberties — we know that when the Patriot Act was passed only one U.S. senator, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin — who just lost, for the second time in a row, his Senate race in Wisconsin — he voted against the Patriot Act … Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress to vote against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force … We sort of saw the bipartisan nature of those horrendously dangerous votes in Congress, but lay out what your current or your initial thinking is on how Trump is going to impact civil liberties, surveillance, being in control now of the NSA and other surveillance entities. What do you see coming?

Trump’s unpredictability is attributable to the fact that he doesn’t have any stable positions; he’s a con artist, he says what he needs to say to get you sign on the dotted line to sell you the used car.

GG: Just to Betsy’s point on this issue, she’s one hundred percent right that Trump’s unpredictability on all of these issues is attributable to the fact that he really doesn’t have any stable positions; he’s a con artist, he says what he needs to say to get you sign on the dotted line to sell you the used car. That’s who Donald Trump is. There are a couple of stable, cogent positions; he railed against TPP and there was actually a report from CNN [on November 11] saying that TPP is dead, at least in the lame duck.

Who knows whether it will be revitalized, but I think that the best way to deduce what’s likely to happen in the Trump administration is not by looking to what Donald Trump believes because that’s indiscernible anyway, but this is the key to me. He himself said three or four months ago: when I’m president I’m going to allow Mike Pence to run foreign policy and domestic policy. I don’t want to be involved in these details, I’m not going to be involved in policy making. And then they said to him I think it was at a New York Times editorial board interview, well if Mike Pence is going to be running foreign policy and domestic policy, what are you going to be doing?

JS: Tweeting.

GG: And he said, “I’m going to be making America great again.”

JS: By tweeting.

GG: I think that’s a pretty honest assessment of how he intends to conduct his administration. So I think that the way that you try and figure out what’s going to happen in the Trump administration is not by trying to understand or decipher his policy pronouncements because they’re all inconsistent anyway as Betsy said. But look at the people that he is going to be empowering. And by and large, they are the traditional, hard, hawkish right-wing members of the Republican Party because the more moderate people, as at least that term is understood in Republican politics, were the ones who were essentially radically against him.

Even the Bush wing, you know the Bush wing is now sort of the moderate wing of the Republican Party, even George W. Bush made it clear publicly that he did not vote for Donald Trump. So that part of the Republican Party will likely wield very little influence. It’s going to be people like, the hardcore, authoritarian fanatics who are the prosecutors who supported him, like Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie, who although moderate on some issues within their realm of primary expertise and influence are as authoritarian as it gets.

JS: Also John Bolton.

GG: John Bolton, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin. We’re talking about the Tea Party wing – so the sort of Ron Paul, Rand Paul Libertarian wing is not really involved, and nor is the kind of like establishment, responsible Republican figures who were cheered by Democrats for opposing Trump — we’re talking about the crazies. The Cheney-ites.

JS: Well even one step beyond that — so when we talk about Mike Pence, I just want to underscore this, because I think a lot of people had never really heard of Mike Pence before he became the vice presidential nominee will be now the vice president. We need to be clear: Mike Pence is a Christian supremacist. He is as radical of a Christian as Mullah Mohammed Omar was radical in his interpretation of Islam as head of the Taliban. This is a guy whose primary view of himself in the world is as a Christian warrior.

And Dick Cheney certainly was an ideological figure whose ideology was rooted in a warped reading of the Federalist Papers and a notion of America First. Pence is all of that, although a kind of dime store version of that when it comes to neocon ideology, but is more motivated by an idea that Christianity needs to be saved and needs to govern the world. And that has so many frightening consequences when you have someone that powerful, that dedicated to a religious supremacist agenda. I don’t think we’ve seen someone as much of a zealot for Christianity – his warped version of Christianity — as Mike Pence, the incoming VP.

BR: It calls to mind Erik Prince.

JS: Well they’re good friends. Erik Prince poured in $100,000 in the closing stages of this election — Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater. Actually I think Erik Prince would have done just fine under Hillary Clinton, but the reason he gave the one hundred thousand dollars — and his family is one of the premier funders of these initiatives — was to stop gay marriage and abortion. That’s his social agenda. Prince would have done just fine under Hillary Clinton. And by the way for all of the talk about “jina, jina, jina” from Trump — you know, China this, China that; he says China with a J — Erik Prince is now working for the Chinese government. And simultaneously giving $100,000 to Donald Trump, who supposedly is going to stand up against China. But even America’s most famous mercenary, his main thing with Trump is: end abortion and gay marriage.

Glenn, I want to ask you … on this issue of civil liberties. You know part of part of what I think we’ve seen in the post 9/11 reality is that Obama picked up from where Bush and Cheney left off in some of their most outrageous policies and interpretations of the Constitution, and definitely has continued on the mission of consolidating power within the executive branch. Not just by issuing executive orders but the climate of secrecy. And I’m wondering, just to throw out a hypothetical: what do you think would have been the response if two years into a Trump administration we had the Snowden revelations. How would that have impacted the public debate in this country versus it happening under Obama?

GG: I always said that if Edward Snowden had leaked documents during a Republican administration, with a Republican president in the White House, there would be a gigantic 50-foot statue erected outside of the headquarters of MSNBC at 30 Rock in his honor. And I think that this is the critical problem, I just wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post on exactly this issue — and in the course of writing that op-ed I went back and was looking at the debates over the civil liberties record of Obama from the time that he was inaugurated.

And you just see over and over and over again leading Democratic Party operatives and officials, as well as leading members, leading liberals in the media, continually mocking and deriding the idea that the powers that Obama was institutionalizing in the name of terrorism and national security — these unconstrained powers to launch wars without congressional authorization to target people for assassination including U.S. citizens without a whiff of due process, to imprison them indefinitely without charges or trial, to spy on them no matter where they are the world without any limits at all — continually mocking and scoffing at concerns over these objections on the grounds that the people who run the U.S. government are kind and good and benevolent and trustworthy.

And I remember in particular, and had my memory triggered as I was doing this op-ed, that in 2013 after the Snowden revelations, a bipartisan coalition in the House of Representatives formed that was lead on the one hand by Justin Amash, the young Libertarian member of Congress from Michigan, on the other by John Conyers, a 25-term African-American liberal also from Michigan, and they lead a bipartisan coalition to seriously rein in the NSA and the amount of electronic spying the U.S. government could do, particularly on U.S. soil and U.S. citizens but also against non-Americans as well.

And it really looks like they had got together a winning coalition if they were going to really be able to put together a bill meaningful reform to rein in these powers. And the White House was opposed to it, and they recruited Nancy Pelosi to lead the way to sabotage this bill and at the last minute she whipped just enough votes to defeat that reform bill and protect the NSA. And there’s even a huge article in Foreign Policy, which I re-read this morning, and the headline is How Nancy Pelosi Saved NSA Surveillance.

And you go across the board: to drones and assassinations, to due process-free imprisonment, to signing statements, to executive power theories that allow secrecy to shield the president from judicial review when it’s alleged that their conduct has been illegal or criminal or in violation of the Constitution.

These are now the powers that were begun by George Bush, but then extended and consecrated by Barack Obama. So they were converted from radical GOP dogma into non-debated bipartisan orthodoxy. This is now the template of awesome, scary, unconstrained powers that is being handed to Donald Trump on a silver platter and there’s nothing anyone can do about it because Republicans and Democrats have spent 15 years legislating the power defending them in court and convincing people politically to turn their backs from those who are objecting to overtly support them.

And so to the extent of the Donald Trump presidency is incredibly scary — and it is — Democrats have had a very large role to play in why that is.

Just wait until Trump gets his briefings from the generals, the unelected national security bureaucracy. We’re going to see hellfire and anyone who thought they were voting for an anti-war candidate is going to be proven mercilessly wrong.

JS: Well, and also beyond the way that this all played out among the elites of the Democratic and Republican parties in Congress and elsewhere, you had this broad notion, it seemed — and it certainly was perpetuated by many of the hosts on MSNBC, which we call MSDNC, which Glenn and I both have said on their airwaves before — the idea that we just trust Obama.

So you know, the drone striking of American citizens: “Oh, well, I trust Obama to make this decision.” The widespread use of JSOC in the CIA for covert action: “Well, we just trust Obama.” That now is going to come back and bite these people because how can you say, “Well, I support President Obama’s kill list, but oh my God, I don’t want Donald Trump to have a kill list!” It really shows that Democrats are vegetarians between meals when it comes to some of the most important issues of our time. There are no Democratic and Republican cruise missiles.

And the fact is that when you when you empower The White House in the way that the Democrats did through their silence or their support of horrid violent policies under Obama, you then continue the game forward so that whoever comes next starts from that point and not from sort of a baseline debate about what’s constitutional.

You know there was this sort of flurry of activity over the past year where people were saying Obama is trying to put in place these rules for his drone program so that the next person elected—no, you have already stated publicly that you have a right to kill American citizens who have not been charged with crimes. You’ve maintained secret kill lists. The CIA has a kill list, the military has a kill list, the National Security Council has a kill list, and now Donald Trump is going to be in charge of a kill list. And how can you then go back and say, “Oh we don’t want Trump to be in charge of these things!” when you accepted it for partisan reasons from your own person?

BR: This is an extraordinarily depressing conversation. But uh …

JS: We’re going to make Intercept razorblades … if you pledge … Our version of NPR.

BR: At The Intercept we have done a lot of talking and thinking about encryption and ways that people can protect their electronic privacy in the face of these threats. And unfortunately those kinds of technologies are going to become ever more important in this era when we face this amount of power in the hands of such a terrifying government.

JS: Well the journalist Allan Nairn, who is a great reporter that revealed the CIA’s backing of the FRAPH death squads in Haiti, uncovered U.S. support for war crimes in Guatemala, then did groundbreaking reporting from the genocide in East Timor and elsewhere, has really kind of studied authoritarian governments, and he was pointing out the other day on Twitter in the aftermath of Trump’s election that under J. Edgar Hoover the enemy’s list basically was at times like a domestic kill list or a domestic target list, and I think that that could be one major difference between Obama and Trump.

There was a lot of discussion about Is Obama going to kill an American with a drone on U.S. soil? and you had Rand Paul filibustering the nomination of John Brennan to be CIA director largely over that issue. But under Trump and his — you know one of his surrogates, Omarosa, from his show The Apprentice, said that Trump has an enemies list and that they are going to be cleaning shop and draining the swamp when he gets to power.

I think that is a different fear than would exist under Obama. It’s not that Obama’s Justice Department hasn’t engaged in horrid misconduct, particularly the FBI with all of these terror plots that they’ve manufactured themselves and then broken up, and other things — but I do think that Trump would go so far as to view the FBI as a score-settling apparatus in the spirit of J. Edgar Hoover. Glenn may push back on that, but I really do think that — I can’t see Obama using it in the way that I could see Trump using it.

GG: Yeah, you know, it’s interesting, I actually do agree with that, and it has been a kind of depressing conversation, but it’s hard not to have a depressing conversation with talking 72 hours after Donald J. Trump was just elected the president of the United States.

But to try and find a couple of silver linings — and before I point out the silver linings, I’ll contribute a little bit more to the depression. Which is, think about what will happen — as bad as all this is, as bad as the whole framework is that he has now inherited — imagine what will happen if there is any kind of a successful terrorist attack or ISIS attack on U.S. soil. Even if it’s like a low-level one like San Bernardino, or the Boston Marathon, let alone a bigger one like Orlando, let alone something on the level of 9/11. If anything like that happens, the extent to which they’re going to exploit that, and the extremes to which they’re going to go, you could pretty much say all bets are off. So I think you can get a lot worse, as bad as it is, if something like that were to happen.

BR: OK, what’s the silver lining?

GG: The two silver linings are … you did see some pretty significant pushback during for example the time in the campaign when Trump was advocating things like murdering the families of terrorists, and reintroducing all new ways to torture people, you saw leading members of the CIA and the Pentagon say that they would disobey orders of that kind … you’ve seen members of the intelligence community really actively working against Trump by calling a Kremlin agent.

There are some pretty seriously powerful factions invested in not having the United States veer completely off the deep-end of radicalism and extremism. And I think there are going to be a lot of internal fights within the deep state, within some of these powerful factions. Yes they’re going to try and co-opt Trump and manipulate him but also I think are going to try and subvert him and work against him, especially if the true crazies start to get their way a little bit too much.

Not because they are moral but because they just perceive that as against the interests of their faction, but also against the interests of the United States as they perceive them. But I think there are those kind of institutional pushbacks, which you’re sort of ambivalent about because on the one hand they cam have some good effects, but on the other it’s kind of an anti-democratic, sort of almost like a coup-type dynamic where these unelected but powerful factions start undercutting and subverting the democratically elected leader as he tries to carry out the policies that probably his voters and supporters would want him to carry out.

JS: I’m not …

GG: The other silver lining that I do think is possible and I hope will happen and I think that we should try and do what we can to play as much of a role as we can and galvanizing, is that there just are a lot of people in this country genuinely horrified of the things that Trump is saying and wants to do. As Betsy pointed out earlier, even though the Democrats lost pretty resoundingly, there are more people in the country who voted for her that voted for him.

And you’re seeing protests, and you’ve seen the media unite in a unique way, against some of his more horrific proclamations; it’s cut across party lines at least at the elite level in ways we haven’t quite seen before. So I do think there is an opportunity to galvanize a real resistance, like actual meaningful dissent, to the most powerful faction in Washington in a way that we haven’t seen in a few decades if not longer.

And in the process re-underscoring and kind of re-animating and re-enlivening a lot of the political values that we’re all supposed to believe and defend because they will be under assault in a more extreme way than ever before and hopefully that reaction, that action, that we take will trigger a kind of counter-reaction that could be very positive if it’s managed the right way and driven and organized the right way and I’m hoping that will happen.

JS: Well we’re going to wrap up here — just one closing thought, you know we’re seeing a rise now in hate crimes and in attacks against Islamic communities, Muslim communities in this country, with graffiti and you have this empowerment of people like David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan. And part of the legacy of Trump, regardless of what his policies end up being, is that he has empowered this very dangerous segment of U.S. society and has really openly encouraged violence against people from certain communities and I think one thing all of us can do is be very vigilant in watching out for these hate crimes in our own communities.

I mean it’s a micro thing but I think it’s very real. A lot of my Muslim friends in this country are really afraid of what this means for them and I think those fears are real. And a lot of women fear for what’s going to happen to their basic health care rights. And outside of even big picture political organizing, these are times that I actually think on a small level we really have to look out for the most vulnerable in our society.

We encourage people to keep reading us at The Intercept. Glenn Greenwald is @ggreenwald on Twitter. Betsy is @BetsyReed2. I’m Jeremy Scahill. @JeremyScahill is my Twitter handle. Thanks for joining us.

The post Reckoning With a Trump Presidency and the Elite Democrats Who Helped Deliver It appeared first on The Intercept.

This election — particularly in its closing stages — has been dominated by controversies over emails, classified documents, and WikiLeaks. We’ve heard endlessly about Hillary Clinton’s private basement server, her 33,000 deleted emails, the phishing and leaking of John Podesta’s emails, including parts of Clinton’s much-discussed private speeches to Goldman Sachs. Trump, for his part, suddenly discovered a great love for Julian Assange, though he does have trouble correctly spelling WikiLeaks in his tweets of praise. Taken together with Trump’s bizarre and consistent lauding of Vladimir Putin and leaks from the U.S. intelligence community, the country has been treated to an odd flashback of Cold War propaganda, including a fair dose of red-baiting from the Democrats. In the matter of Anthony Weiner’s computer, his wife Huma Abedin’s communications, and the potential implications for Clinton, the FBI, whose overreach had not previously been of much concern to Democrats, suddenly became a deviant manipulator of the electoral process, while Trump and his supporters alternately praised the agency’s professionalism and denounced it as part of the rigged system.

The U.S. public is now getting a taste of the way hacking, phishing, and an overwhelming dependence on fallible machines and networks can impact politics. But let’s be clear: None of the disclosures in this campaign — not one thing in any of the hacked emails or those declassified and released from Clinton’s private server — has brought to light anything of greater importance than the documents Chelsea Manning provided to WikiLeaks. She revealed war crimes, including murder and torture; exposed liars and the dirty and duplicitous dealings of the U.S. and its allies; documented a secret history of America’s longest-running war; and forced a much needed debate about the U.S. role in the world. And for that, she is being tortured.

The double standards of our society dictate that a perjurer like the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, faces no consequences for his crimes. Gen. David Petraeus gets a slap on the wrist, no jail time, and prestigious positions at universities for sharing classified information with his mistress. Only Gen. James Cartwright may face the inside of a prison cell for discussing classified information with journalists — and he is a sacrificial lamb for the cause of exonerating Clinton and Petraeus from any true accountability by the Obama Justice Department.

But Chelsea Manning, whose motivation was noble, whose actions made our country better, faces the full wrath of the system. And it may end up killing her. When we talk about the high-tech scandals that marked this election, at the top of the list should be the torture of Chelsea Manning.

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That priest, Fr. James Carney, was indeed a revolutionary and, as a practitioner of liberation theology in Latin America during a period marked by populist movements fighting against death squads and murderous regimes backed by the U.S., an avid student of Marxist theory.

After years spent among the poor and oppressed in Latin America, Carney renounced his U.S. citizenship and joined the armed guerrilla struggle against U.S.-backed death squads and governments. He also left the Jesuits because, he explained, the order would not condone his involvement in an armed struggle. Whatever one thinks of that decision, Carney sacrificed his privilege and status to join the people he was ministering to as a priest. In the eyes of the Reagan administration, that made him a terrorist. In the eyes of the peasants and revolutionaries Carney joined in struggle, he was a hero. (For a look at the roots of Jesuits joining indigenous struggle in Latin America, check out the film “The Mission.”)

The scandal that the Beast claims “may cause trouble” for Kaine is that he once met Fr. Carney, 35 years ago. The right-wing group Catholic Vote has done its best Joe McCarthy imitation on the issue. “That Kaine made the effort to seek out and spend time with Carney is troubling,” according to a memo published by the group with the headline “Tim Kaine’s Radical Roots in Honduras.” It claimed that “the Soviets created liberation theology to undermine the Church and advance the Soviet cause against the United States. In Honduras, the phony Marxist-tinged theology was planted to manipulate poor Catholics, instigate terrorism, and stir up a violent revolution in Honduras — then the key ally of the United States opposing Communism in the region.”

“There’s some serious questions here,” Catholic Vote’s spokesperson told the Beast, speaking about the one meeting Kaine had with Carney 35 years ago. “What was your relationship to this guy when you were down there? What did he teach you?”

What is entirely absent from Catholic Vote’s “history” is the context of what was happening in Latin America during the 1980s — particularly to Catholics. Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador was assassinated by graduates of the U.S. Army School of the Americas as he performed mass. Catholic nuns and laywomen, including four from the U.S., were raped and murdered. Jesuit priests were executed by death squads. The U.S.-backed Honduran army’s secret police unit, Battalion 316, committed systematic massacres — all while John Negroponte was the U.S. ambassador to Honduras. Negroponte was very close to 316’s commander, Gen. Gustavo Álvarez Martínez, and met with him frequently.

Declassified cables from Negroponte’s time in Honduras reveal no evidence Negroponte ever expressed even a mild objection to Battalion 316’s systematic murders and human rights abuses. According to the National Security Archives: “The Honduran human rights ombudsman later found that more than 50 people disappeared at the hands of the military during those years. But Negroponte’s cables reflect no protest, or even discussion of these issues during his many meetings with Gen. Álvarez, his deputies and Honduran President Robert Suazo. Nor do the released cables contain any reporting to Washington on the human rights abuses that were taking place.”

And what became of Father Carney?

He was thrown from a helicopter in 1983. A whistleblower who deserted Battalion 316 reported that Carney “was executed by order of the battalion’s commander, Gen. Gustavo Álvarez Martínez, who along with several other members of 316 had received training in counterintelligence from U.S. forces at the School of the Americas.” The deserter also asserted that “Álvarez Martínez gave the order for Carney’s execution in the presence of a CIA officer, known as ‘Mister Mike.’” The Los Angeles Times reported that Negroponte failed to report a “U.S.-backed operation that resulted in the execution of nine prisoners and the disappearance of an American priest.” The year Carney was murdered, Negroponte praised Gen. Álvarez Martínez’s “dedication to democracy.”

Catholic Vote’s justification for Fr. Carney’s death: “Carney died during an invasion of Honduras with a group of approximately 100 fellow communist insurgents, trained by communists in Nicaragua and Cuba.” That is how Ronald Reagan and Negroponte preferred for these events to be publicly explained. That propaganda is necessary for Kaine’s meeting with Fr. Carney 35 years ago to be manufactured into a controversy.

John Negroponte, who went on to become George W. Bush’s director of national intelligence, has endorsed Kaine’s running mate, Hillary Clinton — a fact the campaign has proudly promoted. Perhaps that should be the focus of any scandal involving Fr. Carney and the Clinton campaign — and not some meeting Tim Kaine had as a law student three decades ago.

That may be difficult for Clinton. She engaged in the same kind of red baiting against Bernie Sanders over comments Sanders made about the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, who fought the Contra death squads passionately supported by Clinton’s endorser Negroponte.

Awkward.

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Although two children were shot during the raid and multiple witnesses and Afghan investigators alleged that U.S. soldiers dug bullets out of the body of at least one of the dead pregnant women, Defense Department investigators concluded that “the amount of force utilized was necessary, proportional and applied at appropriate time.” The investigation did acknowledge that “tactical mistakes” were made.

The Defense Department’s conclusions bear a resemblance to U.S. Central Command’s findings in the aftermath of the horrifying attack on a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, last October in which 42 patients and medical workers were killed in a sustained barrage of strikes by an AC-130. The Pentagon has announced that no criminal charges will be brought against any members of the military for the Kunduz strike. CENTCOM’s Kunduz investigation concluded that “the incident resulted from a combination of unintentional human errors, process errors, and equipment failures.” CENTCOM denied the attack constituted a war crime, a claim challenged by international law experts and MSF.

A photograph taken by military investigators in the room where members of an Afghan family were killed near Gardez in Afghanistan’s Paktia province, Feb. 12, 2010.

The February 2010 night raid, which took place in a village near Gardez in Paktia province, was described by the U.S. military at the time as a heroic attack against Taliban militants. A press release published by NATO in Afghanistan soon after the raid asserted that a joint Afghan-international operation had made a “gruesome discovery.” According to NATO, the force entered a compound near the village of Khataba after intelligence had “confirmed” it to be the site of “militant activity.” As the team approached, they were “engaged” in a “fire fight” by “several insurgents.” The Americans killed the insurgents and were securing the area when they made their discovery: three women who had been “bound and gagged” and then executed inside the compound. The U.S. force, the press release alleged, found the women “hidden in an adjacent room.” The story was picked up and spread throughout the media. A “senior U.S. military official” told CNN that the bodies had “the earmarks of a traditional honor killing.”

Documents provided to The Intercept contain substantial redactions, particularly in areas dealing with allegations of a cover-up of the circumstances of the killings.

Witnesses and survivors described an unprovoked assault on the family compound of Mohammed Daoud Sharabuddin, a police officer who had just received an important promotion. Daoud and his family had gathered to celebrate the naming of a newborn son, a ritual that takes place on the sixth day of a child’s life. Unlike the predominantly Pashtun Taliban, the Sharabuddin family were ethnic Tajiks, and their main language was Dari. Many of the men in the family were clean-shaven or wore only mustaches, and they had long opposed the Taliban. Daoud, the police commander, had gone through dozens of U.S. training programs, and his home was filled with photos of himself with American soldiers. Another family member was a prosecutor for the U.S.-backed local government, and a third was the vice chancellor at the local university.

