Arizona Daily Star, 26 Aug 2010: A Davis-Monthan airman accused of running a sham Russian bride ring testified Wednesday he was just kidding around when he told a colleague he could set him up with a foreign wife and would pay him $100 each for referring other airmen interested in marriage.
“It was said as a joke,” Staff Sgt. Aleksandr S. Ilin said as he took the witness stand in his own defense at his court-martial. Ilin, 27, said he purposely cultivated the image of being a member of the “Russian mafia” because he was sick of being harassed about his foreign accent and heritage. From the time he was in basic training, Ilin said, fellow airmen and supervisors “always joked about my Russian background, called me a commie, a KGB agent,” he said. He decided to adopt a bad-boy persona so they’d knock it off, he said.
“If someone said you were KGB or Russian mafia, you would play along with that?” defense lawyer Capt. Mark Rosenow asked Ilin. “Oh yeah,” Ilin replied. “I’d just go with it.”
Ilin was at a loss, though, to explain why two former Air Force colleagues who married Russian women he introduced them to later pleaded guilty at their own court-martials to marriage fraud and conspiracy and to larceny for taking the extra pay and benefits the Air Force gives to married airmen. Both former airmen were imprisoned for up to six months and were kicked out of the Air Force after accepting plea deals in which they agreed to testify against Ilin. In both those cases, Ilin said he thought the marriages in question were bona fide. He denied ever arranging a fraudulent union.
Ilin is accused of arranging three sham marriages between 2005 and 2007 so the foreign women could obtain legal status in the U.S., and with soliciting other airmen who refused similar offers. Witnesses have testified that some of the Russian brides paid Ilin $2,000 to $5,000 each for setting up the unions. . . . .
Strategy Page, 26 Aug 2010: For the 13th time this year, the U.S. Navy has fired a commander, not of one of its ships, but of something even more ominous, the head of the Naval Computer and Telecommunications Station in Bahrain. The relieved officer, Commander. Mary Ann L. Giese, controlled top secret networks and encrypted communications. The reason for here removal was inappropriate relationships with subordinates. This made her vulnerable to blackmail, a nightmare situation for counterintelligence officials tasked with keeping top secret communications secret. These “zipper control” offenses are an increasingly common cause for commanders losing their jobs. And the rate of commanders losing their jobs is increasing. . . . .
NextGov, 23 Aug 2010: Defense Secretary Robert Gates has ordered a new coordinated cyberspace counterintelligence policy that would better identify military personnel who pose a threat in an effort to avoid events such as the mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, in November 2009.
E-mails and other electronic documents frequently have pointed to the possibility of wrongdoing. Investigators looking into the shooting said they had discovered at least 20 e-mails between Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, and radical Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki prior to the attacks.
Investigators believe al-Awlaki might have known in advance about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and he has had contacts with other radical Muslims, including Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines plane in December 2009.
Internal Army reports indicated personnel were aware of Hasan’s tilt toward radicalism since 2005, and the FBI knew of the e-mail exchanges between Hasan and al-Awlaki well before the attack, but it determined the psychiatrist was not a threat.
The new policy is supposed to go into effect in August, Gates said in his memo, which was based on recommendations made by an independent review panel that studied the Fort Hood shooting. Togo West Jr., secretary of the Veterans Affairs Department during the Clinton administration, headed up the committee.
The policy will establish procedures for identifying potential threats to Defense Department personnel, information and facilities through coordinated, but not defined, cyber counterintelligence activities, the memo said. The policy will help alert Defense’s investigative groups of threat information discovered during counterintelligence operations on Defense networks, systems and computers, Gates said. . . .
Christian Science Monitor, 29 July 2010: Military analysts say three trends involving technology, workplace culture, and the nature of modern warfare explain how WikiLeaks could have gotten so many classified Pentagon documents.
It could take months or years – and perhaps a court martial – before the full fallout of WikiLeaks’ release of more than 90,000 secret documents is known. It could well take until the end of the war in Afghanistan, or at least until US and allied counterintelligence sources have done their work looking for evidence that the Taliban and Al Qaeda benefited from the revelations.
But for now, military analysts see important recent trends that help explain how the WikiLeaks leak happened: new technology, the working relationships and culture within the military and intelligence services, and the evolving nature of 21st century warfare.
It was just a few years ago that spies like Jonathan Pollard, the civilian intelligence analyst who spied for Israel, and Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who spied for the Soviet Union and Russia, had to obtain paper copies of secret documents – sometimes thousands of pages that were then bundled up and turned over to foreign agents or secretly planted for pick up.
Whoever obtained and revealed the 90,000 classified documents made public by WikiLeaks had it much easier. “He was basically able to put the Library of Alexandria on a thumb drive and walk out the door,” says John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org. “That’s the part that I find distressing. I just don’t see how a well-designed system would allow that to happen.” . . .
Daily Beast, 27 July 2010: Who was minding the store when 92,000 classified military logs were purloined? Retired Army Col. Ken Allard analyzes this and three other troubling conundrums—including whether the leaker should pay the ultimate price.
It’s a bad time for secrets. Just last week, The Washington Post went Pulitzer-prospecting with a 20,000-word exposé on the post-9/11 security establishment, reporting that almost a million people hold top-secret security clearances. One of those people apparently provided 92,000 classified military logs about the Afghan-Pakistani war to the blog network WikiLeaks. Unlike an ordinary spy or thief, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange claims higher motives, saying he hopes the release of these secrets will usher in “the age of the whistleblower.”
But maybe the next Pulitzer should go to the investigative journalist who can shed light on some basic and deeply troubling questions:
1. Who was minding the store when 92,000 documents were purloined, Big Brother or Big Momma? From Burn After Reading to Salt, Hollywood thrives on the myth of the all-knowing, all-pervasive Big Brother. The reality is slightly different: The leading suspect in the leak investigation is neither Mata Hari nor James Bond but a baby-faced 22-year-old Army private from Potomac, Maryland. Left unexplained is how such a junior-level intelligence analyst was allowed apparently unlimited access to this secret treasure trove. Were his supervisors asleep at the switch? The intelligence officer’s most basic responsibility is ensuring that his junior analysts get the need-to-know information required to do their jobs—and nothing else. As at Fort Hood, we now need to find out what went terribly wrong here, and at the most basic levels.
2. How good is American counterintelligence when an entire archive of classified information can be copied and transmitted from a war zone? We only learned after Fort Hood that the shooter had been communicating routinely with a radical Islamic cleric in Yemen. For all practical purposes, off-duty soldiers on American bases enjoy the same Internet access as their civilian counterparts. But in a war zone, where the leaks apparently originated, all communications infrastructures operate under military control. Just as any employer has a right, even the obligation, to check on employee email usage, our counterintelligence services have the duty to monitor the communications of soldiers in a combat zone. This is doubly true of soldiers, like junior intelligence analysts, required to handle large amounts of sensitive information. Why were those communications pathways not monitored here, especially when large packets of information were apparently being sent outside government channels? As one retired general told me privately, “This wasn’t a leak, it was a deluge!” . . . .