Mohammed Daoud Sharabuddin in his police uniform.

Image: Rick Rowley/Dirty Wars

At about 3:30 a.m., when the family heard noises outside their compound, Daoud and his 15-year-old son Sediqullah, fearing a Taliban attack, went outside to investigate. Both were immediately hit with sniper fire.

“All the children were shouting, ‘Daoud is shot! Daoud is shot!’” Daoud’s brother-in-law Tahir recalled when I visited the family compound in 2010. Daoud’s eldest son was behind his father and younger brother when they were hit. “When my father went down, I screamed,” he told me. “Everybody — my uncles, the women, everybody came out of the home and ran to the corridors of the house. I sprinted to them and warned them not to come out as there were Americans attacking and they would kill them.”

Within a matter of minutes, a family celebration had become a massacre. Seven people died, including three women and two people who later succumbed to their injuries. Two of the women had been pregnant. Sixteen children lost their mothers.

The Americans were still present when survivors prepared burial shrouds for those who had died. The Afghan custom involves binding the feet and head. A scarf secured around the bottom of the chin is meant to keep the mouth of the deceased from hanging open. They managed to do this before the Americans began handcuffing them and dividing the surviving men and women into separate areas. Several of the male family members told me that it was around this time that they witnessed a horrifying scene: U.S. soldiers digging the bullets out of the women’s bodies. “They were putting knives into their injuries to take out the bullets,” Sabir told me. I asked him bluntly, “You saw the Americans digging the bullets out of the women’s bodies?” Without hesitation, he said, “Yes.” Tahir told me he saw the Americans with knives standing over the bodies. “They were taking out the bullets from their bodies to remove the proof of their crime.”

Months after the February 2010 night raid, Jeremy Scahill interviewed survivors. A brief clip from Dirty Wars.

The U.S. military’s internal investigation into the raid, which was described in detail in the documents obtained by The Intercept, was ordered by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, who at the time of the raid was the commander of all international forces in Afghanistan. The lead investigator, whose identity was redacted, noted at the beginning of the report that he did not visit the scene of the raid, saying that the risks of “re-awakening emotional and political turmoil” would not have been “worth the cost.” Instead, family members of the victims were asked to travel to a U.S. base to be interviewed.

The documents’ redactions and omissions are perhaps more interesting than the conclusions of the investigation. U.S. Central Command released 535 pages, including more than 100 photographs taken at the scene, but withheld nearly 400 additional pages, stating that they are exempt from FOIA for national security reasons. Photographs of bodies and wounds were redacted. The documents include NATO press releases and talking points claiming that the victims of the U.S. attack were Taliban militants and offering the standard assurances that “Coalition Forces take every precaution to ensure non-combatant civilians are protected from possible hostilities during the course of every operation.” An error-laden “questions and answers” document stated that during the operation, “two militants [were] killed and one wounded,” and “one women and two children were protected.” A list of talking points titled “Post Operation IO and Mitigation” characterized the “Area Tribe” in the following terms: “One Ph.D described them as ‘great robbers’ and ‘utter savages’ and that their country was formerly a refuge for bad characters.”

Read the documents: The Pentagon’s investigation of the Gardez massacre included “information operations” assessments of the military’s communications strategies.

While the investigation asserted that the soldiers did not dig any bullets out of the bodies of the dead, the sections of the investigation addressing this allegation were almost entirely redacted. The investigation found that the survivors interviewed in the raid’s aftermath, referred to as “detainees,” provided credible testimony. The report also noted “consistency in all eight detainees’ statements that would be impossible to pre-plan without prior knowledge of specifics of the operation,” adding that “the detainee reports corroborate that the women died when they tried to stop Zahir [one of the men killed] from exiting the building.”

Despite this assessment of the credibility of the survivors’ testimony, the Pentagon investigation dismissed outright the statements from multiple witnesses, including the husband of one of the dead women, that the Americans dug bullets from the women’s bodies. “This investigation found no attempt to hide or cover up the circumstances of the local national women’s deaths,” the executive summary of the investigation concluded. The investigators were instructed by the main U.S. command at Bagram to determine: “Did anyone alter, clean or otherwise tamper with the scene in any way following the operation, and if so, why?” The answer to that question was completely redacted.

Initial instructions given to Defense Department public relations staff on how to discuss the Gardez raid.

The investigation did note, however, that the Afghan investigation conducted immediately after the raid “reports that an American bullet was found in the body of one of the dead women, but it does not say how that bullet was found or who removed it from the woman.” Citing statements from the members of the strike force that conducted the raid, the investigators asserted, “There is no evidence to support that bullets were removed from the bodies by anyone associated with U.S. forces.”

The initial press release on the raid contained erroneous information about the women being bound and gagged, according to the investigation, because “the ground force was confused by the unfamiliar sight of the women prepared so quickly for burial and firmly believed that they did not kill the three women.” The investigation concluded that the “assumption” that the women “had been killed by Afghans and placed on the scene” was an “honest assessment” and the result of a “lack of cultural awareness,” not “an attempt to mislead higher headquarters.”

A “roll-up,” or inventory, of the Gardez operation.

According to the instructions provided to investigators, the U.S. forces claimed the women had been killed as many as two days before the raid occurred, but the report observed that their “remains were collocated with EKIA,” enemies killed in action, and photos taken in the immediate aftermath showed the women with wounds indicating they had been killed during the raid. “Was this an attempt to deceive?” That question was not answered in the documents provided by the Pentagon, at least not in an unredacted format.

The report also noted a curious contradiction. One of the men killed by American forces had been prepared for burial just as the dead women were — with a cloth wrap tied around his head so his jaw would remain closed. Yet when the U.S. forces first reported on the raid, they described only the women as having their heads bound and suggested their deaths were the result of a “cultural custom.”

The cause of death listed for the men was gunshot wounds to the chest. For the three women, the cause of death was “wounds.” The most credible theory, according to the final report, was that the women were killed in a “shoot through” once the raid had begun, and that their deaths were unintentional — and unknown to the shooters.

“It is undeniable that five innocent people were killed and two innocent men were wounded in the conduct of this operation,” the report stated. “To simply call this ‘regrettable’ would be callous; it is much more than that. However, the unique chain of events that led to their deaths is explicable.”

According to the report, the university official who was at the party inside the compound called the police headquarters in Paktia as the raid was beginning because he believed the house was coming under attack from the Taliban. All the witnesses interviewed stated that Mohammed Daoud, the Afghan police commander, left the party and entered the courtyard, believing he was confronting a Taliban attack. Still, the investigation concluded that the U.S. forces were justified in shooting him, as well as his cousin Mohammed Saranwal Zahir, the local prosecutor. The investigators found that the men had showed “hostile intent” because they were armed with rifles.

A U.S. soldier takes photographs inside a room where members of an Afghan family were killed near Gardez in Afghanistan’s Paktia province, Feb. 12, 2010.

Image: AP

In the end, the investigation determined that American forces had followed the rules of engagement and standard operating procedures during the raid, concluding only that there were “tactical mistakes made.” The investigation recommended that the coalition forces “make an appropriate condolence payment to the family as a sign of good faith in our sincerity at the seriousness of the incident.”

Because of excessive redactions, these documents fail to answer many questions. While the report referenced “Special Forces,” the specific unit was redacted. The report also seemed to indicate that the strike force came from a base in another province, rather than the local base in Paktia, yet offered no explanation. The letter accompanying the documents provided to The Intercept stated that some documents could not be released because they would expose “inter-agency and intra-agency memorandum.” What other agencies were involved in this raid and subsequent management of the fallout and investigation? Who provided the Americans with the intelligence that led to the raid, which claimed that a Taliban facilitator was present? No explanation was given for why the documents, which were requested from SOCOM, the parent command of JSOC, under the Freedom of Information Act in March 2011, were only now released, after being reviewed by another — unnamed — agency.

The report noted that “there are considerable questions about the cause of the females’ deaths and males’ injuries” as well as “multiple inconsistencies between what was observed and what has since been reported by local nationals.” If the women were killed by U.S. forces, even in a “shoot through,” what happened to the bullets? The report stated that the throat of one of the women had been slit with a knife and that another dead body contained knife marks on the chest. Where did these lacerations come from? One investigator observed a blood splatter pattern that “appeared to be more consistent with blunt force trauma” and suggested “someone had possibly slipped on the ice and split open his or her head on the hard concrete.” If that is truly what the splatter indicated, then which person received those injuries? If the investigators determined the surviving witnesses of the raid were convincing and credible, why then was their testimony about Americans digging bullets out of the women’s dead bodies discarded?

A photograph of bullet shells and orange peels taken by the U.S. military after the Gardez killings.

Mohammed Sabir was one of the men singled out for further interrogation after the raid. With his clothes still caked with the blood of his loved ones, Sabir and seven other men were hooded and shackled. “They tied our hands and blindfolded us,” he recalled. “Two people grabbed us and pushed us, one by one, into the helicopter.” They were flown to a different Afghan province, Paktika, where the Americans held them for days. “My senses weren’t working at all,” he recalled. “I couldn’t cry, I was numb. I didn’t eat for three days and nights. They didn’t give us water to wash the blood away.” The Americans ran biometric tests on the men, photographed their irises, and took their fingerprints. Sabir described to me how teams of interrogators, including both Americans and Afghans, questioned him about his family’s connections to the Taliban. Sabir told them that his family was against the Taliban, had fought the Taliban, and that some relatives had been kidnapped by the Taliban.

“The interrogators had short beards and didn’t wear uniforms. They had big muscles and would fly into sudden rages,” Sabir recalled, adding that they shook him violently at times. “We told them truthfully that there were not Taliban in our home.” One of the Americans, he said, told him they “had intelligence that a suicide bomber had hidden in your house and that he was planning an operation.” Sabir told them, “If we would have had a suicide bomber at home, then would we be playing music in our house? Almost all guests were government employees.” By the time Mohammed Sabir returned home after being held in American custody, he had missed the burial of his wife and other family members.

Mohammed Sabir, one of the men singled out for further interrogation after the raid.

Image: Rick Rowley/Dirty Wars

In the end, the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, Vice Adm. William McRaven, visited the compound in Gardez accompanied by a phalanx of Afghan and U.S. soldiers. He made an offer to the family to sacrifice a sheep, which his force had brought with them on a truck, to ask forgiveness.

JSOC commander Vice Adm. William McRaven, surrounded by Afghan National Army forces, listens to Hajji Sharabuddin, whose family members were killed in the night raid near Gardez in Afghanistan’s Paktia province, April 8, 2010.

Photo: Jeremy Kelly

“We call them the American Taliban,” added Mohammed Tahir, the father of Gulalai, one of the slain women.

The internal investigation ordered by Gen. McChrystal into the Gardez raid is an incomplete accounting of this horrifying incident. It is also based on the word of the force that carried out the killings, whose personnel could have faced serious charges under the Uniform Code of Military Justice if investigators had taken seriously the survivors’ allegations.

Portions of this article were adapted from Scahill’s 2014 book, Dirty Wars. 

Top photo: Members of a joint Afghan and U.S. security force provide security during an operation “in search of a Taliban facilitator” in Gardez district, Paktia province, Afghanistan, March 21, 2013.

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The post Pentagon: Special Ops Killing of Pregnant Afghan Women Was “Appropriate” Use of Force appeared first on The Intercept.

For four months, Airborne’s team had worked nearly nonstop to modify an American-made Thrush 510G crop duster to the exact specifications of an unnamed client. Everything about the project was cloaked in secrecy. The company’s executives would refer to the client only as “Echo Papa,” and instructed employees to use code words to discuss certain modifications made to the plane. Now the employees would learn that Echo Papa also owned more than a quarter of their company.

A fit, handsome man with blond hair and blue eyes got out of the Mercedes and entered Airborne’s hanger. Echo Papa, who was often just called EP, shook hands with a dozen Airborne employees and looked over the plane. “He was the sun, and all the management were planets rotating around him,” said one person present that day.

One of the Thrush 510G being modified at Airborne Technologies’ hangar in Wiener Neustadt, Austria. Prince owns at least 25 percent of the company.

One of the mechanics soon recognized Echo Papa from news photos — he was Erik Prince, founder of the private security firm Blackwater. Several of the Airborne staff whispered among themselves, astonished that they had been working for America’s best-known mercenary. The secrecy and strange modification requests of the past four months began to make sense. In addition to surveillance and laser-targeting equipment, Airborne had outfitted the plane with bulletproof cockpit windows, an armored engine block, anti-explosive mesh for the fuel tank, and specialized wiring that could control rockets and bombs. The company also installed pods for mounting two high-powered 23 mm machine guns. By this point, the engineers and mechanics were concerned that they had broken several Austrian laws but were advised that everything would be fine as long as they all kept the secret.

Erik Prince, or “Echo Papa,” the founder of Blackwater and chairman of Frontier Services Group, a publicly traded logistics and aviation company.

Photo: Mark Peckmezian

Prince congratulated everyone for making the plane “rugged” and then left. The plane was due in South Sudan, where it was urgently needed to salvage Prince’s first official contract with his new company, Frontier Services Group. Prince was eager to get the Thrush 510G in the air.

The conversion of crop dusters into light attack aircraft had long been part of Prince’s vision for defeating terrorists and insurgencies in Africa and the Middle East. In Prince’s view, these single-engine fixed-wing planes, retrofitted for war zones, would revolutionize the way small wars were fought. They would also turn a substantial profit. The Thrush in Airborne’s hangar, one of two crop dusters he intended to weaponize, was Prince’s initial step in achieving what one colleague called his “obsession” with building his own private air force.

The story of how Prince secretly plotted to transform the two aircraft for his arsenal of mercenary services is based on interviews with nearly a dozen people who have worked with Prince over the years, including current and former business partners, as well as internal documents, memos, and emails. Over a two-year period, Prince exploited front companies and cutouts, hidden corporate ownership, a meeting with Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout’s weapons supplier, and at least one civil war in an effort to manufacture and ultimately sell his customized armed counterinsurgency aircraft. If he succeeded, Prince would possess two prototypes that would lay the foundation for a low-cost, high-powered air force capable of generating healthy profits while fulfilling his dream of privatized warfare.

Photo: Marwan Naamani/AFP/Getty Images

FROM THE EARLY DAYS of the war on terror, Prince aggressively built up an aviation wing at Blackwater and supplied aircraft to the CIA and other government agencies. His “little bird” helicopters — with armed commandos hanging from their frames — became a notorious symbol of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. By 2013, after scandals, investigations, and a $42 million settlement with the Justice Department, Blackwater had been broken up, with its pieces renamed and Prince largely excluded from their operations. But his vision of creating a private air force endured.

In early 2014, Prince and Citic Group, China’s largest state-owned investment firm, founded Frontier Services Group, a publicly traded logistics and aviation company based in Hong Kong. FSG offered services such as shipping minerals, chartering flights for executives, and occasional medevacs from remote African locations. Over the past two years, Prince has given interviews and speeches describing his vision of FSG. “This is not a patriotic endeavor of ours,” Prince said of his new company. “We’re here to build a great business and make some money doing it.” China, he said, “has the appetite to take frontier risk, that expeditionary risk of going to those less-certain, less-normal markets and figuring out how to make it happen.” But while he burnished his new image as chairman of a public company, he was secretly overseeing the clandestine attack aircraft program.

Prince exploited front companies, a connection with Viktor Bout’s weapons supplier, and at least one civil war in an effort to sell his customized armed aircraft.

Prince, together with a small group of loyal deputies, hid this effort from the corporate leadership at FSG by means of non-company encrypted email, aliases, and outright deception. When Prince pitched logistics contracts to African governments on behalf of FSG, he and his team simultaneously developed plans for paramilitary contracts with those same governments.

In 2013, when FSG was being created, Prince and his team were already developing a secret blueprint for weaponized crop dusters to target terrorists and assist counterinsurgency operations in Africa. Originally drafted in late 2013, the plan was updated more than 100 times through the end of 2015. The goal was to offer affordable, high-powered air superiority to Prince’s clients that could “break the paradigm of attrition warfare in low intensity conflict.” Prince’s plan predicted strong “global marketability” for the small attack planes.

Read the document: Erik Prince’s blueprint for light attack aircraft.

The aircraft, which the blueprint suggested could be produced in a manner that would bypass export “restraints,” would be modified to carry both precision-guided munitions as well as simpler weapons systems. But, the plan noted, “Guns, Rockets and Dumb Bombs offer the most cost effective weapon load for the target set/threat environment.” The planes would contain armored cockpits, engines, and airframes, sophisticated reconnaissance equipment similar to that used on drones, as well as night-vision capabilities. The blueprint envisioned targeting groups of insurgents, boats, vehicles, and static positions. According to the plan, the aircraft would have 12 hours of endurance to conduct operations.

The modified light attack aircraft “offers affordable ability [to] raise, train and sustain the capability for the ‘long war’ necessary in Counter Insurgency,” according to the blueprint. But this aspiration was not one that Prince would openly share with the people he was recruiting to build his new public company.

BY THE SUMMER of 2013, Prince was already putting together a team to run FSG. Among the recruits was Gregg Smith, an old friend and former Marine, who would eventually become the company’s CEO. Smith was an investment banker who had helped guide Prince through the sale of Blackwater and other entities after the U.S. government began investigating his companies. That July, as they discussed their new venture, Prince and Smith took a trip to the border of Burkina Faso and Niger in West Africa, where Prince was considering investing in a magnesium mine, according to Smith. The men landed at an airstrip controlled by French forces. Niger was a dangerous country with civil unrest and a regional al Qaeda affiliate.

As they surveyed the mine, the two discussed the advantages of adding surveillance cameras to small civilian planes to fly over mining operations or oil fields. Such planes would be useful for alerting mining companies and government forces of a possible attack by insurgents or bandits. “If you’re in a conflict zone and you have an extractive mine, or even oil and gas, you want to know what’s going on around you and that’s not always easy in those types of areas,” said Smith in an interview. “Having the ability to put an aircraft in the sky that has good ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] capabilities and monitor the radius around you, that’s good stuff.”

Prince used non-company encrypted email, aliases, and outright deception.

Such surveillance aircraft would be relatively inexpensive to operate and could provide what Smith and Prince both believed would be nice profits for their fledgling company, which they agreed should have a fleet of aircraft crisscrossing the African continent. “When we set up the company and had discussions about what FSG would and would not be, we were very clear it would not be a security company, it would not have armed people,” Smith told The Intercept. However, Prince and FSG did contemplate offering intelligence and surveillance services, as well as non-lethal logistical support, in war zones.

Prince was legendary for pushing the risk envelope, particularly when defining what legally constituted military or security services. Those contracts could require licenses and authorization from the U.S. government, and FSG’s new executives strongly doubted they could obtain them with Prince as the company’s chairman.

In February 2014, a month after Prince became chairman of FSG, he authorized the purchase of two Thrush 510G crop dusters made in Albany, Georgia. Each aircraft cost approximately $1 million. Prince told officials at FSG that the purchase was urgent because he had received a green light for a project to support the government of Mali in its battle against a regional al Qaeda affiliate. The plan was to have the planes fitted with aerial surveillance gear with a data link to a ground station, so that the aircraft could provide reconnaissance for forces operating on the ground. Prince claimed that Project Mike, as it was called internally, “was a go and as part of that we were going to be providing the ISR support and we would need those ASAP,” according to a source with direct knowledge of FSG’s inner workings.

SCAR Pod on a modified Thrush airplane.

Photo obtained by The Intercept

Prince arranged for the planes to be equipped with cameras and other surveillance gear at Airborne Technologies in Austria. Airborne, founded in 2008, is best-known for producing a proprietary device, known as a SCAR Pod, that mounts on small aircraft and enables aerial surveillance cameras to wirelessly deliver live video and other data. In promotional material, Airborne calls it “surveillance out of the box.”

What FSG’s executives did not know at the time was that Prince, through one of his veiled corporate entities, owned 25 percent of Airborne. Dorian Barak, Prince’s personal attorney who handled his investments, brokered Prince’s ownership stake in Airborne in early 2013 and represented Prince on the company’s board. In preparing the deal, Barak suggested that Airborne was open to expanding into the security business with Prince providing “strategic guidance,” contacts, and sales, according to a memo prepared for Prince.

Barak did not respond to a request for comment. Prince did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Christiaan “Serge” Durrant, a former Australian special forces pilot, ran FSG’s “specialty aviation division.”

Photo: LinkedIn

Prince and his team made plans for the aircraft to be flown from the U.S. directly to Airborne’s hangar at Wiener Neustadt East airport, south of Vienna. The official contract with Airborne was to modify the planes with surveillance equipment, including a Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) camera similar to those used on U.S. attack and spy drones.

In May 2014, both Thrush planes were flown from the U.S. across the Atlantic Ocean to Airborne’s hangar. Once they arrived in Austria, Prince asserted effective control over the modifications and an ability to make decisions for both FSG and Airborne. The Thrush project was managed by Prince’s longtime associate Christiaan “Serge” Durrant. Prince had enlisted Durrant, a former Australian special forces pilot, to run FSG’s “specialty aviation division.” By that point, Prince was brokering a secret arrangement with executives at Airborne to turn the planes into paramilitary aircraft.

The Air Tractor crop duster was weaponized by the CIA for use in Colombia in the early 2000s.

Photo: Lowvelder

THE IDEA OF arming agricultural planes for attack did not originate with Prince. In the early 2000s, a classified program run by the CIA in Colombia employed a different U.S. crop duster, the Air Tractor. During the day, on a State Department contract, the planes would spray coca fields with herbicide. But the aircraft had been modified with ISR equipment and hardware for mounting weapons, according to a former U.S. official familiar with the program, so that the planes could be used for night bombing missions against FARC rebels and cocaine cartels.

Prince was not involved with that program, but in 2008, he did purchase a Super Tucano, a Brazilian-made light attack aircraft. Prince then leased that plane to the Pentagon as a prototype, and nearly a decade later, the U.S. began providing armed Super Tucanos to Afghanistan’s air force. He also tried pitching a light attack plane to the CIA for close air support in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to two former colleagues of Prince who were involved in the offer.

The planes were cheap, durable, and relatively discreet.

In Prince’s view, according to several sources who worked closely with him for years, his idea had been stolen by the U.S. government and his competitors, one of which has a licensed contract with the government to sell weaponized Thrush planes. But Prince did not abandon his ambitions, and the Thrush modifications he was now coordinating held great promise. The planes were cheap, durable, and relatively discreet.

Months before embarking on the secret work at the Austrian hangar, Prince and his allies at Airborne began strategizing about how to confront a potentially project-ending obstacle: Austrian defense export regulations. They knew the government would view the customized Thrush planes for what they were: militarized aircraft. Austria, which played a central role in starting two world wars, has a firm policy of neutrality and stringent regulations that would apply to the export of an Austrian-manufactured paramilitary aircraft for use in a civil war.

This was not a new challenge for Prince. Through his former Blackwater enterprise, he had acquired extensive experience defying or sidestepping U.S. defense export regulations. In an effort to avoid Austrian and European export laws, Prince looked south to Bulgaria, a nation known for its lax defense export regulations and role as a hub for international arms traffickers. “It’s very difficult to manufacture [such aircraft] in Austria and keep everything quiet,” said a former Airborne employee who worked on the plane. “It’s too risky for them. So the idea was to go to Bulgaria.”

Kristof Nagl, chief financial officer of Airborne Technologies, helped Prince set up a Bulgarian front company.

Photo: Airborne Technologies

In May 2014, Kristof Nagl, Airborne’s chief financial officer, wrote to Prince explicitly discussing the creation of a front company in Bulgaria to disguise the production of weapons-readied aircraft. Nagl cited earlier discussions with Prince and Dorian Barak and confirmed for Prince that they were moving forward with “the foundation of” a Bulgarian company named LASA Engineering Ltd. “LASA shall mean light armed surveillance aircraft,” Nagl wrote. In the memo, Nagl described a structure for LASA in which Prince “provides customers and know how.” Airborne, according to Nagl, would acquire Thrush aircraft and do the reconnaissance and surveillance modifications. LASA, however, would “be used for marketing” and “selling of light armed airborne solutions,” though its promotional materials would not directly mention the word Thrush. This omission, Nagl wrote Prince, would be done “according to your wish.”

Under the proposed arrangement, LASA would purchase the Thrush aircraft modified by Airborne directly from the company at its standard price “so all margin will stay as always with” Airborne. The transformation of the planes to light attack aircraft would be laundered in Sofia. LASA would get the necessary export licenses from the Bulgarian government so that the planes could be sold or deployed abroad.

“LASA shall mean light armed surveillance aircraft,” Nagl wrote.

The advantage of the corporate front, according to Nagl, was that they could get “indirect access to potential clients which we have to refuse now and the ‘export risk’ is covered by” the newly formed Bulgarian entity. He also proposed that the partners involved in the deal put up a percentage of the cost of creating LASA, which “will not need any significant investment.”

In response to detailed questions from The Intercept, a lawyer representing Nagl and Airborne claimed that the assertions in this article are “incorrect except for the fact that our client is offering to the market ISR modifications on various aircraft, including Thrush.” He added: “Our client obtained all required export licenses in all past transactions and will keep doing so also in the future.” The lawyer asserted that Nagl and Airborne “strictly follow all relevant and applicable export control laws and regulations.” The firm that sent the letter, Specht & Partner, has also represented Prince in Austria. After the deadline for this article, Airborne’s lawyer sent further comment, writing that the company never manufactured or sold an armed aircraft and “does not hold (directly or indirectly) shares in a company” that did so.

Prince made arrangements to visit Bulgaria in May 2014 for an Airborne meeting and a tour of the Arsenal factory in Kazanlak. Arsenal is the largest arms manufacturer in Bulgaria, and Prince was interested in viewing its line of “aerial weaponry,” including guns, rockets, bombs, and weapons management systems for aircraft, according to an internal document reviewed by The Intercept.

Shawn Matthews, an FSG contractor and former Australian special forces pilot, served as Serge Durrant’s deputy on the Thrush program.

Photo: LinkedIn

The next month, according to internal documents, Shawn Matthews, an FSG contractor and former Australian special forces pilot who served as Durrant’s deputy on the Thrush program, went to Bulgaria to meet with Peter Mirchev, a Bulgarian arms dealer who supplied Viktor Bout. (Bout is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence in the U.S. for attempting to sell weapons to the FARC in Colombia.) When an FSG official learned that Matthews had met with Mirchev, he instructed Matthews and Durrant to cease all contact with him. It is not known what Matthews and Mirchev discussed, but the FSG official warned Prince’s men not to pursue arming the Thrush aircraft, saying that it would be a clear violation of U.S. law. Matthews declined to comment on the record. Durrant declined to comment.

According to the former Airborne employee and a second company whistleblower, almost all of the modifications would actually be performed in Austria. By the time the aircraft reached Bulgaria, an engineer could complete a simple installation of hardware. “The final installation of the weapons would be done in Bulgaria,” said the former employee.

Arsenal is the largest arms manufacturer in Bulgaria. Prince said he was interested in viewing its line of “aerial weaponry.”

Photo: Google Maps

FOR NEARLY TWO decades, Prince has steadily built a labyrinthine network of entities and supply-chain businesses in his quest to provide full-spectrum, “turn-key” military “solutions.” With an ownership stake in Airborne, and a front company in Bulgaria, Prince, aided by his lawyer Dorian Barak, was buying in to and expanding an entire ecosystem of paramilitary services: surveillance, weapons, engineering, and a clandestine apparatus for bypassing national and international defense regulations.

Two common threads emerge when examining many of Prince’s recent military proposals and offshore companies: He owns multiple parts of the supply chains for the deployment of private armed forces to foreign countries; and, since at least 2012, he has failed to implement them.

The plan that Prince and his team devised to weaponize the Thrush crop dusters was an engineering nightmare. Prince’s men treated Airborne’s hangar as their private Frankenstein laboratory where they directed engineers and mechanics in a perilous experiment to transform an agricultural airplane into a jerry-rigged flying tank. And Prince wanted it done fast.

At Prince’s direction, Airborne’s engineers installed bulletproof glass on modified Thrush aircraft.

Photo obtained by The Intercept

The Intercept has reviewed dozens of documents relating to the modifications of the Thrush aircraft in Austria. The former Airborne employee, who played a central role in the modifications performed on the Thrush, agreed to speak with The Intercept on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the program and fears of retaliation by Prince and Airborne.

It was clear almost as soon as the Thrush planes arrived at the hangar outside Vienna that the goal was to create military-grade attack aircraft, according to the former employee. He said that Nagl, Airborne’s chief financial officer, and Wolfgang Grumeth, the firm’s CEO, must have known that the modifications they were performing would likely be prohibited under Austrian regulations. Airborne’s employees, who had worked on sensitive projects for various governments, were led to believe they were engaged in a secret but legitimate contract.

Grumeth did not respond to a request for comment, but Airborne’s attorney stated that the company is “strictly following all Austrian as well as international applicable laws and regulations in connection with their business.”

Work began in Austria on one of the Thrush planes in July 2014. Durrant’s deputy, Shawn Matthews, embedded at the Austrian hangar to oversee the modifications, which Airborne’s employees were instructed to describe using code words such as “aeromagnetic” and “sensor” to replace discussion of weapons.

Inside a hangar in Austria, the Thrush were stripped down and rebuilt as paramilitary aircraft.

Photo obtained by The Intercept

The initial modifications involved attaching the SCAR Pod and surveillance camera. In addition to the cameras and other reconnaissance systems, according to the former employee, they installed heavy armor on the plane, replaced the Thrush’s windows with 19 mm thick ballistic glass, and lined the cockpit with Kevlar. They placed special meshing in the fuel tank so that it would not explode if struck by bullets or shrapnel, and attached a camera mount that allowed the surveillance package to be lowered once the plane was aloft so it could be used as a laser platform to assist targeting.

It was already apparent to most of the staff working on the plane that the modifications, requested by a company they knew only as Frontier, were deeply problematic. “It was clear they didn’t care about certification,” the former Airborne employee said, describing the attitude of Prince’s team. “If you make a modification to an aircraft and you do not certify it, then the operation of the aircraft is completely illegal. In Europe, it is very illegal. You are breaking a lot of laws.” He recalled one of Prince’s deputies saying that the aircraft would be used for surveillance operations in Africa and “no one there cares about certifications.” The former employee said he and other personnel working on the Thrush project were told that certification and licensing were the aircraft owner’s problem. The message was: “We do not have a risk as long as everyone keeps quiet.”

The modified Thrush aircraft had retractable surveillance cameras similar to those installed on U.S. attack drones.

Photo obtained by The Intercept

IN AUGUST 2014, a month after Nagl’s communication with Prince about establishing LASA, the company was officially open for business in Sofia — or rather, an entity named LASA filed papers with the Bulgarian government. Prince’s man in Bulgaria was Zachary Botchev, a U.S.-educated businessman whose professional biography states that he created the largest ceramic tile producer in the Balkans and started a jet airline company.

Botchev was an initial investor in Airborne and at one point controlled a third of the company’s stock. Botchev and Nagl had worked together before the founding of Airborne, according to the former employee. “The idea,” he said, was that Botchev would eventually “buy an airfield in Bulgaria and they would weaponize the planes there.”

Botchev did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In the memo Nagl sent to Prince outlining the plan for establishing LASA, he stated that Botchev would provide local contacts in Bulgaria for export licenses and “products.” He was also tasked with selecting LASA’s managing director. It was Botchev who arranged Prince’s tour of the weapons factory in Bulgaria.

Botchev is a convicted felon with a warrant out for his arrest in the U.S., according to court files. He was found guilty of felony burglary for stealing trade files from an employer in Texas while living in Dallas in the 1990s. Botchev violated the terms of his probation and fled the U.S.

According to LASA’s corporate filings with the Bulgarian government, its official address and phone number are the same as a Bulgarian aviation company, controlled by Botchev, that claims a “close partnership” with Airborne. On LASA’s sparse website, the contact email goes to a sales address for Botchev’s company. LASA’s founding documents and other forms filed with the Bulgarian government do not mention Prince, Airborne, FSG, or the Thrush aircraft. On paper, LASA was established by a consortium of Botchev-linked businesses that shared a handful of common addresses and phone numbers.

One of LASA’s reported offices in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Photo: Google Maps

In an email, a lawyer for LASA wrote that the company was “in full compliance to all respective” laws and could not comment on “commercial arrangements.”

Botchev’s associates, who populate a murky network of Bulgarian companies, constitute 100 percent of LASA’s ownership and management. Among the addresses provided to the Bulgarian government by LASA and other Botchev-affiliated companies is a graffiti-covered building in Sofia and an office in a blighted strip mall. In its filings, LASA described its business as engineering in Bulgaria and abroad, obtaining licenses, technology brokering, domestic and foreign trade, “as well as any other commercial activity not prohibited by law.” There was no mention of weaponizing or modifying aircraft.

In September 2014, Durrant told FSG that some of the modifications and testing of the Thrush would need to be performed in Bulgaria, and that he had a deal for LASA to be the vendor. When FSG began vetting LASA, it found almost no publicly available information that would indicate LASA had ever done any business of any kind. The company did not appear to have previous contracts to modify aircraft, nor did it have a factory or staff to perform such work. According to its 2014 financial filings in Bulgaria, LASA paid less than $5,000 in salaries. One FSG officer involved with the review said LASA looked like a “paper company.” Prince and his deputies were “deliberately vague,” the officer said, in explaining the nature of the additional modifications and testing and why it was necessary to hire LASA.

In its filings with the Bulgarian government, LASA listed this graffiti-covered building in Sofia, Bulgaria, as one of its offices.

Photo: Google Maps

KRISTOF NAGL INFORMED Airborne’s Thrush team in Austria that September that they would have to work substantial overtime to finish the modifications, according to the former employee and the other whistleblower. People who worked for FSG on the project with Prince described him as running the Thrush program as though FSG were not a public company with a CEO or shareholders, but rather his private enterprise. One described Prince directing Airborne to equip the Thrush with “more toys” without alerting anyone at FSG. “We were very busy with this aircraft,” the former Airborne employee said. “There was no time for thinking, just for work because we had to make a lot of modifications on these aircraft. We were working day and night, Saturday and Sunday nights.”

Prince’s team told Airborne’s engineers they wanted the ability to mount 23 mm Russian machine guns on both sides of the plane. Those guns create a powerful recoil that Airborne’s engineers struggled to offset with complex, additional modifications. They worked around the clock and replaced the airplane’s entire electrical system. As the deadline for the Thrush’s deployment grew near, Prince’s men faced a new challenge: They were unable to purchase pylons, the hardware necessary for mounting bombs and rockets on planes.

Additional modifications to support machine guns mounted on the Thrush aircraft.

Photo obtained by The Intercept

After failed attempts to acquire them through multiple countries, they conceded defeat. The plane would have to deploy without the pylons. But they instructed Airborne to begin building customized pylons capable of carrying both Russian and NATO munitions that could be added later. According to Prince’s original Thrush blueprint, the aim was to patent a new pylon. Creating such a device was a challenge, but Airborne’s engineers would eventually succeed in building it, according to the former Airborne employee. “It was really an impressive engineering accomplishment,” he said, pointing out that Western and Russian bombs required different mounts. “You could arm those aircraft with any weapons — NATO or Warsaw pact — with the pylons we built. It was kind of incredible.”

In October 2014, Prince finally prevailed in getting FSG to sign a contract to have one of the Thrush aircraft further modified and tested by LASA in Bulgaria, with work set to commence the following spring. “The boss wants this,” one of the people involved with the deal said he was told by Serge Durrant. The boss was Prince, though the exact nature of the additional modifications remained vague.

By that point, Airborne had already attached more than 1,500 pounds of equipment to one of the Thrush planes. The engineers were told that the plane needed to be sent to Africa right away — they had been led to believe the destination was Kenya. Under pressure from Airborne’s management and Prince’s men, the former Airborne employee said they hastily organized a 30-minute test flight in Austria. It was a disaster. “After all these modifications, we had only one test flight. We had no maintenance guy who signed off on it, no paper, just jumping in and flying,” he said. “We found 30 problems and we only had two days to fix the problems because they needed to ferry it to Africa.”

“We are not just doing something risky, we are doing something completely illegal,” said a former Airborne employee.

Despite a range of safety concerns from Airborne’s technicians, a few days later, the heavily modified Thrush took off for Africa. But the pilot had to abort the journey and make a premature landing because of a damaged fuel pump. After the plane was repaired, it was flown to Malta, where a plane spotter snapped a picture of the aircraft. The Thrush, according to its tail number, had been registered in the European mini-state of San Marino. The photo the plane spotter posted on a hobbyist website showed an armored aircraft with a distinctly military appearance and clearly visible drone-style surveillance gear. Eventually the aircraft was flown back to Austria, where Airborne workers would spend three weeks repairing it.

After this photo of the Thrush aircraft was posted by a plane spotter in Malta, aviation authorities canceled the plane’s registration.

Photo: Burmarrad Camenzuli/Flickr

As staff worked on the aircraft one Saturday that November, according to the former Airborne employee, Nagl announced they were expecting a special visitor on-site. Nagl did not name the visitor, the former employee said, but described him as “something like an owner of our company” who was “very important.” The visitor, arriving in the black Mercedes SUV, was the mysterious Echo Papa. “We had no idea who this guy was. When he entered the hangar, I knew his face, but I couldn’t recall his name.” One of his colleagues told him the man was Erik Prince of Blackwater.

The former employee had read about Prince years earlier in the local paper, and he immediately Googled him at a computer in the hangar. “Erik Prince is the co-owner of our company?” he recalled thinking in disgust. That was the moment he realized that the Thrush he helped to modify was not intended for what he and his colleagues considered a legitimate client, “but had been built for Erik Prince stuff.”

The former employee said that learning of Prince’s ownership stake and role in the Thrush program led him to conclude, “We are not just doing something risky, we are doing something completely illegal.” Several Airborne employees would eventually quit over concerns about the project and Prince.

“A private armored plane? It’s for me completely unthinkable to do that.”

By the time Prince toured the hangar that Saturday, the first Thrush was almost completely ready for full weaponization. “Ninety-nine percent of the horrible work had already been done,” said the former Airborne employee. The plane had a retractable camera that could be lowered below the propeller for lasers to support the targeting of bombs and rockets, as well as a wireless data link system that could enable firing munitions remotely, similar to how an armed drone functions. “If I make a military aircraft and it’s delivered to the Swiss or to Germany, I have no problems with that,” the former employee said. “But a private armored plane? It’s for me completely unthinkable to do that.”

Airborne technicians in Austria work on the surveillance gear attached to one of the Thrush airplanes.

Photo obtained by The Intercept

FOR SIX MONTHS, FSG’s executives had heard almost nothing about Project Mike, the Mali job to support a campaign against al Qaeda that Prince cited as the reason to expedite the purchase of the Thrush aircraft in early 2014. That did not surprise the executives. They knew, from his history, that Prince was always looking for the next deal and often merged his aspirational plans with concrete ones. “All these projects that Erik talked about where FSG would participate in them never happened,” said the source with direct knowledge of the company’s inner workings. “Erik was always running around talking about things that could happen, but none of them were happening.”

Then, in the summer of 2014, Prince brought a project to FSG that he believed could serve as a test run for the newly modified Thrush planes and help get the infant company on its feet. It involved South Sudan, where Prince had a long track record dating back to the Blackwater era. Prior to South Sudan’s independence in 2011, Blackwater was fined by the U.S. government for brokering defense services to southern Christian rebels without a State Department license. In 2006, ignoring explicit U.S. government instructions, Blackwater proposed a security contract with forces loyal to rebel leader Salva Kiir, a devout Christian and the future president of an independent South Sudan.

Salva Kiir, a devout Christian and the president of South Sudan, has a relationship with Erik Prince that’s spanned more than a decade.

Photo: AFP

Nearly a decade later, when Prince brokered FSG’s deal, South Sudan was ruled by Kiir, whose trademark cowboy hat was a gift from President George W. Bush. In the summer of 2014, the young, oil-rich country was several months into a civil war that had reduced oil production by a third, and Kiir needed Prince’s support. But, as was the case with many of Prince’s proposals, the services he claimed he was offering stood in stark contrast to his real plan.

FSG, according to the proposal Prince presented to the company, would provide South Sudan’s Ministry of Petroleum and Mining with logistical services to help get the country’s oil fields and refineries back online. The 12-month contract, which company officials said was worth $150 million, called for FSG to operate overflight surveillance of several oil fields in South Sudan, build and supply camps next to the fields, and ferry workers and engineers by helicopter and plane.

Willingness to operate in a civil war reflected the new company’s appetite for risk; FSG recognized an opportunity for profit in parts of the African continent where competitors were afraid to venture. Prince, as chairman and founder of the company, saw himself as opening the door for business on the African “frontier.” But, according to multiple sources, the services FSG understood it would provide to South Sudan never included defense assistance. The company had not applied for, nor did it possess, the required defense export licenses from the U.S. government.

“This is not supporting the army,” Gregg Smith told Bloomberg News in December 2014. “The contract is clearly with the Ministry of Petroleum and Mining to support the oil field services and to make sure the production of oil keeps flowing.”

In Austria, Airborne had already drawn up blueprints detailing how different weapons configurations would affect the Thrush’s fuel consumption and flight times, according to a copy of the plans. The blueprints offered three configuration options: mixed-attack mission, ISR mission, and bomb mission. All of them involved arming the planes with a combination of machine guns, bombs, or rockets.

One of the configurations developed by Airborne Technologies for weaponizing the Thrush aircraft.

CONTRARY TO WHAT the Airborne employees had been told, the Thrush was not intended for a Kenyan operation. The plane was ultimately flown from Austria to Juba, South Sudan. In the meantime, San Marino aviation authorities had seen the picture of the Thrush posted by the plane spotter and canceled the aircraft’s registration. They informed FSG that the plane did not appear to be the civilian aircraft for which they had issued an operating certificate. Within a few weeks, the Thrush was transported from Juba to an air hangar in another East African nation, where it remains to this day.

By the end of 2014, the South Sudanese government had stopped paying FSG. When FSG executives inquired with the oil ministry, the South Sudanese were evasive, saying they would only speak directly to Prince. “They quit paying and they wouldn’t talk to anyone and they said, ‘You need to have Erik Prince come up here,’” recalled the source with direct knowledge of the company’s operations. “They wouldn’t talk to us, wouldn’t pay us, wouldn’t do anything.”

“They said, ‘You need to have Erik Prince come up here.’”

FSG dispatched personnel to Juba to determine why the contract was falling apart. Although the government wouldn’t tell FSG what the problem was, one South Sudanese official told an FSG employee in the country that Prince had promised to provide the government with attack aircraft. The South Sudanese, according to a person with knowledge of the encounter, were initially confused, and then angry, when the militarized planes never arrived.

“[The South Sudanese] thought they were buying attack aircraft that could go after the rebels in a very serious manner,” said the source knowledgable about FSG’s internal affairs. “Erik had promised things to these guys, capabilities that we didn’t have and that we were never going to have.”

Prince had promised the South Sudan government a foreign mercenary force if it hired FSG to provide logistics and aerial surveillance. Prince did not inform FSG executives of this side deal, claiming he had offered only “monitoring the oil fields, monitoring any activity in and around them, to give the government line of sight so they could keep the oil flowing,” according to the source familiar with internal FSG matters.

“Erik promised them ISR, planes that drop bombs, attack helicopters, medical evacuation capabilities, a strike team, and training for 4,000 soldiers,” said the second person with knowledge of the plan. “The contract was for logistical support and camp building, things to support the oil fields. [Prince] verbally promised the rest.”

In the meantime, one of Prince’s lieutenants, a retired South African special forces officer, began building a proposal for Prince that could be pitched to President Kiir. Code-named Project Iron Fist, the proposal stated that Prince and his colleagues had been “invited” by South Sudan to “design a proposal” for “oil field security training, security intervention and protection support services to the government of South Sudan.”

Read the document: Erik Prince’s Iron Fist proposal.

Prince’s associates explicitly plotted a business structure for the contract that would expose no traceable connection to them, according to a document reviewed by The Intercept. They believed this would enable them to hide violations of U.S. and international defense regulations.

At the time the plan was being prepared, the United Nations Security Council was considering a set of sanctions and an arms embargo against Salva Kiir and his political rival’s armed faction.

Prince’s $300 million proposal to aid Kiir’s forces explicitly called for ground and air assaults, initially to be conducted by a 341-person foreign combat unit. Prince’s forces would conduct “deliberate attacks, raids, [and] ambushes” against “rebel objectives,” to be followed by “continuous medium to high intensity rapid intervention,” which would include “search [and] destroy missions.” Various drafts of the proposal, obtained by The Intercept, reveal meticulous planning, down to the exact number of munitions and specific hand-held radios that would be purchased. Iron Fist called for the acquisition of at least 600 bombs, 3,500 rockets, 7,500 mortars, and more than 30 million rounds of ammunition.

Among the aircraft offered in the plan were two weaponized and surveillance-equipped Thrush planes.

Read the document: Erik Prince’s Iron Fist PowerPoint presentation.

Iron Fist represents — more than any other known document — Erik Prince’s vision of contemporary warfare on the African continent, where the mere presence of an armed crop duster offers an opportunity to defeat a rebellion, terror group, or insurgency. While the proposal’s overt focus was on protecting South Sudan’s oil industry, two people with direct knowledge of Prince’s efforts said his actual intent was to provide a foreign force, loyal to President Kiir, to be used in a civil war fought largely on ethnic and religious lines. Iron Fist promised that the rebels would be “neutralized.” According to one of the people with knowledge of the project, Prince and his team then planned to establish and train a force to defend President Kiir’s agenda. They would also offer “spin-offs” of the original foreign mercenary unit, according to the Iron Fist proposal.

After FSG’s logistics contract fell apart and the government halted its payments to the company, Prince traveled alone to South Sudan several times in early 2015 in an effort to salvage the deal. FSG officials said that Prince never briefed the company on his meetings and they were never given a formal explanation of what they had failed to provide the South Sudanese government. “We never got paid and I made the decision to shut it down,” said Smith.

Slides from Prince’s original plan to weaponize the Thrush 510G.

IN MARCH 2015, Prince traveled to a Central Asian nation where he was pursuing a contract. He floated the idea of using the Thrush for that job, a suggestion shot down by FSG executives concerned about possible violations of U.S. defense export regulations.

By then, the company had already begun exploring the sale of the two Thrush aircraft. After the failure in South Sudan, FSG’s leadership had decided that providing surveillance aircraft would not be part of the company’s future business model. In an effort to assess the value of the planes, in April 2015, FSG began reviewing the costs of the modifications made to its aircraft. In June, Prince told FSG that Airborne was interested in purchasing the aircraft.

From the perspective of FSG’s leadership, the two Thrush aircraft — one stuck in East Africa, the other housed in Airborne’s hangar in Austria — were becoming a nuisance and they wanted to get them off the company’s books. FSG had a preliminary inspection performed on the plane in Africa in an effort to determine its value. Following that inspection, FSG executives were informed that it had been modified beyond the surveillance capabilities they had been briefed on. “We said, ‘Holy crap, maybe we don’t know what we have.’ We never laid eyes on these aircraft physically,” said the source with direct knowledge of FSG’s operations. “Nobody had, except Erik and Serge and the guys” who did the modifications, he added.

“Holy crap, maybe we don’t know what we have.”

When the inspectors reported their findings to FSG, the company understood it had a potentially serious problem with U.S. defense export regulations. The first Thrush, according to the inspection, had hard points on the wing, an armored cockpit, nose armor, ballistic glass, night-vision capabilities, and other paramilitary enhancements.

Afraid that FSG could be in violation of U.S. government regulations, the company turned to legal counsel. They were advised that, to be cautious, FSG should view the plane as a “foreign defense article” — a flying weapon that the company had no license to sell. The lawyers also concluded that even if FSG rightfully owned the modified plane, any U.S. citizen attempting to broker its sale or use by a foreign power could be violating U.S. law. Their legal opinion was that there was a “material risk” that the government would determine that Prince and other FSG staff had engaged in unauthorized brokering. The lawyers were so concerned that they advised the company to consider self-reporting the issue to the government.

FSG began an internal review. Its auditors soon discovered a series of orders and other arrangements that Prince and Durrant had pushed through without fully informing the company of their true purpose. By then, Prince was pressuring FSG to sell the Thrush planes to LASA in Bulgaria. LASA, in turn, would sell them to Prince’s buyer in Central Asia. Documents show Prince wanted to sell the two planes for $16 million. Smith said he became concerned that selling the planes to a company they could find almost no information about in a country renowned for arms trafficking could end badly. Behind the scenes, Prince attempted to pressure an FSG officer reviewing the potential deal to rubber stamp it. He was rebuffed.

Despite FSG’s stated desire to sell the aircraft, Prince, Airborne, and LASA forged ahead with their efforts to complete the weaponization of the second Thrush. Earlier in 2015, Airborne had sent two employees to Ukraine and Bulgaria to visit weapons manufacturers in an effort to assess the hardware that would be necessary to finish the job, according to the former Airborne employee. The Thrush at Airborne’s hangar in Austria, which had been modified in an almost identical manner to the one stranded in Africa, was flown to Bulgaria. “All of the modifications were done in Austria except the mounting of the pylons, which was intended to be done in Bulgaria,” the former employee said.

Behind the scenes, Prince’s men were panicking.

In September 2015, FSG’s board was notified that its plane grounded in East Africa had been modified for weapons and would likely be considered a foreign defense article in the eyes of the U.S. government. A second inspection was ordered, this time to assess the FSG aircraft in Bulgaria. When Prince’s inner circle caught wind of the imminent inspection, they engaged in a conspiracy to thwart the investigators’ efforts and to conceal the true extent of the modifications. According to two inside sources, Prince and his deputies hid the fact that they were preparing the Thrush to be weaponized, with one charging they had “deliberately concealed” the effort.

Behind the scenes, Prince’s men were panicking. Matthews, the Thrush pilot, privately expressed concerns to a colleague that the company’s CEO didn’t seem to understand what was going on, and asked whether the company understood the extent of the modifications. He advocated postponing the inspection of the plane in Bulgaria so they could surreptitiously remove the military equipment. At the time they learned of the inspection, the Thrush had already been equipped for weapons testing. The plane had been retrofitted to a state where “in one week you could have turned this aircraft into a weaponized plane,” according to the former Airborne employee. In advance of the inspection, one of Prince’s deputies described taping over a weapons control panel that had been installed in the cockpit.

When FSG’s inspectors arrived in Bulgaria in late September to examine the Thrush, according to two sources briefed on the report, they found armor on the plane’s frame and nose, laser-targeting equipment, ballistic glass, and an anti-explosive mechanism built in to the fuel tank. They also discovered modifications inside the cockpit for controlling weapons systems and hardware for arming the aircraft with bombs, rockets, and machine guns. The inspectors noted that the Bulgarian facility where the modifications had allegedly taken place did not appear to have the equipment or personnel capable of doing the work.

The discovery sparked an internal battle within FSG. Senior executives accused Prince of placing the company’s executives and officers — including a retired four-star admiral — in legal jeopardy with the U.S. government, with one senior executive alleging that Prince ran “a secret program deep within our organization.”

Smith ordered a full review of the company’s internal communications and computer network to document how and why the planes had been modified, according to three people with direct knowledge of the events. FSG officials found records, including invoices that did not match signed contracts, indicating that Prince and Durrant had secretly authorized approximately $2 million in additional modifications. “There was a concerted effort to downplay the modifications. There’s a difference between modification and weaponization,” said an FSG insider. “Did Gregg Smith know they were being modified? Of course he did. Whether they were weaponized is a different question. That was deliberately kept from senior management.”

Airborne technicians work on installing retractable surveillance gear.

Photo obtained by The Intercept

LAST OCTOBER, FRONTIER Services Group held its biannual board meeting in Hong Kong. Gregg Smith delivered the results of the internal investigation, which left little doubt that Prince, FSG’s chairman and founder, had used his position in the company to pay for and build the prototype for a private air force.

Prince already knew what he’d face at the meeting. FSG executives had forced his close lieutenant Serge Durrant into an administrative leave based on evidence Durrant had helped direct the unauthorized effort to weaponize the Thrush and then conceal it from the company’s leadership. Prince formally disclosed his partial ownership of Airborne but denied he had any connection to LASA Engineering. The board also learned from Prince for the first time that another of his companies had been paid for construction equipment used to build one of the oil field camps in South Sudan. In addition, Prince disclosed four other entities that he owned or controlled, all of which had received payments from FSG for services.

Smith and the board voted to shut down the specialty aviation division entirely and fired Durrant, Matthews, and several other Prince hires. In all, more than 20 employees were pushed out. The board formally decided to write off the $8 million expenditure of the two Thrush crop dusters and their modifications. The planes would either have the militarized components uninstalled, in an effort to sell them, or the aircraft would be sold for scrap.

The board stripped Prince of any authority over the day-to-day operations of the company.

The board also stripped Prince of any authority over the day-to-day operations of the company. “The Company reiterates its policy not to acquire or modify controlled items” under U.S. defense export regulations, stated a board resolution reviewed by The Intercept. It added that FSG would not “engage in activities that require” U.S. government licenses.

FSG’s growth projections for 2016 were strong, and the company’s executives believed they had successfully put their chairman’s trouble behind them. A final resolution reiterated that FSG’s business was in transportation and logistics — and that any business outside that description required approval from a “high risk” committee headed by FSG’s most prominent board member, retired four-star Adm. William Fallon.

But Prince persisted with unsanctioned activities, including a secret meeting with Chinese intelligence in Beijing and the establishment of a bank account at Bank of China in Macau. By January 2016, executives at FSG had grown increasingly alarmed, and Prince’s efforts in China had become part of an investigation by the U.S. government into his defense-brokering activities. Victoria Toensing, one of Prince’s lawyers, told The Intercept that her client’s Chinese bank account complied with U.S. regulations.

In February, according to multiple people with direct knowledge of the events, FSG representatives traveled to Washington to meet with officials from the Department of Justice. At the meeting, they disclosed evidence pertaining to the modifications of the Thrush aircraft and the attempt to broker a sale in Central Asia, as well as Prince’s meetings in China. Among the officials with whom FSG representatives met were the head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division and a senior prosecutor for export control in its counterespionage section.

Airborne Technologies brochure featuring the modified Thrush 510G.

Photo: Airborne Technologies

None of this seems to have slowed the modified Thrush program. Airborne’s prized American co-owner had indicated that there was great interest from buyers in the Middle East and Africa for the modified Thrush, according to a source with direct knowledge of Airborne’s internal meetings. The future production of 100 to 150 of the planes was mentioned.

In February, Airborne showcased the customized planes at a defense trade show in Singapore. The company also posted on its website an essay written from the perspective of the Thrush aircraft. “I’m characterized by a rugged design in combination with long-range endurance, this makes me reliable and robust during challenging times,” read the essay. “I come along with a steeled body, so I am used to carrying heavy loads without effort. I am able to work under pressure and I stand my ground when others fly at me. All in all I am the perfect workhorse anywhere and in any situation.” A note after the essay referred to the Thrush’s “tank” armor and “ruggedized” frame. “Due to its incredibly robust, durable and reliable design features the Thrush aircraft is ready to use when others reach their limit,” said Wolfgang Grumeth, Airborne’s CEO. On its website, Airborne began actively promoting the sale of modified Thrush aircraft. It featured a photo of one of FSG’s modified planes.

An Austrian lawmaker, who has investigated arms trafficking for years, is in the preliminary stages of what he believes will become a criminal investigation into Prince and Airborne Technologies. Peter Pilz, a member of the Austrian Parliament, says he plans to present a public prosecutor with documentary evidence on the Thrush modifications and the plans to weaponize the aircraft. “We are definitely sure that it is against our laws of neutrality,” Pilz told The Intercept. He said the investigation would also examine possible violations of Austrian defense export regulations. “Prince and all the others are not guilty until there’s been a case and a trial. But this case is strong enough. It’s going to be a criminal case definitely.” Citing Blackwater’s history in Iraq and the “soldier of fortune business,” Pilz said, “It is unacceptable for us to have people like Erik Prince in Austria. We have to make that very clear.”

Airborne’s hangar is a stone’s throw from what was once the Wiener Neustadt aircraft factory, which the Nazis used to manufacture warplanes during World War II. Allied bombers repeatedly targeted the factory and ultimately reduced the entire city of Wiener Neustadt to rubble. “The crucial thing is that a company in Wiener Neustadt is once again building fighter airplanes, while combat airplanes were once the reason why this city was completely destroyed,” said the former Airborne employee. This fact, according to Pilz, will not be lost on the city’s residents. “I think that when people in Wiener Neustadt are informed [about] what’s going on in the area of their city, it will be a major political scandal,” Pilz said.

Kristof Nagl and Wolfgang Grumeth with Wiener Neustadt’s mayor at the groundbreaking ceremony for a new Airborne Technologies facility.

Photo: Airborne Technologies

Airborne does not appear concerned. In early March, its executives broke ground on a new facility at Wiener Neustadt airport in Austria. The local mayor was on hand to celebrate, along with Nagl and Grumeth. An Airborne press release announced that the company had recently won “a number of significant orders from international Police and Military forces.” The company predicted unprecedented growth and a substantial expansion of its workforce. Among the structures it intends to build by September is a large hangar to house sensitive projects.

A recent LASA business proposal delivered to a foreign government, reviewed by The Intercept, offered to provide heavily modified, weapons-readied Thrush aircraft. It advertised the capability to equip the planes with missiles, bombs, and machine guns, though it noted that the weapons were not included as part of the specific package. The sales pitch contained multiple photos of a modified Thrush in flight. Its tail number matched the FSG plane grounded in East Africa.

This Thrush aircraft, originally purchased by FSG, is currently grounded at a hangar in East Africa.

Photo obtained by The Intercept

IN THE WEEKS preceding FSG’s board meeting in March in Hong Kong, a civil war was raging within the company. On one side stood Smith and Adm. Fallon, on the other, Erik Prince, backed by the board members representing the Chinese government’s stake in the company. As the U.S. leadership of FSG met with government officials and others, several of them had been encouraged to sever business ties with Prince. The government investigation was expanding, they were told, and it could affect FSG’s business.

From the perspective of Smith’s faction, the board meeting in Hong Kong would decide whether the company they had built could be salvaged. In their view, FSG was never intended to venture into the security business. A publicly traded company run by the best-known American mercenary, in their estimation, would not be able to obtain the licenses and permissions from the U.S. government necessary to operate in the private military industry servicing foreign governments. In Hong Kong, there would be a moment of truth: Either Prince would declare a new direction for the company, or Smith and the other Americans Prince had recruited three years earlier would solidify the original FSG mission.

FSG’s most prominent board member, retired Adm. William Fallon.

Photo: Bloomberg / Getty Images

In the last days of March, the board gathered at FSG’s offices on the 39th floor of an office building overlooking Kowloon Bay in Hong Kong. FSG’s Chinese board members wasted no time in declaring their allegiance to Prince and a new vision for the company. Prince’s experience and reputation, they said, would assist the company in offering security and training services as well as anti-terrorism consulting for Chinese businesses, according to a former U.S. intelligence official briefed after the meeting.

FSG’s Chinese board members wasted no time in declaring their allegiance to Prince.

The board didn’t even need to vote. Prince, the Chinese government investors, and his allies on the board controlled enough of the company to call the shots. FSG, the Americans were told, had been created to support China’s global economic plan. Logistics and aviation, it seemed, had been a sideshow. The decision was a complete rebuke of the U.S. leadership of FSG, specifically Smith and Adm. Fallon.

Prince had won the battle.

But, with an expanding U.S. government investigation into his activities and a business landscape riddled with burned bridges, a significant question continues to haunt Prince: Will he win the war?

“Brilliant idea — logistics in Africa — Prince has been talking about that for ten years,” said the former U.S. intelligence official, who has worked extensively with Prince. “He could have made money with FSG with his eyes shut. Everybody agrees and he didn’t do it. Why? Because it was going to be boring.”

Update: April 11, 2016
This article has been updated with an additional comment from Airborne’s attorney.

Additional Research: Janis Kreilis.
Top photo: Portrait of Erik Prince by Mark Peckmezian. Collage: The Intercept.

Related:
Erik Prince in the Hot Seat

The post Inside Erik Prince’s Treacherous Drive to Build a Private Air Force appeared first on The Intercept.

What began as an investigation into Prince’s attempts to sell defense services in Libya and other countries in Africa has widened to a probe of allegations that Prince received assistance from Chinese intelligence to set up an account for his Libya operations through the Bank of China. The Justice Department, which declined to comment for this article, is also seeking to uncover the precise nature of Prince’s relationship with Chinese intelligence.

Prince, through his lawyer, Victoria Toensing, said he has not been informed of a federal investigation and had not offered any defense services in Libya. Toensing called the money-laundering allegations “total bullshit.”

The Intercept interviewed more than a half dozen of Prince’s associates, including current and former business partners; four former U.S. intelligence officers; and other sources familiar with the Justice Department investigation. All of them requested anonymity to discuss these matters because there is an ongoing investigation. The Intercept also reviewed several secret proposals drafted by Prince and his closest advisers and partners offering paramilitary services to foreign entities.

For more than a year, U.S. intelligence has been monitoring Prince’s communications and movements, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence officer and a second former intelligence official briefed on the investigation. Multiple sources, including two people with business ties to Prince, told The Intercept that current government and intelligence personnel informed them of this surveillance. Those with business ties were cautioned to sever their dealings with Prince.

Erik Prince Sought to Recreate a Blackwater-Style Operation

In 2010, amid public scandals and government investigations, Prince began to sell off his Blackwater empire. Using new vehicles, he continued to engage in controversial private security ventures, including operations in Somalia and the United Arab Emirates. Eventually, the former Navy SEAL and self-proclaimed American patriot began building close business ties with powerful individuals connected to the Chinese Communist Party. In January 2014, Prince officially went into business with the Chinese government’s largest state-owned investment firm, the Citic Group, and founded Frontier Services Group, which is based in Hong Kong. Citic Group is the company’s single largest investor, and two of FSG’s board members are Chinese nationals.

Despite the provenance of FSG’s funding and Prince’s history of bad publicity, Prince was able to recruit an impressive line-up of former U.S. military and intelligence officers to run the company. Key to Prince’s ability to retain such personnel, given FSG’s ties to China, has been the firm’s strictly circumscribed mission, which does not include military-related services. FSG is a publicly traded aviation and logistics firm specializing in shipping in Africa and elsewhere. The company also conducts high-risk evacuations from conflict zones. Prince has described his work with FSG as being “on the side of peace and economic development” and helping Chinese businesses to work safely in Africa.

Behind the back of corporate leadership at FSG, Prince was living a double life.

But behind the back of corporate leadership at FSG, Prince was living a double life.

Working with a small cadre of loyalists — including a former South African commando, a former Australian air force pilot, and a lawyer with dual citizenship in the U.S. and Israel — Prince sought to secretly rebuild his private CIA and special operations enterprise by setting up foreign shell companies and offering paramilitary services, according to documents reviewed by The Intercept and interviews with several people familiar with Prince’s business proposals.

Several of the proposals for private security services in African nations examined by The Intercept contained metadata in the digital files showing Prince and his inner circle editing and revising various drafts.

Since 2014, Prince has traveled to at least half a dozen countries to offer various versions of a private military force, secretly meeting with a string of African officials. Among the countries where Prince pitched a plan to deploy paramilitary assets is Libya, which is currently subject to an array of U.S. and United Nations financial and defense restrictions.

Prince engaged in these activities over the objections of his own firm’s corporate leadership. Several FSG colleagues accused him of using his role as chairman to offer Blackwater-like services to foreign governments that could not have been provided by the company, which lacks the capacity, expertise, or even the legal authority to do so.

FSG’s CEO, Gregg Smith, a decorated former U.S. Marine who deployed twice to Beirut in the 1980s, vehemently denies the firm’s complicity in any such efforts by Prince. “FSG has no involvement whatsoever with the provision of — or even offering to provide — defense services in Libya,” Smith told The Intercept. “To the extent that anyone has proposed such services and purported that they were representing FSG, that activity is unauthorized and is not accepted or agreed to by the company.”

Smith said that any proposals advanced by Prince in Libya were not made on behalf of FSG, explaining that the company “has strict protocols in place and has a board-level committee to review any high-risk project, which would certainly include any proposal” involving Libya.

“He’s a rogue chairman,” said Prince’s close associate. “Erik wants to be a real, no-shit mercenary.”

“He’s a rogue chairman,” said one of Prince’s close associates, who has monitored his attempts to sell mercenary forces in Africa.

That source, who has extensive knowledge of Prince’s activities and travel schedule, said that Prince was operating a “secret skunkworks program” while parading around war and crisis zones as FSG’s founder and chairman. “Erik wants to be a real, no-shit mercenary,” said the source. “He’s off the rails exposing many U.S. citizens to criminal liabilities. Erik hides in the shadows … and uses [FSG] for legitimacy.”

Last October, FSG’s corporate leadership grew so concerned about Prince’s efforts to sell paramilitary programs and services that the board passed a series of resolutions stripping Prince of most of his responsibilities as chairman.

FSG also terminated the contracts of two of Prince’s closest associates within the company after management became suspicious that they were assisting Prince in his unapproved dealings, according to two people with knowledge of FSG’s inner workings. Smith declined to comment on internal FSG personnel matters.

In recent months, FSG employees became alarmed when they began to hear reports from sources within the U.S. government that their chairman’s communications and foreign travel were being monitored by U.S. intelligence. According to three people who have worked with Prince, his colleagues were warned not to get involved with his business deals or discuss sensitive issues with him. “I would assume that just about every intelligence agency in the world has him lit up on their screen,” said one of the people advised to avoid Prince.

Operation Lima: Prince Exploited Refugee Crisis to Peddle Paramilitary Services in Libya

Prince developed the paramilitary services proposal for Libyan officials in 2013, before FSG was created, according to documents and two people familiar with the pitch. He made several trips to Libya to meet with government officials there.

The Libyan proposal, reviewed by The Intercept, was code-named Operation Lima. It offered the Libyans an array of military equipment and services — including weaponized vehicles, helicopters, boats, and surveillance airplanes — to help stabilize eastern Libya. The ground force, according to a person involved with the plan, would consist of a troop of former Australian special operations commandos. Given the instability of the government and Prince’s inability to navigate complex Libyan factions to vet potential partners, he had trouble finding the right power brokers to help sell the proposal.

By May 2015, Prince had rebranded himself and claimed a legitimate public reputation as FSG’s chairman. Without the approval of FSG’s management, he returned to Libya offering a freshly repackaged proposal, according to a person involved with the plan. Rather than a counterinsurgency force, Prince proposed a similar set of equipment and services, but with a new justification: The mercenaries would be there to engage in border security.

Prince’s Libya proposal called for supplying “armed” vehicles, helicopters, boats, and surveillance planes to help stem the tide of migrants trying to reach Europe.

Prince told colleagues that he received preliminary approval for the border force from a senior Libyan official, but would need to secure European support to loosen up restrictions on Libyan money and weapons, which would otherwise impede the plan, according to a person who discussed the proposal with Prince.

By exploiting European fears of a mass exodus from the Middle East and North Africa, Prince believed he could obtain political buy-in from Europe to bring a foreign force into Libya.

Prince arranged a meeting in Germany to pitch the plan and also shared the proposal with the Italian government, according to two people familiar with his drive to drum up support for Operation Lima. In Italy, Prince found only lukewarm interest, according to a person with knowledge of the effort. The Intercept was unable to confirm the German response.

However, according to two people involved in the proposal, Prince grew frustrated with the failure to get European help in releasing the frozen Libyan funds, and began looking for other ways to get his border force funded.

By then, the U.S. government was already investigating Prince for possible weapons deals in Africa, according to the former senior U.S. intelligence official and the former intelligence official briefed on the matter. In the course of the surveillance operation for that investigation, U.S. intercepts revealed Prince appearing to discuss efforts to open bank accounts in China to help his Libyan associates.

“Money laundering for Libyan officials using a Chinese bank — that is the issue that pushed it over the edge” for the Justice Department, said the second former intelligence official.

The U.S. spies monitoring Prince soon discovered that he had traveled to the Chinese-controlled peninsula of Macau in an effort to open a bank account, according to two people familiar with the investigation. A well-connected source within the Macau banking community told The Intercept that Prince first attempted to open an account at the Macau branch of a European-connected bank, but was denied after a review by the bank’s European headquarters.

Later, Prince traveled to Beijing, where he met with Chinese agents from the Ministry of State Security, according to the second former intelligence official and a source familiar with the meeting.

In January, Prince returned to Macau and opened an account at the Bank of China, according to several sources, including the second former intelligence official and the source with close connections to Macau’s banking community.

“It was not a personal account,” said the former U.S. intelligence official briefed on the investigation. “He was doing it for the purpose of what is considered now — in the investigation — money laundering on behalf of the Libyans.”

“When he has legitimate business, he does legitimate business,” said Prince’s lawyer.

The CEO of FSG China is a former Chinese security official who was once described by a defense trade publication as “Prince’s right-hand man in China, oiling the wheels of his relationship with the government.”

“If Erik is fucking around with the Chinese, I don’t even want to imagine what the U.S. government is thinking about,” said Prince’s close associate with in-depth knowledge of his activities.

Toensing, Prince’s lawyer, confirmed that Prince successfully opened an account with the Bank of China. “He opened an account on behalf of a business,” she said. Toensing declined to say for which business he opened the account, but said that it complied with U.S. banking regulations. “This is not an FSG bank account,” a spokesperson for FSG told The Intercept.

As for Prince’s alleged meetings with Chinese intelligence, Toensing confirmed that Prince had met with internal security officials in Beijing, but claimed it was in connection to medical evacuation operations. Toensing was unable to answer allegations that Chinese intelligence assisted Prince in setting up a bank account in Macau because she could not reach Prince, whom she said was not in the United States. “What he told me about visiting China was that he was there selling his book and he’s given various speeches there,” she said.

While Prince’s re-invented Libya “border security” proposal was framed as a means of stopping migration, sources with knowledge of Prince’s business strategy allege that he had greater ambitions in that country. One person involved in Prince’s plan said the anti-migration force was seen as a vehicle for Prince to build a “backdoor” for so-called kinetic, or lethal, operations in Libya — a form of mercenary mission-creep. “During the day, you do interdiction of migrants — not kinetic,” said the person involved in the plan. “But those routes are used by weapons smugglers and drug traffickers at night. Insurgents too. Erik’s guys can then be offered to the Libyans to help with their other problems. That’s how you get kinetic.”

The plan called for a series of “border security” bases housing intelligence centers, helicopters, surveillance airplanes, and weaponized vehicles. Prince proposed a fully equipped, contemporary military force to be staffed in part by foreign mercenaries.

“This is Erik Prince using the refugee crisis in Europe in an effort to put mercenaries on the ground in Libya,” said Malcolm Nance, a former U.S. Naval officer who trained special operations forces and has extensive experience in Libya since the fall of Qaddafi. “They think they’re going to solve the migration problem with technology and a bunch of Western mercenaries?” Nance, who reviewed a copy of Prince’s plan provided by The Intercept, called the proposal “fantasy baseball.”

Government Investigation Focuses on Violations of U.S. Defense Export Regulations

Among the concerns of government investigators is that Prince’s attempts to provide defense-related services to Libya and other countries violate U.S. defense export regulations. Under federal law, U.S. citizens seeking to offer military services or technologies to Libya must have a license certifying that the services or articles are approved under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, or ITAR. “Many of these services and articles are designed to kill people or defend against killing people,” said John Barker, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for export controls. “To protect U.S. national security and foreign policy as well as that of its allies, the U.S. requires prior authorization.”

FSG officials told The Intercept that the company has no such licenses, nor has it sought them. “Since our inception, FSG has had bright-line policies against the provision of defense services and the purchase of U.S.-origin items that might be ITAR-controlled,” said Smith, the CEO of FSG.

The State Department’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls, which issues the licenses, told The Intercept that it would not comment on what licenses companies possess or lack, calling them “proprietary corporate data,” and asserted that information on the licenses is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. The Intercept has a long-standing FOIA request with the State Department seeking information on licenses granted to Prince and his former network of companies. To date, no information has been provided.

According to documents reviewed by The Intercept, as recently as 2014, Prince was registered as a defense services broker with the State Department through a limited liability corporation in Delaware, Westcomi LLC. That registration would permit Prince to engage in brokering without further authorization for some transactions in some countries, but not in Libya. Even with a valid brokering registration, according to legal experts, Prince would still need to get State Department approval for specific deals and report them to the U.S. government. “He could not solicit or promote the brokering of defense articles such as armored equipment delivered from abroad, or engage in or make a proposal to engage in brokering activities, absent prior U.S. government approval,” said Barker, the former state department official.

An FSG official said the company did not know if Prince obtained a license for his activities in Libya, but noted that he did not have one in his capacity as FSG’s chairman. One of Prince’s Libya proposals reviewed by The Intercept lists FSG as the commercial vendor for the project.

Last October, concerned about Prince’s unsanctioned international activities, FSG’s board approved a resolution clarifying that the company does not “engage in activities that require ITAR licenses.” A State Department spokesperson declined to comment, saying, “We are restricted under Federal Regulations from commenting on specific defense trade export licensing activities.”

Prince’s lawyer, Victoria Toensing, told The Intercept: “I’m not going to get into what licenses [Prince] has.”

“You push the buttons on the company, but the main bad guy gets away and does it again,” said an official who tried to prosecute Prince.

Prince has run up against ITAR in the past. In 2010, Prince sold most of his equity in the companies that fell under the Blackwater umbrella. Claiming that left-wing activists, Democratic politicians, and lawsuits had destroyed his companies, he left the United States and became a resident of Abu Dhabi. The remnant of his network was renamed Academi LLC. Federal prosecutors eventually attempted to prosecute Prince’s former companies, culminating in a 2012 deferred prosecution agreement to settle a lengthy list of U.S. legal and regulatory violations committed from 2005 through 2008 when Prince was in charge, including ITAR violations.

A senior official involved with the Blackwater-related litigation, who has since left the government, told The Intercept that the Obama administration’s continued willingness to award contracts to former Blackwater entities while the case was active was a fatal impediment to a successful prosecution. The official, comparing the former Blackwater empire to a drug syndicate, added that prosecutors could not get anyone under Prince to testify against him personally. “This is very much the concern,” the former official told The Intercept. “You push the buttons on the company, but the main bad guy gets away and does it again.”

No criminal charges were filed against Prince.

In federal court filings, Prince’s former companies admitted to providing — on numerous occasions during Prince’s tenure — defense goods and services to foreign governments without the required State Department licensing. In some cases, they admitted to providing services even after failing to obtain a license from the State Department.

As part of their settlement with the government, Prince’s companies ultimately agreed to pay nearly $50 million in fines and other penalties and to implement compliance procedures to ensure such illegal activities did not continue. In September 2015, the deferred charges were dismissed after the U.S. government certified that the companies had “fully complied” with all of its conditions.

At that point, Prince was already deep into creating new companies registered outside of the United States and appeared poised to return to the conduct that had marked his time at the helm of Blackwater.

An internal document from Prince’s inner circle, reviewed by The Intercept, shows his team openly discussing the need to avoid U.S. and international defense export regulations and to mask the involvement of Prince and his cohort in efforts to provide mercenary services and military equipment to foreign governments. “Erik is always pressing the limits as to what is possible,” said the close associate of Prince’s.

Project November: Prince Offered Services to Nigeria to Fight Boko Haram

Several of the proposals for paramilitary services Prince has shopped around the world called for the use of a foreign force to conduct operations, according to the proposals and a person familiar with Prince’s plans. These documents, including one for Nigeria, were not authorized or approved by FSG and do not exist on any of its internal computer systems, according to company officials.

Prince has long been interested in raising a private military force to battle Islamic militant groups in a variety of countries. In 2014, he traveled to Nigeria and met personally with then-President Goodluck Jonathan to offer a $1.5 billion proposal to wipe out the radical Islamic group Boko Haram, according to a person familiar with Prince’s meeting. “It was a proposal to fix roads,” Toensing, Prince’s lawyer, said in a phone interview. “It was for fixing roads and not military related.”

Part of Project November — Prince’s proposal for Nigeria — envisioned air attacks in northeast Nigeria against the Islamic militant group Boko Haram.

Nigeria later hired Eeben Barlow, the legendary South African special forces mercenary — and Prince’s longtime business rival — to conduct a three-month operation inside the country to fight Boko Haram. Two sources close to Prince said that, as Prince saw it, Barlow had taken his plan and effectively stole the contract. “Erik was smokin’ hot” over that, said one of the sources.

In recent months, Gregg Smith and some members of FSG’s board, which includes retired Adm. William Fallon, the former commander of U.S. Central Command, began examining the possibility that Prince’s unauthorized activities could lead to a criminal indictment or other sanctions against the FSG chairman by the U.S. government. Toensing dismissed the notion Prince had broken any laws. “When he has legitimate business, he does legitimate business,” she said.

According to multiple sources familiar with Prince’s activities, as well as documents reviewed by The Intercept, Prince is considering an invitation to speak at a conference later this month in China sponsored by the country’s main domestic security organization, the Ministry of Public Security.

Internally, FSG executives determined that any presentations by the company’s U.S. citizen personnel at the conference could potentially violate U.S. laws against providing defense advice to China. Smith issued a directive that no U.S. personnel from FSG were authorized to attend. Erik Prince, Smith told his staff, would need to make his own decision.

Research: Sheelagh McNeill, John Thomason, Margot Williams, Josh Begley

The post Blackwater’s Founder Is Under Investigation for Money Laundering, Ties to Chinese Intel, and Brokering Mercenary Services appeared first on The Intercept.

The catalogue includes details on the Stingray, a well-known brand of surveillance gear, as well as Boeing “dirt boxes” and dozens of more obscure devices that can be mounted on vehicles, drones, and piloted aircraft. Some are designed to be used at static locations, while others can be discreetly carried by an individual. They have names like Cyberhawk, Yellowstone, Blackfin, Maximus, Cyclone, and Spartacus. Within the catalogue, the NSA is listed as the vendor of one device, while another was developed for use by the CIA, and another was developed for a special forces requirement. Nearly a third of the entries focus on equipment that seems to have never been described in public before.

The Intercept obtained the catalogue from a source within the intelligence community concerned about the militarization of domestic law enforcement. (The original is here.)

A few of the devices can house a “target list” of as many as 10,000 unique phone identifiers. Most can be used to geolocate people, but the documents indicate that some have more advanced capabilities, like eavesdropping on calls and spying on SMS messages. Two systems, apparently designed for use on captured phones, are touted as having the ability to extract media files, address books, and notes, and one can retrieve deleted text messages.

Above all, the catalogue represents a trove of details on surveillance devices developed for military and intelligence purposes but increasingly used by law enforcement agencies to spy on people and convict them of crimes. The mass shooting earlier this month in San Bernardino, California, which President Barack Obama has called “an act of terrorism,” prompted calls for state and local police forces to beef up their counterterrorism capabilities, a process that has historically involved adapting military technologies to civilian use. Meanwhile, civil liberties advocates and others are increasingly alarmed about how cellphone surveillance devices are used domestically and have called for a more open and informed debate about the trade-off between security and privacy — despite a virtual blackout by the federal government on any information about the specific capabilities of the gear.

“We’ve seen a trend in the years since 9/11 to bring sophisticated surveillance technologies that were originally designed for military use — like Stingrays or drones or biometrics — back home to the United States,” said Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has waged a legal battle challenging the use of cellphone surveillance devices domestically. “But using these technologies for domestic law enforcement purposes raises a host of issues that are different from a military context.”

MANY OF THE DEVICES in the catalogue, including the Stingrays and dirt boxes, are cell-site simulators, which operate by mimicking the towers of major telecom companies like Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile. When someone’s phone connects to the spoofed network, it transmits a unique identification code and, through the characteristics of its radio signals when they reach the receiver, information about the phone’s location. There are also indications that cell-site simulators may be able to monitor calls and text messages.

In the catalogue, each device is listed with guidelines about how its use must be approved; the answer is usually via the “Ground Force Commander” or under one of two titles in the U.S. code governing military and intelligence operations, including covert action.

But domestically the devices have been used in a way that violates the constitutional rights of citizens, including the Fourth Amendment prohibition on illegal search and seizure, critics like Lynch say. They have regularly been used without warrants, or with warrants that critics call overly broad. Judges and civil liberties groups alike have complained that the devices are used without full disclosure of how they work, even within court proceedings.

“Every time police drive the streets with a Stingray, these dragnet devices can identify and locate dozens or hundreds of innocent bystanders’ phones,” said Nathan Wessler, a staff attorney with the Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The controversy around cellphone surveillance illustrates the friction that comes with redeploying military combat gear into civilian life. The U.S. government has been using cell-site simulators for at least 20 years, but their use by local law enforcement is a more recent development.

The archetypical cell-site simulator, the Stingray, was trademarked by Harris Corp. in 2003 and initially used by the military, intelligence agencies, and federal law enforcement. Another company, Digital Receiver Technology, now owned by Boeing, developed dirt boxes — more powerful cell-site simulators — which gained favor among the NSA, CIA, and U.S. military as good tools for hunting down suspected terrorists. The devices can reportedly track more than 200 phones over a wider range than the Stingray.

Amid the war on terror, companies selling cell-site simulators to the federal government thrived. In addition to large corporations like Boeing and Harris, which clocked more than $2.6 billion in federal contracts last year, the catalogue obtained by The Intercept includes products from little-known outfits like Nevada-based Ventis, which appears to have been dissolved, and SR Technologies of Davie, Florida, which has a website that warns: “Due to the sensitive nature of this business, we require that all visitors be registered before accessing further information.” (The catalogue obtained by The Intercept is not dated, but includes information about an event that occurred in 2012.)

The U.S. government eventually used cell-site simulators to target people for assassination in drone strikes, The Intercept has reported. But the CIA helped use the technology at home, too. For more than a decade, the agency worked with the U.S. Marshals Service to deploy planes with dirt boxes attached to track mobile phones across the U.S., the Wall Street Journal revealed.

After being used by federal agencies for years, cellular surveillance devices began to make their way into the arsenals of a small number of local police agencies. By 2007, Harris sought a license from the Federal Communications Commission to widely sell its devices to local law enforcement, and police flooded the FCC with letters of support. “The text of every letter was the same. The only difference was the law enforcement logo at the top,” said Chris Soghoian, the principal technologist at the ACLU, who obtained copies of the letters from the FCC through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The lobbying campaign was a success. Today nearly 60 law enforcement agencies in 23 states are known to possess a Stingray or some form of cell-site simulator, though experts believe that number likely underrepresents the real total. In some jurisdictions, police use cell-site simulators regularly. The Baltimore Police Department, for example, has used Stingrays more than 4,300 times since 2007.

Police often cite the war on terror in acquiring such systems. Michigan State Police claimed their Stingrays would “allow the State to track the physical location of a suspected terrorist,” although the ACLU later found that in 128 uses of the devices last year, none were related to terrorism. In Tacoma, Washington, police claimed Stingrays could prevent attacks using improvised explosive devices — the roadside bombs that plagued soldiers in Iraq. “I am not aware of any case in which a police agency has used a cell-site simulator to find a terrorist,” said Lynch. Instead, “law enforcement agencies have been using cell-site simulators to solve even the most minor domestic crimes.”

The Intercept is not publishing information on devices in the catalogue where the disclosure is not relevant to the debate over the extent of domestic surveillance.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment for this article. The FBI, NSA, and U.S. military did not offer any comment after acknowledging The Intercept’s written requests. The Department of Justice “uses technology in a manner that is consistent with the requirements and protections of the Constitution, including the Fourth Amendment, and applicable statutory authorities,” said Marc Raimondi, a Justice Department spokesperson who, for six years prior to working for the DOJ, worked for Harris Corp., the manufacturer of the Stingray.

WHILE INTEREST FROM local cops helped fuel the spread of cell-site simulators, funding from the federal government also played a role, incentivizing municipalities to buy more of the technology. In the years since 9/11, the U.S. has expanded its funding to provide military hardware to state and local law enforcement agencies via grants awarded by the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department. There’s been a similar pattern with Stingray-like devices.

“The same grant programs that paid for local law enforcement agencies across the country to buy armored personnel carriers and drones have paid for Stingrays,” said Soghoian. “Like drones, license plate readers, and biometric scanners, the Stingrays are yet another surveillance technology created by defense contractors for the military, and after years of use in war zones, it eventually trickles down to local and state agencies, paid for with DOJ and DHS money.”

In 2013, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement reported the purchase of two HEATR long-range surveillance devices as well as $3 million worth of Stingray devices since 2008. In California, Alameda County and police departments in Oakland and Fremont are using $180,000 in Homeland Security grant money to buy Harris’ Hailstorm cell-site simulator and the hand-held Thoracic surveillance device, made by Maryland security and intelligence company Keyw. As part of Project Archangel, which is described in government contract documents as a “border radio intercept program,” the Drug Enforcement Administration has contracted with Digital Receiver Technology for over $1 million in DRT surveillance box equipment. The Department of the Interior contracted with Keyw for more than half a million dollars of “reduced signature cellular precision geolocation.”

Information on such purchases, like so much about cell-site simulators, has trickled out through freedom of information requests and public records. The capabilities of the devices are kept under lock and key — a secrecy that hearkens back to their military origins. When state or local police purchase the cell-site simulators, they are routinely required to sign non-disclosure agreements with the FBI that they may not reveal the “existence of and the capabilities provided by” the surveillance devices, or share “any information” about the equipment with the public.

Indeed, while several of the devices in the military catalogue obtained by The Intercept are actively deployed by federal and local law enforcement agencies, according to public records, judges have struggled to obtain details of how they work. Other products in the secret catalogue have never been publicly acknowledged and any use by state, local, and federal agencies inside the U.S. is, therefore, difficult to challenge.

“It can take decades for the public to learn what our police departments are doing, by which point constitutional violations may be widespread,” Wessler said. “By showing what new surveillance capabilities are coming down the pike, these documents will help lawmakers, judges, and the public know what to look out for as police departments seek ever-more powerful electronic surveillance tools.”

Sometimes it’s not even clear how much police are spending on Stingray-like devices because they are bought with proceeds from assets seized under federal civil forfeiture law, in drug busts and other operations. Illinois, Michigan, and Maryland police forces have all used asset forfeiture funds to pay for Stingray-type equipment.

“The full extent of the secrecy surrounding cell-site simulators is completely unjustified and unlawful,” said EFF’s Lynch. “No police officer or detective should be allowed to withhold information from a court or criminal defendant about how the officer conducted an investigation.”

JUDGES HAVE BEEN among the foremost advocates for ending the secrecy around cell-site simulators, including by pushing back on warrant requests. At times, police have attempted to hide their use of Stingrays in criminal cases, prompting at least one judge to throw out evidence obtained by the device. In 2012, a U.S. magistrate judge in Texas rejected an application by the Drug Enforcement Administration to use a cell-site simulator in an operation, saying that the agency had failed to explain “what the government would do with” the data collected from innocent people.

Law enforcement has responded with some limited forms of transparency. In September, the Justice Department issued new guidelines for the use of Stingrays and similar devices, including that federal law enforcement agencies using them must obtain a warrant based on probable cause and must delete any data intercepted from individuals not under investigation.

Contained within the guidelines, however, is a clause stipulating vague “exceptional circumstances” under which agents could be exempt from the requirement to get a probable cause warrant.

“Cell-site simulator technology has been instrumental in aiding law enforcement in a broad array of investigations, including kidnappings, fugitive investigations, and complicated narcotics cases,” said Deputy Attorney General Sally Quillian Yates.

Meanwhile, parallel guidelines issued by the Department of Homeland Security in October do not require warrants for operations on the U.S. border, nor do the warrant requirements apply to state and local officials who purchased their Stingrays through grants from the federal government, such as those in Wisconsin, Maryland, and Florida.

The ACLU, EFF, and several prominent members of Congress have said the federal government’s exceptions are too broad and leave the door open for abuses.

“Because cell-site simulators can collect so much information from innocent people, a simple warrant for their use is not enough,” said Lynch, the EFF attorney. “Police officers should be required to limit their use of the device to a short and defined period of time. Officers also need to be clear in the probable cause affidavit supporting the warrant about the device’s capabilities.”

In November, a federal judge in Illinois published a legal memorandum about the government’s application to use a cell-tower spoofing technology in a drug-trafficking investigation. In his memo, Judge Iain Johnston sharply criticized the secrecy surrounding Stingrays and other surveillance devices, suggesting that it made weighing the constitutional implications of their use extremely difficult. “A cell-site simulator is simply too powerful of a device to be used and the information captured by it too vast to allow its use without specific authorization from a fully informed court,” he wrote.

He added that Harris Corp. “is extremely protective about information regarding its device. In fact, Harris is so protective that it has been widely reported that prosecutors are negotiating plea deals far below what they could obtain so as to not disclose cell-site simulator information. … So where is one, including a federal judge, able to learn about cell-site simulators? A judge can ask a requesting Assistant United States Attorney or a federal agent, but they are tight-lipped about the device, too.”

The ACLU and EFF believe that the public has a right to review the types of devices being used to encourage an informed debate on the potentially far-reaching implications of the technology. The catalogue obtained by The Intercept, said Wessler, “fills an important gap in our knowledge, but it is incumbent on law enforcement agencies to proactively disclose information about what surveillance equipment they use and what steps they take to protect Fourth Amendment privacy rights.”

Research: Josh Begley

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In recent years, however, al Shabaab has turned on the foreign fighters in its own ranks, waging a brutal campaign to purge the perceived spies from its midst. An intimate account of the Shabaab civil war was provided to The Intercept in a series of interviews conducted with a current member of al Shabaab and a source who has maintained close contacts with the group.

Al Shabaab has assassinated several foreign fighters on the CIA’s kill/capture list over the past few years and currently runs a network of secret prisons that hold, on charges of spying, U.S., British and other Western citizens who came to Somalia to join Shabaab, The Intercept has found. Shabaab operatives torture detainees using techniques such as waterboarding, beatings, and food and sleep deprivation, and conduct public executions of suspected spies, including by crucifixion.

Ibrahim* is a citizen of a Western country who traveled to Somalia several years ago to join Shabaab. He is currently living in a Shabaab-controlled territory, and the group believes he is a loyal member. The Intercept, which has confirmed his real identity, granted him anonymity and agreed not to identify his country of origin because criticizing Shabaab can result in imprisonment or death. “I’d be arrested and tortured,” Ibrahim said when asked what would happen if he spoke out against the group.

Like other young Westerners of Somali origin, Ibrahim decided to move to Somalia after watching Shabaab’s videos on the Internet and following the news of battles between Somali militants and the U.S.-backed African peacekeeping force, AMISOM. “At that time there was a lot of stuff going on and I felt like it was my religious duty to participate in the holy jihad that was going on in Somalia. And I felt that it was my responsibility as a Muslim youth to support my brothers and sisters in Somalia against the enemy,” he says. “I felt like the call of Somalia had to be answered.”

Ibrahim says he believed that Shabaab was fighting to establish a Shariah law system that would allow him to live according to his deeply held religious convictions. Joining the jihad, he believed, would help to make that a reality in Somalia. “It was at the beginning. At that time they were happy to see what you call foreign fighters — they welcomed them big time,” he says. “We took part in training, small training, basic training, small weapons and such. Everything was easy.” He adds: “According to the media, somehow they over-exaggerate about Shabaab training. The training is basically just simple, small arms and physical training and discipline.”

That period of relative harmony within the group would not last. And now Ibrahim wants to tell his story so that others will know not to follow in his path. For Keith Ellison, a Minnesota congressman who represents the largest Somali community in the United States, in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, Ibrahim’s cautionary tale is an example of the kind of story alienated members of Shabaab should be encouraged to tell, rather than simply locking them up or killing them, which is the current U.S. government approach. “I think somebody who has been inside Shabaab telling the truth about how Shabaab is really a criminal terrorist group and not about the liberation of Somalia is probably more likely to promote safety and security than just throwing that same kid in jail,” Ellison says. “We need to learn from these people and we need to use them to message to young people who might be lured by a message from al Shabaab.”

Omar Hammami. (YouTube)

SOON AFTER JOINING al Shabaab, Ibrahim met the most famous American fighter in Somali history — a young U.S. citizen from Alabama, Omar Hammami, known in Somalia as Abu Mansour al Amriki. “He was a happy, young guy — typical Western,” Ibrahim recalls.

Ibrahim viewed Hammami as a mentor and a leader within the contingent of foreign fighters. Hammami had traveled to Somalia in 2006 and joined fighters from the Islamic Courts Union as they battled a U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion of the country. The ICU, a populist coalition that expelled CIA-backed warlords from Mogadishu in the summer of 2006, sought to create a government based on Shariah law. But the ICU’s time in power would be short lived. U.S. and Ethiopian troops began assassinating and imprisoning its leaders, and Ethiopian troops occupied Mogadishu and other areas of Somalia for two years.

As the Islamic Courts disintegrated, al Shabaab emerged as the only remaining resistance force against foreign occupation. Overnight, the group went from being a small part of the Islamic movement to “liberate” Somalia to the vanguard of that struggle. It solidified its affiliation with al Qaeda and began aggressively recruiting foreign fighters. Al Qaeda, meanwhile, saw potential in Somalia as a future base of operations.

In early January 2007, bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri, addressed the situation in Somalia in a recording released online. “I speak to you today as the crusader invader forces of Ethiopia violate the soil of the beloved Muslim Somalia,” he began. “I call upon the Muslim nation in Somalia to remain in the new battlefield that is one of the crusader battlefields that are being launched by America and its allies and the United Nations against Islam and Muslims.” He implored the mujahedeen, “Launch ambushes, land mines, raids and suicidal combats until you consume them as the lions eat their prey.”

Hammami had won street credibility within al Shabaab for being among the first to answer that call. He was there during a period of legendary battles, had a Somali wife and quickly became the prized English-speaking ambassador for Shabaab’s effort to attract Western youth. He would post YouTube videos describing the joys of the jihad and the comfort of an Islamic lifestyle. He even produced hip-hop songs predicting his demise by a drone strike or cruise missile. “He was a kind of symbol for the foreign fighters — he was here since the end of 2006 and he fought in a lot of battles and he was well educated. He was very smart,” says Ibrahim.

In late 2007, a year after he first arrived in Somalia, Hammami appeared on Al Jazeera — with a keffiyeh covering much of his face — explaining why he had joined al Shabaab. “Oh, Muslims of America, take into consideration the situation in Somalia,” he declared. “After 15 years of chaos and oppressive rule by the American-backed warlords, your brothers stood up and established peace and justice in this land.” By that point, Somali officials estimated that more than 450 foreign fighters had come to Somalia to join al Shabaab in its struggle.

Following Hammami’s lead, after receiving basic training from Shabaab, Ibrahim began to engage in regular attacks against AMISOM troops — mostly from Uganda and Burundi. “I took part in a lot of battles, mostly within Mogadishu. I don’t think any battles had a name,” he recalls. “When I came, I stayed with foreign fighters known as muhajireen.” He said there were fighters from the United States, Canada, the U.K., Denmark, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and East African countries.

Soon, however, powerful Somali leaders of al Shabaab came to see the flood of foreign fighters as a threat to their own fiefdoms. By 2011, a rift had emerged within the group — one that would pit the foreign fighters against the Somali leadership in bloody conflict, and would ultimately lead Ibrahim to regret coming to Somalia to join Shabaab.

Members of Somalia’s al Qaeda-backed Islamic militia al Shabaab in Mogadishu, Somalia, Nov. 16, 2010. (Badri Media/EPA/Landov)

AS THE SOMALI LEADERS of al Shabaab have moved to reassert their authority, al Qaeda, along with the foreign fighters, has found itself marginalized.

Osama bin Laden had always wanted to establish a foothold in Somalia for al Qaeda. But the country’s clan-based system made that very difficult. The Ethiopian invasion and U.S. killing campaign had changed that. Bin Laden named Mohammed Fazul, a Comoros-born al Qaeda operative, as a head of al Qaeda in East Africa with a major directive to support the jihad in Somalia. Fazul was one of the masterminds of the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and had organized a series of attacks against Western targets in Kenya in 2002.

Abdirahman “Aynte” Ali, a leading scholar on al Shabaab, told me that Fazul served as “the bridge between al Shabaab and al Qaeda, tapping into the resources of al Qaeda, bringing in more foreign fighters, as well as financial resources — more importantly, military know-how: how to make explosives, how to train people, and so on. So that’s when they have gained the biggest influence that they needed.”

In August 2010, al Shabaab declared what it called a “massive war” against AMISOM troops, which at the time numbered some 6,000. They hit convoys, deployed suicide bombers and attacked government ministers, sowing fear and terror and seizing some territory in Mogadishu. The U.S. and other Western nations began beefing up support of the besieged peacekeeping force, which led to an overwhelming offensive — complete with indiscriminate shelling of Shabaab positions — and ultimately forced Shabaab into what the group tried to characterize as a strategic retreat. Shabaab had taken heavy losses, and its leaders began to bicker over the group’s next steps.

By 2011, Fazul Abdullah Mohammed’s world had grown very small. Almost all of his East African al Qaeda comrades had been assassinated by JSOC, and he lived life on the run. He had a $5 million bounty on his head, courtesy of the U.S. government. Some intelligence reports indicated that he may have had plastic surgery, and there were periodic reports of him popping up throughout the Horn of Africa using aliases and fake passports. With many of the veteran al Qaeda leaders gone, Fazul was increasingly isolated and dealing with the complexities of Somalia’s clan politics. Then, on May 2, Osama bin Laden was killed.

Fazul was finding it more and more difficult to deliver adequate resources from al Qaeda to al Shabaab, and al Shabaab sought out different means of financing and support, including making deals with powerful clans.

So Fazul found himself at odds with al Shabaab’s Somali leadership. I interviewed a Somali intelligence source who was given access to some of Fazul’s writings seized by his agency in 2011. They described growing “fissures,” revealing that “Fazul thought, essentially, that al Shabaab is going the wrong way, that the traditional warfare that’s going on between al Shabaab and the government was not sustainable anymore.” Fazul alleged that al Shabaab was recruiting young people, but then “in a few months they’re just sending them as suicide bombers. And he thought that was such a bad idea, and that in the long run it would just erode fighters out of al Shabaab.” The source added: “I mean this guy’s looking way ahead, and he’s accusing the al Shabaab leadership of being shortsighted.”

On June 7, 2011, Somali intelligence operatives informed the CIA that Fazul had been killed by some local militiamen in Somalia. Fazul, they said, had taken a wrong turn, had an altercation with the soldiers at a checkpoint and was gunned down. The Americans, the Somali intelligence official told me, were “unbelievably grateful.” Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Fazul’s death “a significant blow to Al Qaeda, its extremist allies and its operations in East Africa. It is a just end for a terrorist who brought so much death and pain to so many innocents.”

Neither Ibrahim nor the source with close ties to al Shabaab interviewed for this story believe the official version of events in Fazul’s death. They suspect that Fazul was assassinated, not by militiamen or by the CIA, but rather by al Shabaab. “At that time, the former leader of al Shabaab, Abu Zubayr, and Fazul, they kind of had some kind of clash,” says Ibrahim. “I’ll be killed by Shabaab soon. If I am killed, don’t waste my blood,” Ibrahim says Fazul told a senior Somali Shabaab leader who supported the foreign fighters. “The conflict continued until this assassination happened. I think al Shabaab planned that assassination. I don’t think it was a mistake. I think it was set up,” says Ibrahim.

Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, left, and an unidentified man lying dead in Mogadishu, Somalia, June 8, 2011. (Farah Abdi Warsameh/AP)

IN THE MONTHS after Fazul’s death, the fissure between the local Shabaab leadership and the foreign fighters widened. Omar Hammami began openly criticizing the Shabaab leadership’s tactics and decisions. “He never accepted any kind of humiliation and disrespect, and basically he stood up for his rights,” says Ibrahim.

The source with close ties to al Shabaab told me that during Hammami’s conflict with Shabaab’s leadership, Hammami would, at times, walk around with a suicide vest on. The message: if you try to kill me, you will go down with me.

Hammami and other leading foreign fighters forged an alliance with Mukhtar Robow, a longtime senior member of Shabaab. That’s when the internal civil war for control of Shabaab exploded. Shabaab began an assassination campaign against prominent foreign fighters and their Somali allies, several of whom were wanted by the U.S. or designated for kill or capture by the CIA. In June 2013, they killed Sheikh Moalim Burhan and Ibrahim Afghani, a Somali who had lived in the U.S. in the 1980s. “Those guys somehow they wanted to start some kind of small revolution, and some kind of uprising. They tried to speak publicly,” says Ibrahim. “They took them out in Barawe, killed them both.”

Robow, who also had a $5 million bounty issued by the U.S., and another Shabaab leader publicly denounced Shabaab’s chief, Abu Zubayr. Robow accused the Shabaab leader of ordering the killings of top foreign fighters and of plotting to kill Hammami, calling it “a big crime against the blood of our brothers.”

That month, Robow fled Shabaab-controlled territory and returned to the safety of his family’s stronghold. “He felt like he wasn’t safe, so he ran away to Bakool, where his family stayed and he’s under protection by his clan now,” says Ibrahim.

When Robow left, Hammami lost his most powerful protector. He began live-tweeting Shabaab’s attempts to kill him, at one point posting a picture of what he claimed was a wound from a would-be assassin’s bullet that had grazed his neck. “Just been shot in neck by shabab assassin. not critical yet,” Hammami tweeted in April 2013. Later he alleged that Shabaab was sending in assassins from various directions: “abu zubayr has gone mad. he’s starting a civil war,” he tweeted.

Eventually, on September 12, 2013, Hammami was killed. Long sought by the U.S. government, his killers were not from the CIA or JSOC, but al Shabaab.

“The foreign fighters made [Shabaab] go forward. And one of them was Abu Mansour al Amriki [Hammami]. He played a big role, he was a very smart guy, he improved a lot of things,” recalls Ibrahim. “He made Shabaab be more international. The Shabaab killed him, man. That’s clear cut because the guy became a public threat.” Hammami was killed alongside his friend and fellow foreign fighter — a British citizen who went by the name Osama Pakistani.

As Ibrahim watched Shabaab implode and witnessed his fellow foreign fighters imprisoned or assassinated, suspicions that had lingered in the back of his mind began to dominate his thoughts. He realized he had made a life-altering and potentially life-ending mistake in coming to Somalia. The story could end, not with his dying in jihad, but in being killed or imprisoned by his former allies from al Shabaab.

Some of Ibrahim’s colleagues have been killed, while others have disappeared in secret prisons run by Shabaab. Their imprisonment is often preceded by an allegation of spying or conspiring against the Shabaab leadership. “They had secret prisons before, but the secret prisons became more effective after the killings of Abu Mansour al Amriki and Sheikh Burhan and all those guys,” he says. “Whoever goes against Shabaab, says anything they don’t like, they will be seen as an enemy to the Shabaab and somehow they will hit you [because] you are not serving their interest. You’ll see yourself missing, in an underground prison being tortured.”

What kind of torture?

“Beatings, waterboarding, they used some kind of gas. They tie you up for hours and hours. Lack of food, lack of sleep. You might be whipped outside, nighttime. You might be crucified, tied to a car. Tied to the back of an SUV [that they] then drive. All these types of things.”

Most of the people in the prisons, Ibrahim says, are foreign fighters, including, at present, at least two Americans. “Most of the time what they do is they will categorize you as a spy and will have you locked up in an underground prison,” he says. “You know you might be serving over a year and when you come out then you might have two options: to keep quiet or otherwise you’ll be deported.” Deported, he says, means being sent to a country that would likely charge you as a terrorist for being a member of al Shabaab, as the U.S. has done repeatedly.

It could also mean being dumped on the streets of Mogadishu. The Somali government has started an amnesty program for Somalis who leave al Shabaab. If they turn themselves in, they will have their freedom. But it comes with the risk of assassination by Shabaab.

A suspected member of al Shabaab was captured by AMISOM in Mogadishu, Somalia, August 6, 2011. (Antoine de Ras/EPA/Landov)

WHEN HE FIRST started to believe Shabaab was corrupting the cause that brought him to Somalia, Ibrahim says, “at that time I felt like in my heart I could just sense that something was wrong, but I wasn’t open about it. I didn’t want to talk about it. I was trying to keep it to myself and somehow overcome it.” But soon, he says, “These crimes just became open. We felt like the foreign fighters were no longer welcome and somehow we were not respected and we were categorized as second-class citizens.”

“If you look at it, the growth of al Shabaab and making it an international movement, the reality is the foreign fighters, they’re the ones who built this,” Ibrahim says. “At the beginning, Shabaab was basically a local-based organization. When the foreign fighters joined in with Shabaab, that’s when Shabaab started improving themselves. The media, the training camps, all these things, the international cause. They made it an international issue instead of a local issue.” That era, Ibrahim says, is over.

Ibrahim likened life in Shabaab territory to what he understands of North Korean society: secret trials, no appeals, public executions, torture. Only the group’s leadership is allowed access to the Internet or international news. Cell phone logs are monitored by Shabaab. Cameras and camera phones are forbidden.

Ibrahim says he wants to warn Somalis in the U.S., Britain, Canada and elsewhere. “I want my voice to be heard. I don’t want others to make the same mistake I did. Especially to the youth who are in the West, I just want to tell them, don’t come to Somalia. This is advice from the bottom of my heart. You will not improve yourself, first of all, and you will not improve the Muslim Ummah in general.”

When asked if he wants to return to his country of origin, Ibrahim answers no. “I’m not saying I miss where I came from. That’s not the point. I don’t regret choosing this path. The thing I don’t like is the people I’m working with. That’s the main point.”

Ibrahim predicts that years from now, Shabaab will be like the FARC in Colombia — a former political group that has transformed into a criminal enterprise.

Rep. Ellison compares the current U.S. government approach to radicalized Westerners like Ibrahim who join Shabaab to the U.S. war on drugs in its shortsightedness. “In the middle of the drug war, even people who questioned it knew that drugs hurt people, drugs are bad, drugs are not healthy. But do we really want to lock up people for it or do we want to introduce some treatment options here?” He adds, “Same thing now with this. There’s no doubt that all these groups, like al Shabaab, Boko Haram, ISIS and all the rest are horrible, malevolent groups, but how do we defeat them? Is just gunning them down and using military and prison against them going to ultimately defeat them? Or maybe we have to find a way to defeat and undermine the ideology itself.”

Toward this end, circulating stories like Ibrahim’s would be extremely useful, he believes. “The American people don’t know enough about the mindset of anybody who would be attracted to a terrorist reality. We just think that there are bad people and there are good people,” says Ellison. “The truth is there are kids that hate Gitmo, that hate drones, they don’t like our national foreign policy, that are highly critical of it, but that doesn’t make them a terrorist.”

Somalia’s minister for internal security says the government’s amnesty program has been a success. Abdirizak Omar Mohamed estimates that in the past month, a dozen Shabaab fighters have entered the program, joining a defector center for rehabilitation. And he said that one of the driving factors encouraging defectors are the kinds of experiences described by Ibrahim. “The people that have been attracted to Shabaab have realized that the kind of ideology that they have seen and the actions of the leadership of al Shabaab is contradictory to what they were expecting,” Omar told The Intercept. “These are young kids who have been brainwashed. I think if they come to their senses, I think people need to be given a second chance, amnesty.”

The U.S. government has taken a very different approach. Instead of offering amnesty, it has meted out long prison sentences to Somali-Americans and others who have traveled to Somalia, on charges of material support to a terror group. When asked whether the Somali government would hand over U.S. citizens wanted by the government if they asked for amnesty in Mogadishu, Omar said: “That’s a legal question, but we will not surrender them as long as they are here to cooperate with the government and provide information and give up the ideology. They do have rights to be protected.”

I asked Ibrahim what he thinks the U.S. should do. “America is the key player. I think the U.S. should revise their policy toward Somalia. Because I don’t think things are improving.”

While recognizing that Shabaab has conducted deadly attacks outside of Somalia’s borders — such as a 2010 bomb attack in Uganda during the World Cup and the 2013 siege on a shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya that killed more than 65 people — Ibrahim believes the U.S. is overstating Shabaab’s global capabilities. He believes the U.S. has given too much credence to the claims made in Shabaab’s propaganda videos and by its media wing, al-Kataib. The U.S. response to Shabaab, he says, has elevated the group’s status in the global jihad movement, making the group more attractive to Westerners.

Ibrahim says he is still committed to the larger cause of establishing a Shariah state, but not through the methods employed by al Shabaab. “The only way I see to clear these issues is we have to practice the Shariah 100 percent,” Ibrahim says. “Al Shabaab, at the beginning, they took this kind of position, ‘If we change Somalia, we will be able to be under the Shariah.’ At the beginning it was beautiful, but somehow they messed it up.”

* “Ibrahim” is a pseudonym.

——
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research to this report.

Photo Illustration: Connie Yu; Background: Dai Kurokawa/EPA/Landov; al Shabaab soldier: Reuters/Landov

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The claim triggered an investigation that spanned years and saw U.S. Army Major Mathew L. Golsteyn stripped of his Silver Star. While the admission has been reported in the press, the Army’s investigation into the alleged killing has been largely conducted in secrecy.

The Intercept has obtained internal U.S. Army documents that detail elements of the military’s investigation into the alleged killing and a previously undisclosed letter of reprimand Golsteyn received last year.

“In an interview conducted at the CIA, then-CPT Golsteyn claimed to have captured and shot and buried a suspected IED bomb maker,” an Army memo dated September 29, 2014 reads. “He further went to comment that he went back out with two others to cremate the body and dispose of the remains. In the transcript, CPT Golsteyn stated that he knew it was illegal but was not remorseful as he had solid intelligence and his actions protected the safety of his fellow teammates.”

Following the September 2011 CIA interview, the agency alerted the military of a “possible violation of criminal law.” In October, the Army launched a criminal probe. The next month, Golsteyn was promoted to the rank of major.

Two years later, in November 2013, U.S. Army criminal investigators concluded that Golsteyn had knowingly violated the laws of war, alleging he had committed the crimes of “murder and conspiracy.” Army Secretary John McHugh stripped Golsteyn of his Silver Star and other awards. However, Golsteyn remains in the military and no criminal charges have been filed against him. Golsteyn received the Silver Star in 2011 for his role in a mission to hunt down enemy snipers in Afghanistan.

Maj. Mathew Golsteyn (Right) in Afghanistan with an Afghan soldier (Photo released by Rep. Duncan Hunter’s office)

Golsteyn’s lawyer, Phillip Stackhouse, says the Army document describing his client’s comments “contains incorrect information in several important and significant areas.” In an email to The Intercept, Stackhouse wrote, “What is true – is that during the investigation that lasted over two years, there was not one piece of evidence that corroborated the allegation.” He denounced the stripping of Golsteyn’s medals and charged that “Secretary McHugh’s actions were vindictive.”

Military law experts interviewed by The Intercept said that the confession alone was not enough to criminally prosecute him, so Army officials took the only route available to them — an administrative reprimand — to punish him.

Retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Jeffrey Addicott, the former senior legal advisor for U.S. Army Special Forces, says the “Army acted correctly” in the case. The Geneva Conventions and corresponding Army regulations “require that whenever we receive information about a grave breach of the law of war we must investigate and take appropriate action,” wrote Addicott in an email to The Intercept. “The admission by the Captain that he had killed an unarmed unlawful enemy combatant in his custody (the 2001 AUMF would classify the person killed as such) and buried the body required further investigation.” Addicott, who currently runs the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary’s University in Texas, says the military would need “additional evidence” to obtain a conviction under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

“Someone could look at this and say, ‘My God, this is a slap on the wrist for a heinous, unjustified killing,’” says Professor Geoffrey Corn, an international and war law expert at the University of South Texas. “If I had been the JAG officer they came to, it would kill me not to be able to charge this guy.”

Corn, who spent 22 years as a military officer and served as the Army’s senior law of war expert in the Office of the Judge Advocate General,  says that in order to criminally charge Golsteyn with murder, prosecutors would have to find corroborating evidence, such as a witness, a body, physical evidence or a co-conspirator. “The fact is that he admits to what — if it’s true — is as serious of a felony as we can imagine: intentional, unlawful killing of a human being, which is premeditated murder,” Corn told The Intercept. “If there was a viable criminal sanction, you’d have to do a general court martial. You’d have to. Nothing else would be credible. And you can’t because you can’t find corroboration for the confession.”

Golsteyn would have known the CIA would eventually polygraph him during his application to work with the CIA, according to Corn. “The odds that he’s gonna lie in that interview are pretty slim. So the context of the statement makes it highly credible,” he said. “Maybe he didn’t do it. Or maybe he killed somebody in a fight and he’s trying to embellish it to make it seem like he’s more hardcore than he is. I don’t know. The problem is all of that is speculative.”

Maj. Golsteyn was reprimanded for the alleged murder by Army Brigadier General Darsie D. Rogers in a letter dated April 24, 2014, also obtained by The Intercept.

“On 6 September 2011, during an interview with the Central Intelligence Agency, you admitted to committing a Law of Armed Conflict violation,” the letter begins. “You are hereby reprimanded. Your behavior in this matter manifests a complete lack of judgment and responsibility.”

The letter explains that the “reprimand is administrative in nature and is not imposed as punishment under the” Uniform Code of Military Justice.

“It’s a career ending administrative sanction for an officer. The stripping of the medals is peripheral. The real thing is once he gets this reprimand in his official file, then somebody’s going to say we should process him to be separated from the military—in other words, fire him,” says Corn. “The burden of proof is different for an administrative sanction than it is for a criminal sanction. That’s the law. You don’t need corroborating evidence.”

California Rep. Duncan Hunter, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, has publicly declared his support for the embattled soldier. Writing on Golsteyn’s case in an article for The Daily Beast in February, the Republican lawmaker, himself an Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran, lamented that, “The career of a decorated soldier and everything he has accomplished over a nearly fifteen-year service career has been taken away. The reason: an allegation that the Army was never able to substantiate.”

Speaking to The Intercept Wednesday, Hunter’s spokesman, Joe Kasper, argued that relying solely on the information contained in the Army’s documents could present a “one sided” view of the Golsteyn case. In the absence of a transcript, the context of the conversation Golsteyn had with the CIA remains unclear, he said, adding that the Army has failed to present evidence linking Golsteyn to any wrongdoing.

“The process has to have integrity,” Kasper said. “There has to be due process.”

This is not the first time soldiers with the Army’s 3rd Special Forces Group have been suspected of unlawfully killing Afghans and disposing of their bodies. In November 2013, Rolling Stone magazine presented evidence linking a unit with the special forces group to the disappearance — and suspected killing — of 10 Afghan civilians.

Golsteyn’s hearing to determine whether he will receive a less than honorable discharge from the Army is scheduled for May 18.

Photo: James Robinson/The Fayetteville Observer

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The source believed that Salim and Waleed “had been lured to the car by the two AQAP militants when the airstrike hit.”

Salim and Waleed’s deaths sparked protests in their village, and the incident was later well-documented by international media and human rights groups. Their family representative, Faisal bin Ali Jaber, has met with Yemeni and U.S. national security officials and members of Congress. But the United States still has not formally acknowledged or apologized for the incident.

The previously unreported intelligence report, viewed by The Intercept, indicates that the U.S. government knew soon after the strike that it had killed two civilians. It could add fire to a lawsuit that Faisal bin Ali Jaber has launched in Germany, as further evidence that U.S. strikes put innocent Yemenis at risk.

Jaber will testify next month in front of a German court, alleging that Germany is violating a constitutionally enshrined duty to protect the right to life by allowing the United States to use Ramstein Air Base as part of its lethal drone operations.

It is the first time a victim of a U.S. drone strike will air his grievances in court, lawyers for the case told The Intercept. The lawsuit could put Germany in the awkward position of having to publicly defend its role in the U.S. drone program.

As The Intercept reported today, the U.S. military sees Ramstein as an essential node in the technical infrastructure for its armed and unarmed drone operations. A budget request for the Ramstein station stated that without the facility, “weapon strikes cannot be supported.”

The administrative court in Cologne where Jaber’s suit is filed recently granted him the chance to present evidence, a sign that it will allow the case to move forward. At that hearing, scheduled for May 27, Jaber will describe the 2012 incident and argue that he and his family are still in danger from drone strikes.

“We’re asking the German government to take measures to stop the U.S. from using German soil in their illegal and immoral drone war,” said Kat Craig, legal director for Reprieve, an international rights group that is representing Jaber along with the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights.

Extending the constitutional right to life to a non-German citizen outside of Germany is untested legal ground. That Jaber will be allowed to testify is “quite remarkable,” said Craig, and shows “the court is taking it seriously.”

The German government has tried to get the suit tossed, arguing in a court filing that Ramstein’s role in the U.S. drone program is unproven, and that Jaber can’t tie Germany to his specific case.

The lawsuit, the government argues in the filing, is asking Germany to act as a “‘global public prosecutor’ towards other sovereign states” — namely, the United States and Yemen.

The German government also wrote that the U.S. has provided assurances that no drones are commanded or controlled from Germany, echoing what a Pentagon spokesperson told The Intercept: that the United States does not “directly fly or control any manned or remotely piloted aircraft” from Ramstein. As The Intercept explained, that language carefully evades the important technical role played by the base.

Any victory in Jaber’s case will likely be symbolic, said Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It’s almost unimaginable that lethal counterterrorism operations would rupture a relationship with an ally like Germany. Ramstein is used for so many other things and is so important to the bilateral relationship,” Zenko said.

But it could have political ramifications in Germany, where drones are a particularly controversial issue. Zenko noted a recent survey that found 67 percent of Germans were opposed to U.S. drone strikes. Previous allegations of Ramstein’s role in the drone program led to parliamentary inquiries.

In its response, the German government “appears to be trying to avoid a situation where they have to justify their cooperation with the Americans,” said Craig. “That is why they won’t simply deal with the facts of the case.”

U.S. drone operations in Yemen have slowed in the months since Jaber filed his case, as the country has disintegrated into war. U.S.-backed President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi fled into exile in February as the Houthi rebel group took over the capital and large swaths of the country. Saudi Arabia is now bombing the Houthis (with U.S. support) while AQAP has taken advantage of the vacuum to expand its territory.

Nonetheless, strikes continue. Just this week a U.S. drone strike killed a leader of AQAP who was once held in Guantánamo. Jaber’s lawyers plan to argue that the drone campaign will now be less precise due to the war limiting U.S. intelligence on the ground.

Reprieve acknowledges that the German case is a roundabout way of getting at the issue. “It’s very difficult to challenge U.S. drone activities in U.S. courts, so Reprieve targets the soft underbelly of Europe and U.S. allies there to fill the void of accountability,” said Craig.

The United States rarely acknowledges specific drone strikes — usually only when a high-level target is killed — and almost never responds to specific allegations of civilian harm. Attempts to bring cases in U.S. courts have gained little traction. The family of U.S. citizen Anwar al Awlaki and his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, has tried for years to bring suit for their deaths in U.S. drone strikes in 2011. In June, a federal judge dismissed their case, deferring to executive branch authority over military targeting decisions.

National Security Council spokesman Ned Price declined to comment on the contents of the intelligence report on the August 2012 strike that killed Salim and Waleed bin Ali Jaber. He said generally that the U.S. government “takes seriously all credible reports of non-combatant deaths and injuries,” conducts after-action reviews, and in some cases, offers compensation.

The family did receive roughly $100,000 last year, in bags of crisp U.S. dollars delivered by Yemeni officials. Jaber told Yahoo News last October that he was told the money came from the United States. But he was still not satisfied. “‘One thinks the U.S. believes it can silence the families of the victims with money’ rather than ‘an apology and an explanation,’” Yahoo reported.

Letta Tayler, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch who conducted an in-depth investigation into U.S. drones strikes in Yemen, questioned the underlying policy that allows for so many civilian deaths. “It’s as if the hundreds of Yemenis and thousands of Pakistanis killed in drone strikes simply do not exist,” she said.

Photo: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty

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A TOP-SECRET U.S. intelligence document obtained by The Intercept confirms that the sprawling U.S. military base in Ramstein, Germany serves as the high-tech heart of America’s drone program. Ramstein is the site of a satellite relay station that enables drone operators in the American Southwest to communicate with their remote aircraft in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and other targeted countries. The top-secret slide deck, dated July 2012, provides the most detailed blueprint seen to date of the technical architecture used to conduct strikes with Predator and Reaper drones.

Amid fierce European criticism of America’s targeted killing program, U.S. and German government officials have long downplayed Ramstein’s role in lethal U.S. drone operations and have issued carefully phrased evasions when confronted with direct questions about the base. But the slides show that the facilities at Ramstein perform an essential function in lethal drone strikes conducted by the CIA and the U.S. military in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Africa.

The slides were provided by a source with knowledge of the U.S. government’s drone program who declined to be identified because of fears of retribution. According to the source, Ramstein’s importance to the U.S. drone war is difficult to overstate. “Ramstein carries the signal to tell the drone what to do and it returns the display of what the drone sees. Without Ramstein, drones could not function, at least not as they do now,” the source said.

The new evidence places German Chancellor Angela Merkel in an awkward position given Germany’s close diplomatic alliance with the United States. The German government has granted the U.S. the right to use the property, but only under the condition that the Americans do nothing there that violates German law.

The U.S. government maintains that its drone strikes against al Qaeda and its “associated forces” are legal, even outside of declared war zones. But German legal officials have suggested that such operations are only justifiable in actual war zones. Moreover, Germany has the right to prosecute “criminal offenses against international law … even when the offense was committed abroad and bears no relation to Germany,” according to Germany’s Code of Crimes against International Law, which passed in 2002.

This means that American personnel stationed at Ramstein could, in theory, be vulnerable to German prosecution if they provide drone pilots with data used in attacks.

While the German government has been reluctant to pursue such prosecutions, it may come under increasing pressure to do so. “It is simply murder,” says Björn Schiffbauer of the Institute for International Law at the University of Cologne. Legal experts interviewed by Der Spiegel claimed that U.S. personnel could be charged as war criminals by German prosecutors.

A top-secret slide confirms the central role Germany plays in the U.S. drone war.

RAMSTEIN IS ONE of the largest U.S. military bases outside the United States, hosting more than 16,000 military and civilian personnel. The relay center at Ramstein, which was completed in late 2013, sits in the middle of a massive forest and is adjacent to a baseball diamond used by students at the Ramstein American High School. The large compound, made of reinforced concrete and masonry walls and enclosed in a horseshoe of trees, has a sloped metal roof. Inside this building, air force squadrons can coordinate the signals necessary for a variety of drone surveillance and strike missions. On two sides of the building are six massive golf ball-like fixtures known as satellite relay pads.

In a 2010 budget request for the Ramstein satellite station, the U.S. Air Force asserted that without the Germany-based facility, the drone program could face “significant degradation of operational capability” that could “have a serious impact on ongoing and future missions.” Predator and Reaper drones, as well as Global Hawk aircraft, would “use this site to conduct operations” in Africa and the Middle East, according to the request. It stated bluntly that without the use of Ramstein, drone “weapon strikes cannot be supported.”

“Because of multi-theater-wide operations, the respective SATCOM Relay Station must be located at Ramstein Air Base to provide most current information to the war-fighting commander at any time demanded,” according to the request. The relay station, according to that document, would also be used to support the operations of a secretive black ops Air Force program known as “Big Safari.”

The classified slide deck maps out an intricate spider web of facilities across the U.S. and the globe: from drone command centers on desert military bases in the U.S. to Ramstein to outposts in Afghanistan, Djibouti, Qatar and Bahrain and back to NSA facilities in Washington and Georgia. What is clear is that most paths within America’s drone maze run through Ramstein.

Transatlantic cables connect U.S. drone pilots to their aircraft half a world away. (Josh Begley)

Creech Air Force Base in Nevada is central to multiple prongs of the U.S. drone war. Personnel stationed at the facility are responsible for drone operations in Afghanistan — which has been on the receiving end of more drone strikes than any country in the world — and Pakistan, where the CIA has conducted a covert air war for the last decade. The agency’s campaign has killed thousands of people, including hundreds of civilians. Some drone missions are operated from other locations, such as Fort Gordon in Georgia and Cannon Air Force Base in Clovis, New Mexico.

The pilots at Creech and other ground control stations send their commands to the drones they operate via transatlantic fiber optic cables to Germany, where the Ramstein uplink bounces the signal to a satellite that connects to drones over Yemen, Somalia and other target countries. Ramstein is ideally situated as a satellite relay station to minimize the lag time between the commands of the pilots and their reception by the aircraft, called latency. Too much latency — which would be caused by additional satellite relays — would make swift maneuvers impossible. Video images from a drone could not be delivered to the U.S. in near real time. Without the speed and precise control an installation like Ramstein allows, pilots would practically be flying blind.

A diagram in the secret document shows how the process works. Ramstein’s satellite uplink station is used to route communications between the pilots and aircraft deployed in a variety of countries. Video from the drones is routed back through Ramstein and then relayed to a variety of U.S. intelligence and military facilities around the U.S. and the globe. Another diagram shows how pilots at Creech connect to Ramstein and then to the Predator Primary Satellite Link, which facilitates direct control of the drone wherever it is operating.

All of this — location, combined with the need to securely house the large quantities of equipment, buildings and personnel necessary to operate the satellite uplink — has made Ramstein one of the most viable sites available to the U.S. to serve this critical function in the drone war.

When the prominent German daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the German public television broadcaster ARD published an expose on Ramstein in May 2013 and alleged that the base was being used to facilitate drone strikes, it created a massive controversy in Germany. The report spurred parliamentary investigations and calls for the U.S. to explain exactly what it was doing at the base. In response, the German and U.S. governments mischaracterized the reporting and the German government claimed it had no hard evidence of Ramstein’s role in lethal strikes.

A month later, in a June 2013 speech in Berlin, President Obama addressed the issue of Ramstein’s role in the drone war. He did not mention that the satellite relay facility at Ramstein enables U.S. drone strikes. Instead, he denied a claim that the journalists had not made: “We do not use Germany as a launching point for unmanned drones … as part of our counterterrorism activities,” Obama said.

President Barack Obama and Chancellor Angela Merkel (Chris Hyde/Getty Images)

In response to questions for this article, Pentagon spokesman Maj. James Brindle echoed the precise language of previous government statements. “We maintain robust civilian and military cooperation with Germany and manage all base activities in accordance with the agreements made between the United States and German governments,” he said. “The Air and Space Operations Center at Ramstein Air Base conducts operational level planning, monitoring and assessment of assigned airpower missions throughout Europe and Africa, but does not directly fly or control any manned or remotely piloted aircraft.”

The German government has issued similar statements, saying no drone pilots are based at Ramstein and no drones are launched from the base. “The U.S. government has confirmed that such armed and remote aircrafts are not flown or controlled from U.S. bases in Germany,” government spokesperson Steffen Seibert said last year. In 2013, members of the Bundestag, the German parliament, submitted written questions to their federal government. “To the knowledge of the Federal Government, is it true that U.S. drone attacks in Africa could not be carried out without a special satellite relay station for unmanned flying objects in Ramstein?” the lawmakers asked.

“The Federal Government has no reliable information in this regard,” read the official reply. Pressed further on the satellite facility and its purpose, the government replied: “The Federal Government has no information regarding the installation of the satellite system or when it started operating.”

Internal German government communications provided to The Intercept by Der Spiegel show how some German officials tried and failed to get the government to confront the U.S. about what connection facilities in Germany had to drone strikes. According to a June 2013 document, a senior Foreign Office official, Emily Haber, advocated demanding a clear answer from Washington about the role U.S. facilities in Germany played in drone strikes. Haber was overruled: “The Federal Chancellery and the Defense Ministry would prefer to ‘sit out’ the pressure from parliament and the public,” the response read. The unofficial German-U.S. agreement appears to amount to a “don’t ask, don’t tell” understanding.

While most, if not all, of the official statements by both governments may be technically true, it is also true that without the base, it would be very difficult for the United States to sustain the current drone war. The slide deck contains an array of arrows showing the complex system used to operate drones across the world. In the end, all arrows point to Ramstein. “Everything relies on Ramstein and Creech as central hubs for communication” in both armed and unarmed drone operations, says the source. Aside from the possibility of using an undisclosed satellite uplink station, the only drone operations that would not rely on Ramstein in these regions would be those conducted via aircraft that have a line of sight to a ground control station.

A top-secret slide deck obtained by The Intercept shows the complex architecture of the U.S. drone program.

HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS in Germany, as well as opposition politicians, have long suspected that Ramstein has played a direct role in the U.S. drone war. They have called on the German government to stop allowing the armed U.S. drone program to operate from German soil.

Lt. Gen. David Deptula, the former director of the Combined Air Operations Center, accused such critics of the drone program of being influenced by “misinformation that’s provided by terrorist organizations that these things are being effective against.”

Deptula oversaw the implementation of the U.S. armed drone program starting in 2001. In an interview with The Intercept, he defended the use of drones. “Operations conducted by remotely piloted aircraft really are the most accurate and precise means of applying force,” Deptula says. “Why would the Germans want to shut down operations that effectively provide information to increase situational awareness of a community of nations that are trying to combat terrorism?”

Kat Craig, the legal director at Reprieve, an international human rights organization that represents victims of drone strikes in Yemen and elsewhere, said the notion that critics of the drone program are being manipulated by propaganda from terrorist organizations “would be laughable, were it not so offensive towards civilian victims of drone strikes.”

A new report from The Open Society Foundations, published this month, studied nine U.S. drone strikes in Yemen and found that 26 civilians were killed, including several children and a pregnant woman.

“It has become all too clear that, too often, those carrying out the strikes simply do not know who they are hitting,” Craig said. “This misguided campaign has been allowed free rein because it has been kept hidden from public scrutiny.”

Yemenis gather around a burned car after it was torched by a drone strike on January 26, 2015. Among the dead was a teenage boy. (AFP/Getty Images)

WHILE THE GERMAN government has so far managed to dodge questions on Ramstein’s role in drone strikes, the country’s judicial system may not have that option.

Two related cases have been winding their way through the German legal system. In 2010, a German citizen was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan. Two years later, a federal prosecutor opened a preliminary investigation “to examine whether Bünyamin Erdogan’s violent death qualified as a war crime under Germany’s international criminal code.”

The case was later dropped after investigators determined that at the time he was killed by a missile fired from a drone, Erdogan was not considered a civilian protected under international law. Rather, they asserted that he had been a “member of an organized, armed group that participated as a party in an armed conflict.” Pakistan, according to German interpretations of international law, is considered a war zone in cases involving known militants in certain areas.

German courts haven’t established whether other targeted countries, such as Yemen and Somalia, qualify as war zones. Last October, a Yemeni man whose relatives were killed in a 2012 U.S. drone strike filed a lawsuit against the German government. Faisal bin Ali Jaber said his brother-in-law, a well-respected moderate imam known for his anti-al Qaeda sermons, and his nephew were killed in a strike.

Jaber claimed the strike would not have been possible without the use of the satellite relay facility at Ramstein. “Were it not for the help of Germany and Ramstein, men like my brother-in-law and nephew might still be alive today. It is quite simple: without Germany, U.S. drones would not fly,” Jaber said at the time. “I am here to ask that the German people and Parliament be told the full extent of what is happening in their country, and that the German government stop Ramstein being used to help the U.S.’s illegal and devastating drone war in my country.” A member of Jaber’s legal team accused Germany of “hiding behind status-of-forces agreements,” saying the government should “admit its responsibility for civilian deaths caused by U.S. drone warfare.”

In response to the suit, the German defense ministry submitted a reply on behalf of the government, which is named as the defendant in the case. “The defendant denies, by claiming ignorance, that the satellite-relay-station in use on the air base transfers field data of unmanned aerial vehicles from Yemen to the U.S. or to other unmanned aerial vehicles and that the air base is a fundamental hub for the data transfer necessary to operate unmanned aerial vehicles in Yemen,” read the January 20 filing. As for the suit’s demand that Germany prevent the relay station at Ramstein from facilitating drone strikes, the German government stated that it could not be expected to act “as a ‘global public prosecutor’ towards other sovereign states and punish alleged infringements outside of their own sovereign territory.”

However, some legal scholars in Germany aren’t satisfied with that response. They argue that if U.S. personnel based at Ramstein are involved in what the government considers an extra-judicial killing in a non-declared war zone, they would not be entitled to immunity — at least not on German soil. The NATO Status of Forces Agreement explicitly grants German authorities the right to investigate members of the U.S. military suspected of having committed a crime.

To date, German prosecutors have shown little interest in pursuing such action. The German government position boils down to this: We have asked the U.S. if they are violating any agreements or laws and the Americans have said no. Case closed.

“What happens between the U.S., Ramstein and the drones is a division of labor in different locations,” says Wolfgang Kaleck, the head of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, one of the organizations bringing the Yemen suit against the German government. “The German government doesn’t ask tough questions because they obviously don’t want to know what really happens.”

Predator drone in Southern Afghanistan, 2006. Most drone pilots operate in the U.S., but depend on Ramstein to control their aircraft. (Veronique de Viguerie/Getty Images)

Getty Images

GERMANY HAS FIGURED prominently in the American drone war from the very beginning.

In 2000, the U.S. Air Force launched an initiative to explore arming drones, the same year that the CIA — contemplating the assassination of Osama bin Laden — began using unarmed Predators to try to track the high-value target.

It was through this surveillance project that a scientist working with the CIA and the U.S. military devised a prototype for what would become the system for operating drones from half a world away that endures to this day.

Originally called “split operations,” the method involved drone pilots operating from Ramstein, while the actual aircraft would fly out of an airfield in Afghanistan’s neighbor Uzbekistan. From there, the drones could record live video over a complex near Kandahar where bin Laden was suspected of residing. “They chose Ramstein because that was the most convenient place where they could be on a very secure location and still reach a satellite that had a footprint that covered Afghanistan,” says Richard Whittle, author of the book Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution. “And that worked.”

The successful development of the split operations was welcomed by those within the U.S. intelligence community who were pushing for authorities to assassinate bin Laden — it would make their mission easier to accomplish.

But plans to assassinate bin Laden with a Hellfire missile launched from a drone piloted from Ramstein hit a snag. “A Defense Department lawyer raised the issue that you couldn’t pull the trigger from German soil under the U.S. Status of Forces Agreement without telling the German government you were going to do it and getting their permission,” says Whittle. Fearing that the German government of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder would reject the proposal or that the existence of the facility and the plot to kill bin Laden would leak, the CIA went back to the drawing board. “You have to remember at that time, the whole idea of assassinating Osama bin Laden had a different feel to it than it did later after 9/11,” Whittle told The Intercept. “He was barely known among the general public. The whole idea of the CIA running a targeted killing was entirely different and there was a lot of hesitation.”

The CIA considered moving the ground control station to a ship in the ocean or to another European location. But all of those scenarios would come with risks and technical complications. In the end, the CIA decided to position pilots at a ground control station within CIA headquarters in Langley and then use fiber optic underwater cables to facilitate lightning fast communications between pilots in the U.S. and the drones they would control. The cable to Germany would be the artery connecting the pilots to the planes that would hunt bin Laden and other terror suspects. It would run from the U.S. to Ramstein, which would house a powerful satellite uplink that could hit satellites in Afghanistan. But the key was that the actual commands to deploy drones as weapons would be issued from American not German soil, thus freeing the U.S. from the obligation to get the Germans’ approval for the mission. The system was called “remote split operations.”

Soon after taking office in 2009, President Obama authorized an expansion of the drone war, including opening new fronts in Somalia and Yemen. But the U.S. military discovered a gap in its satellite coverage. So, in early 2009, after “an urgent call from the Pentagon’s Joint staff,” a commercial satellite provider, Intelsat, shifted its Galaxy-26 satellite from the U.S. to orbit over the Indian Ocean. This repositioning of the Galaxy-26, which could be reached by U.S. drone operators by using the relay station at Ramstein, facilitated the rapid expansion of the U.S. drone program.

Former drone sensor operator Brandon Bryant, who conducted operations in Yemen, Afghanistan and Iraq, said that without Ramstein, the U.S. would either need to find another base in the area, with the ability to hit satellites in the Middle East and Africa, or place U.S. personnel much closer to the areas they are targeting. “Instead of being able to be [inside the U.S.] with their operations, they would have to do more line-of-sight stuff, more direct deployments, more people going over there rather than [operating] in the states,” Bryant, who has become an outspoken critic of the drone program, told The Intercept. The U.S. is “doing shady stuff behind the scenes like using satellite and information technologies that, if able to continue being used, are going to just continue to perpetuate the drone war,” he charged.

“Ramstein is the focal point for drone communications,” says Dan Gettinger, co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College. “If the communications infrastructure didn’t exist, the drone would be just a remote control plane, a toy basically.” It is “more important to the drone operations than the weapons a drone carries.”

The top-secret slides show how embedded Ramstein has become in the drone war. They describe in detail the system by which a geolocating device affixed to the drone feeds back to a satellite and down to the station at Ramstein. The GILGAMESH platform, which The Intercept first reported on in February of 2014, utilizes a device placed on the bottom of the drone. It operates as a fake cell phone tower, forcing individual mobile phones of targeted individuals to connect to it so that their location can be pinpointed and used in “find, fix and finish” missions.

The slides show that GILGAMESH operations ran out of several sites, including Djibouti, a base from which the U.S. has launched drone aircraft into Somalia and Yemen. The slides also describe how drones are equipped with a collection platform, “AIRHANDLER,” which relays data back to ground control stations via Ramstein.

Construction on the Satellite Relay Facility at Ramstein. (Image: Josh Begley)

RAMSTEIN IS NOT the only crucial U.S. military installation in Germany. The U.S. has a separate key facility an hour away, in Wiesbaden, Germany, called the European Technical Center (ETC). According to a previously reported classified document provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the ETC “is NSA’s primary communications hub in that part of the world, providing communications connectivity, SIGINT collection, and data-flow services to NSAers, warfighters and foreign partners in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.”

In the top-secret drone architecture slide deck obtained by The Intercept, the ETC is shown as having satellite links to Bagram air base in Afghanistan as well as a fiber optic connection to the NSA’s counterterrorism facilities in Georgia, where many GILGAMESH operators supporting drone operations are based.

As the U.S. expands the global reach of its drones, Ramstein is poised to play a crucial role in new war frontiers. Last June, the Air Force awarded a contract to a major satellite provider that boasts that it “leverages our global satellite fleet to provide communications capability” for drones. The contract will support the operations of the Germany-based U.S. Africa Command. “Work will be performed at Ramstein Air Base, Germany and the western portion of Africa,” the contract announcement states.

In 2011, the Air Force requested $15 million to build a center similar to the Ramstein satellite facility at a U.S. military base in Sigonella, Italy. As of November 2014, according to a U.S. military contracting document, the project was still in a pre-solicitation stage and construction had not been completed. The Air Force’s request for funding of the station underlined the centrality of Ramstein to all current drone operations. It asserted that the proposed Italy site would “act as a back-up system to the Ramstein site to avoid single point of failure.”

———

Additional reporting by Ryan Devereaux, Laura Poitras, and Josh Begley. Margot Williams, Sheelagh McNeill,  Alleen Brown, Andrea Jones, Sharon Weinberger, and Henrik Moltke contributed to this story.

Illustration:  Connie Yu

The post Germany is the Tell-Tale Heart of America’s Drone War appeared first on The Intercept.

The security researchers presented their latest tactics and achievements at a secret annual gathering, called the “Jamboree,” where attendees discussed strategies for exploiting security flaws in household and commercial electronics. The conferences have spanned nearly a decade, with the first CIA-sponsored meeting taking place a year before the first iPhone was released.

By targeting essential security keys used to encrypt data stored on Apple’s devices, the researchers have sought to thwart the company’s attempts to provide mobile security to hundreds of millions of Apple customers across the globe. Studying both “physical” and “non-invasive” techniques, U.S. government-sponsored research has been aimed at discovering ways to decrypt and ultimately penetrate Apple’s encrypted firmware. This could enable spies to plant malicious code on Apple devices and seek out potential vulnerabilities in other parts of the iPhone and iPad currently masked by encryption.

The CIA declined to comment for this story.

The security researchers also claimed they had created a modified version of Apple’s proprietary software development tool, Xcode, which could sneak surveillance backdoors into any apps or programs created using the tool. Xcode, which is distributed by Apple to hundreds of thousands of developers, is used to create apps that are sold through Apple’s App Store.

The modified version of Xcode, the researchers claimed, could enable spies to steal passwords and grab messages on infected devices. Researchers also claimed the modified Xcode could “force all iOS applications to send embedded data to a listening post.” It remains unclear how intelligence agencies would get developers to use the poisoned version of Xcode.

Researchers also claimed they had successfully modified the OS X updater, a program used to deliver updates to laptop and desktop computers, to install a “keylogger.”

Other presentations at the CIA conference have focused on the products of Apple’s competitors, including Microsoft’s BitLocker encryption system, which is used widely on laptop and desktop computers running premium editions of Windows.

The revelations that the CIA has waged a secret campaign to defeat the security mechanisms built into Apple’s devices come as Apple and other tech giants are loudly resisting pressure from senior U.S. and U.K. government officials to weaken the security of their products. Law enforcement agencies want the companies to maintain the government’s ability to bypass security tools built into wireless devices. Perhaps more than any other corporate leader, Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, has taken a stand for privacy as a core value, while sharply criticizing the actions of U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

“If U.S. products are OK to target, that’s news to me,” says Matthew Green, a cryptography expert at Johns Hopkins University’s Information Security Institute. “Tearing apart the products of U.S. manufacturers and potentially putting backdoors in software distributed by unknowing developers all seems to be going a bit beyond ‘targeting bad guys.’ It may be a means to an end, but it’s a hell of a means.”

Apple declined to comment for this story, instead pointing to previous comments Cook and the company have made defending Apple’s privacy record.

Lockheed Martin Dulles Executive Plaza, Herndon, Virginia.

SECURITY RESEARCHERS from Sandia National Laboratories presented their Apple-focused research at a secret annual CIA conference called the Trusted Computing Base Jamboree. The Apple research and the existence of the conference are detailed in documents provided to The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The conference was sponsored by the CIA’s Information Operations Center, which conducts covert cyberattacks. The aim of the gathering, according to a 2012 internal NSA wiki, was to host “presentations that provide important information to developers trying to circumvent or exploit new security capabilities,” as well as to “exploit new avenues of attack.” NSA personnel also participated in the conference through the NSA’s counterpart to the CIA’s Trusted Computing Base, according to the document. The NSA did not provide comment for this story.

The Jamboree was held at a Lockheed Martin facility inside an executive office park in northern Virginia. Lockheed is one of the largest defense contractors in the world; its tentacles stretch into every aspect of U.S. national security and intelligence. The company is akin to a privatized wing of the U.S. national security state — more than 80 percent of its total revenue comes from the U.S. government. Via a subsidiary, Lockheed also operates Sandia Labs, which is funded by the U.S. government. The lab’s researchers have presented Apple findings at the CIA conference.

“Lockheed Martin’s role in these activities should not be surprising given its leading role in the national surveillance state,” says William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy and author of Prophets of War, a book that chronicles Lockheed’s history. “It is the largest private intelligence contractor in the world, and it has worked on past surveillance programs for the Pentagon, the CIA and the NSA. If you’re looking for a candidate for Big Brother, Lockheed Martin fits the bill.”

The Apple research is consistent with a much broader secret U.S. government program to analyze “secure communications products, both foreign and domestic” in order to “develop exploitation capabilities against the authentication and encryption schemes,” according to the 2013 Congressional Budget Justification. Known widely as the “Black Budget,” the top-secret CBJ was provided to The Intercept by Snowden and gives a sprawling overview of the U.S. intelligence community’s spending and architecture. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

As of 2013, according to the classified budget, U.S. intelligence agencies were creating new capabilities against dozens of commercially produced security products, including those made by American companies, to seek out vulnerabilities.

Last week, CIA Director John Brennan announced a major reorganization at the agency aimed, in large part, at expanding U.S. cyber-operations. The Information Operations Center, which organized the Jamboree conferences, will be folded into a new Directorate of Digital Innovation. Notwithstanding its innocuous name, a major priority of the directorate will be offensive cyberattacks, sabotage and digital espionage. Brennan said the CIA reorganization will be modeled after the agency’s Counterterrorism Center, which runs the U.S. targeted killing and drone program.

THE DOCUMENTS do not address how successful the targeting of Apple’s encryption mechanisms have been, nor do they provide any detail about the specific use of such exploits by U.S. intelligence. But they do shed light on an ongoing campaign aimed at defeating the tech giant’s efforts to secure its products, and in turn, its customers’ private data.

“Spies gonna spy,” says Steven Bellovin, a former chief technologist for the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and current professor at Columbia University. “I’m never surprised by what intelligence agencies do to get information. They’re going to go where the info is, and as it moves, they’ll adjust their tactics. Their attitude is basically amoral: whatever works is OK.”

Bellovin says he generally supports efforts by U.S. intelligence to “hack” devices — including Apple’s — used by terrorists and criminals, but expressed concern that such capabilities could be abused. “There are bad people out there, and it’s reasonable to seek information on them,” he says, cautioning that “inappropriate use — mass surveillance, targeting Americans without a warrant, probably spying on allies — is another matter entirely.”

In the top-secret documents, ranging from 2010 through 2012, the researchers appear particularly intent on extracting encryption keys that prevent unauthorized access to data stored — and firmware run — on Apple products.

“The Intelligence Community (IC) is highly dependent on a very small number of security flaws, many of which are public, which Apple eventually patches,” the researchers noted in an abstract of their 2011 presentation at the Jamboree. But, they promised, their presentation could provide the intelligence community with a “method to noninvasively extract” encryption keys used on Apple devices. Another presentation focused on physically extracting the key from Apple’s hardware.

A year later, at the 2012 Jamboree, researchers described their attacks on the software used by developers to create applications for Apple’s popular App Store. In a talk called “Strawhorse: Attacking the MacOS and iOS Software Development Kit,” a presenter from Sandia Labs described a successful “whacking” of Apple’s Xcode — the software used to create apps for iPhones, iPads and Mac computers. Developers who create Apple-approved and distributed apps overwhelmingly use Xcode, a free piece of software easily downloaded from the App Store.

The researchers boasted that they had discovered a way to manipulate Xcode so that it could serve as a conduit for infecting and extracting private data from devices on which users had installed apps that were built with the poisoned Xcode. In other words, by manipulating Xcode, the spies could compromise the devices and private data of anyone with apps made by a poisoned developer — potentially millions of people. “Trying to plant stuff in Xcode has fascinating implications,” says Bellovin.

The researchers listed a variety of actions their “whacked” Xcode could perform, including:

— “Entice” all Mac applications to create a “remote backdoor” allowing undetected access to an Apple computer.

— Secretly embed an app developer’s private key into all iOS applications. (This could potentially allow spies to impersonate the targeted developer.)

— “Force all iOS applications” to send data from an iPhone or iPad back to a U.S. intelligence “listening post.”

— Disable core security features on Apple devices.

The Intelligence Community is highly dependent on a very small number of security flaws, many of which are public, which Apple eventually patches.

For years, U.S. and British intelligence agencies have consistently sought to defeat the layers of encryption and other security features used by Apple to protect the iPhone. A joint task force comprised of operatives from the NSA and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, formed in 2010, developed surveillance software targeting iPhones, Android devices and Nokia’s Symbian phones. The Mobile Handset Exploitation Team successfully implanted malware on iPhones as part of WARRIOR PRIDE, a GCHQ framework for secretly accessing private communications on mobile devices.

That program was disclosed in Snowden documents reported on last year by The Guardian. A WARRIOR PRIDE plugin called NOSEY SMURF allowed spies to remotely and secretly activate a phone’s microphone. Another plugin, DREAMY SMURF, allowed intelligence agents to manage the power system on a phone and thus avoid detection. PARANOID SMURF was designed to conceal the malware in other ways. TRACKER SMURF allowed ultra-precise geolocating of an individual phone. “[If] its [sic] on the phone, we can get it,” the spies boasted in a secret GCHQ document describing the targeting of the iPhone.

All of the SMURF malware — including the plugin that secretly turns on the iPhone’s microphone — would first require that agencies bypass the security controls built into the iOS operating system. Spies would either need to hack the phone in order to plant their malware on it, or sneak a backdoor into an app the user installed voluntarily. That was one of the clear aims of the Apple-focused research presented at the CIA’s conference.

“The U.S. government is prioritizing its own offensive surveillance needs over the cybersecurity of the millions of Americans who use Apple products,” says Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union. “If U.S. government-funded researchers can discover these flaws, it is quite likely that Chinese, Russian and Israeli researchers can discover them, too. By quietly exploiting these flaws rather than notifying Apple, the U.S. government leaves Apple’s customers vulnerable to other sophisticated governments.”

Security experts interviewed by The Intercept point out that the SMURF capabilities were already available to U.S. and British intelligence agencies five years ago. That raises the question of how advanced the current capacity to surveil smartphone users is, especially in light of the extensive resources poured into targeting the products of major tech companies. One GCHQ slide from 2010 stated that the agency’s ultimate goal was to be able to “Exploit any phone, anywhere, any time.”

Steve Jobs unveiling the first iPhone on January 9, 2007.

THE FIRST JAMBOREE took place in 2006, just as Apple was preparing to unveil its highly-anticipated iPhone. In March 2010, according to a top-secret document, during a talk called “Rocoto: Implanting the iPhone,” a presenter discussed efforts to target the iPhone 3G. In addition to analyzing the device’s software for potential vulnerabilities, the presentation examined “jailbreak methods,” used within the iPhone community to free phones from their built-in constraints, that could be leveraged by intelligence agencies. “We will conclude with a look ahead at future challenges presented by the iPhone 3GS and the upcoming iPad,” the abstract noted. Over the years, as Apple updates its hardware, software and encryption methods, the CIA and its researchers study ways to break and exploit them.

The attempts to target vulnerabilities in Apple’s products have not occurred in a vacuum. Rather, they are part of a vast multi-agency U.S./U.K. effort to attack commercial encryption and security systems used on billions of devices around the world. U.S. intelligence agencies are not just focusing on individual terrorists or criminals — they are targeting the large corporations, such as Apple, that produce popular mobile devices.

“Every other manufacturer looks to Apple. If the CIA can undermine Apple’s systems, it’s likely they’ll be able to deploy the same capabilities against everyone else,” says Green, the Johns Hopkins cryptographer. “Apple led the way with secure coprocessors in phones, with fingerprint sensors, with encrypted messages. If you can attack Apple, then you can probably attack anyone.”

According to the Black Budget, U.S. intelligence agencies have tech companies dead in their sights with the aim of breaking or circumventing any existing or emerging encryption or antiviral products, noting the threat posed by “increasingly strong commercial” encryption and “adversarial cryptography.”

The Analysis of Target Systems Project produced “prototype capabilities” for the intelligence community, enabled “the defeat of strong commercial data security systems” and developed ways “to exploit emerging information systems and technologies,” according to the classified budget. The project received $35 million in funding in 2012 and had more than 200 personnel assigned to it. By the end of 2013, according to the budget, the project would “develop new capabilities against 50 commercial information security device products to exploit emerging technologies,” as well as new methods that would allow spies to recover user and device passwords on new products.

Among the project’s missions:

— Analyze “secure communications products, both foreign and domestic produced” to “develop exploitation capabilities against the authentication and encryption schemes.”

— “[D]evelop exploitation capabilities against network communications protocols and commercial network security products.”

— “Anticipate future encryption technologies” and “prepare strategies to exploit those technologies.”

— “Develop, enhance, and implement software attacks against encrypted signals.”

— “Develop exploitation capabilities against specific key management and authentication schemes.”

— “[D]evelop exploitation capabilities against emerging multimedia applications.”

— Provide tools for “exploiting” devices used to “store, manage, protect, or communicate data.”

— “Develop methods to discover and exploit communication systems employing public key cryptography” and “communications protected by passwords or pass phrases.”

— Exploit public key cryptography.

— Exploit Virtual Private Networks, or VPNs, which allow people to browse the Internet with increased security and anonymity.

The black budget also noted that the U.S. intelligence community partners with “National Laboratories” to conduct the type of research presented at the CIA’s annual Jamboree conference. It confirms the U.S. government’s aggressive efforts to steal encryption and authentication keys, as occurred in the NSA and GCHQ operations against Gemalto, the world’s largest manufacturer of SIM cards, through the use of Computer Network Exploitation attacks. In that case, spy agencies penetrated Gemalto’s internal networks and cyberstalked its employees to steal mass quantities of keys used to encrypt mobile phone communications.

The CIA’s Information Operations Center is currently the second largest of the spy agency’s specialized centers. It not only conducts cyber-ops, but has operated covertly in other nations, working to develop assets from targeted countries to assist in its cyber-surveillance programs, according to the Black Budget. At times, its personnel brief the president.

U.S. President Barack Obama holds up an iPad.

AT THE CIA’s Jamboree in 2011, the computer researchers conducted workshops where they revealed the specifics of their efforts to attack one of the key privacy elements of Apple’s mobile devices. These machines have two separate keys integrated into the silicon of their Apple-designed processors at the point of manufacture. The two, paired together, are used to encrypt data and software stored on iPhones and iPads. One, the User ID, is unique to an individual’s phone, and is not retained by Apple. That key is vital to protecting an individual’s data and — particularly on Apple’s latest devices — difficult to steal. A second key, the Group ID, is known to Apple and is the same across multiple Apple devices that use the same processor. The GID is used to encrypt essential system software that runs on Apple’s mobile devices.

The focus of the security researchers, as described at the CIA conferences, was to target the GID key, which Apple implants on all devices that use the same processors. For instance, Apple’s A4 processor was used in the iPhone 4, the iPod Touch and the original iPad. All of those devices used the same GID. As Apple designs new processors and faster devices that use those processors, the company creates new GIDs. If someone has the same iPhone as her neighbor, they have the exact same GID key on their devices. So, if intelligence agencies extract the GID key, it means they have information useful to compromising any device containing that key.

At the 2011 Jamboree conference, there were two separate presentations on hacking the GID key on Apple’s processors. One was focused on non-invasively obtaining it by studying the electromagnetic emissions of — and the amount of power used by — the iPhone’s processor while encryption is being performed. Careful analysis of that information could be used to extract the encryption key. Such a tactic is known as a “side channel” attack. The second focused on a “method to physically extract the GID key.”

Whatever method the CIA and its partners use, by extracting the GID — which is implanted on the processors of all Apple mobile devices — the CIA and its allies could be able to decrypt the firmware that runs on the iPhone and other mobile devices. This would allow them to seek out other security vulnerabilities to exploit. Taken together, the documents make clear that researching each new Apple processor and mobile device, and studying them for potential security flaws, is a priority for the CIA.

According to the 2011 document describing the Jamboree presentations on Apple’s processor, the researchers asserted that extracting the GID key could also allow them to look for other potential gateways into Apple devices. “If successful, it would enable decryption and analysis of the boot firmware for vulnerabilities, and development of associated exploits across the entire A4-based product-line, which includes the iPhone 4, the iPod touch and the iPad.”

At the CIA conference in 2012, Sandia researchers delivered a presentation on Apple’s A5 processor. The A5 is used in the iPhone 4s and iPad 2. But this time, it contained no abstract or other details, instructing those interested to contact a CIA official on his secure phone or email.

“If I were Tim Cook, I’d be furious,” says the ACLU’s Soghoian. “If Apple is mad at the intelligence community, and they should be, they should put their lawyers to work. Lawsuits speak louder than words.”

Apple CEO Tim Cook testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, May 21, 2013.

FOR YEARS, Apple has included encryption features in the products it sells to consumers. In 2014, the company dramatically broadened the types of data stored on iPhones that are encrypted, and it incorporated encryption by default into its desktop and laptop operating system. This resulted in criticism from leading law enforcement officials, including the FBI director. The encryption technology that Apple has built into its products — along with many other security features — is a virtual wall that separates cybercriminals and foreign governments from customer data. But now, because Apple claims it can no longer extract customer data stored on iPhones, because it is encrypted with a key the company does not know, the U.S. government can be locked out too — even with a search warrant. The FBI director and other U.S. officials have referred to the advent of the encryption era — where previously accessible data and communications may now be off limits because of the security technology protecting them — as “going dark.”

In the face of this rising challenge to its surveillance capabilities, U.S. intelligence has spent considerable time and resources trying to find security vulnerabilities in Apple’s encryption technology, and, more broadly, in its products, which can be leveraged to install surveillance software on iPhones and Macbooks. “The exploitation of security flaws is a high-priority area for the U.S. intelligence community, and such methods have only become more important as U.S. technology companies have built strong encryption into their products,” says the ACLU’s Soghoian.

Microsoft has, for nearly a decade, included BitLocker, an encryption technology that protects data stored on a computer, in its Windows operating system. Unlike Apple, which made encryption available to all customers, Microsoft had included this feature only in its more expensive premium and professional versions of Windows, up until a few years ago. BitLocker is designed to work with a Trusted Platform Module, a special security chip included in some computers, which stores the encryption keys and also protects against unauthorized software modification.

Also presented at the Jamboree were successes in the targeting of Microsoft’s disk encryption technology, and the TPM chips that are used to store its encryption keys. Researchers at the CIA conference in 2010 boasted about the ability to extract the encryption keys used by BitLocker and thus decrypt private data stored on the computer. Because the TPM chip is used to protect the system from untrusted software, attacking it could allow the covert installation of malware onto the computer, which could be used to access otherwise encrypted communications and files of consumers. Microsoft declined to comment for this story.

In the wake of the initial Snowden disclosures, Apple CEO Tim Cook has specifically denounced the U.S. government’s efforts to compel companies to provide backdoor access to their users’ data.

“I want to be absolutely clear that we have never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services. We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will,” Cook said last September in announcing Apple’s new privacy policy. More recently, Cook said, “None of us should accept that the government or a company or anybody should have access to all of our private information. This is a basic human right. We all have a right to privacy. We shouldn’t give it up. We shouldn’t give in to scare-mongering.”

As corporations increasingly integrate default encryption methods and companies like Apple incorporate their own indigenous encryption technologies into easy-to-use text, voice and video communication platforms, the U.S. and British governments are panicking. “Encryption threatens to lead all of us to a very dark place,” declared FBI Director James Comey in an October 2014 lecture at the Brookings Institution. Citing the recent moves by Apple to strengthen default encryption on its operating systems, and commitments by Google to incorporate such tools, Comey said, “This means the companies themselves won’t be able to unlock phones, laptops, and tablets to reveal photos, documents, e-mail, and recordings stored within.”

Under current U.S. regulations, law enforcement agencies can get a court order to access communications channeled through major tech companies and wireless providers. But if those communications are encrypted through a process not accessible by any involved company, the data is essentially meaningless, garbled gibberish. “In a world in which data is encrypted, and the providers don’t have the keys, suddenly, there is no one to go to when they have a warrant,” says Soghoian. “That is, even if they get a court order, it doesn’t help them. That is what is freaking them out.”

Comey alleged that “even a supercomputer would have difficulty with today’s high-level encryption,” meaning a “brute force” attempt to decrypt intercepted communications would be ineffective, and, even if successful, time-consuming.

“Encryption isn’t just a technical feature; it’s a marketing pitch,” Comey added. “But it will have very serious consequences for law enforcement and national security agencies at all levels. Sophisticated criminals will come to count on these means of evading detection. It’s the equivalent of a closet that can’t be opened. A safe that can’t be cracked.”

A few months after Comey’s remarks, Robert Litt, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, also appeared at Brookings. “One of the many ways in which Snowden’s leaks have damaged our national security is by driving a wedge between the government and providers and technology companies, so that some companies that formerly recognized that protecting our nation was a valuable and important public service now feel compelled to stand in opposition,” Litt said. He appealed to corporations to embrace “a solution that does not compromise the integrity of encryption technology but that enables both encryption to protect privacy and decryption under lawful authority to protect national security.”

Green, the Johns Hopkins professor, argues that U.S. government attacks against the products of American companies will not just threaten privacy, but will ultimately harm the U.S. economy. “U.S. tech companies have already suffered overseas due to foreign concerns about our products’ security,” he says. “The last thing any of us need is for the U.S. government to actively undermine our own technology industry.”

The U.S. government is certainly not alone in the war against secure communications. British Prime Minister David Cameron has suggested that if he is re-elected, he may seek to ban encrypted chat programs that do not provide backdoor access to law enforcement. “Are we going to allow a means of communications which it simply isn’t possible to read?” Cameron said in a speech in England earlier this year. “My answer to that question is: ‘No, we must not.’”

When the Chinese government recently tried to force tech companies to install a backdoor in their products for use by Chinese intelligence agencies, the U.S. government denounced China. “This is something that I’ve raised directly with President Xi,” President Obama said in early March. “We have made it very clear to them that this is something they are going to have to change if they are to do business with the United States.” But China was actually following the U.S. government’s lead. The FBI has called for an expansion of U.S. law, which would require Apple and its competitors to design their products so that all communications could be made available to government agencies. NSA officials have expressed similar sentiments.

“Obama’s comments were dripping with hypocrisy,” says Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. “Don’t get me wrong, his actual criticism of China for attempting to force tech companies to install backdoors was spot on — now if only he would apply what he said to his own government. Since he now knows backdooring encryption is a terrible policy that will damage cybersecurity, privacy, and the economy, why won’t he order the FBI and NSA to stop pushing for it as well?”

———

Documents published with this article:

• TCB Jamboree 2012 Invitation
• Strawhorse: Attacking the MacOS and iOS Software Development Kit
• TPM Vulnerabilities to Power Analysis and An Exposed Exploit to Bitlocker
• TCB Jamboree 2012
• Apple A4/A5 Application Processors Analysis
• Differential Power Analysis on the Apple A4 Processor
• Secure Key Extraction by Physical De-Processing of Apple’s A4 Processor
• Rocoto: Implanting the iPhone
• Smurf Capability – iPhone
• Black Budget: Cryptanalysis & Exploitation Services – Analysis of Target Systems

———

Andrew Fishman, Alleen Brown, Andrea Jones, Ryan Gallagher, Morgan Marquis-Boire, and Micah Lee contributed to this story.

Note: An earlier draft of this story incorrectly suggested that the iOS Group ID is used to sign software. An earlier draft also incorrectly stated that Lockheed Martin owns Sandia National Laboratories. Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, operates Sandia National Laboratories as a contractor for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. 

Disclosure: Freedom of the Press Foundation, which Trevor Timm represents, has received grant funding from First Look Media, The Intercept’s parent company. Intercept co-founders Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras are on the board of the organization.

Photo: Shutterstock; Google Maps; Simon Dawson/Bloomberg/Getty Images; Tony Avelar/Getty Images; Kevin Lamarque/Reuters/Landov; J. Scott Applewhite/AP

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