The ‘Highlands
Group/Forum’/SAIC/NSA/Google: Inside The Pentagon’s Secret
Network Behind Mass Surveillance, Endless War, and Skynet
Posted onJanuary 4, 2019AuthorEric Karlstrom1 Comment
GangStalkingMindControlCults
Epigraph Quotes:
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the
acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or
unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The
potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power
exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of
this combination endanger our liberties or democratic
processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an
alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper
meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of
defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that
security and liberty may prosper together. Akin to, and
largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our
industrial-military posture, has been the technological
revolution during recent decades.”
Farewell address of President Dwight D. Eisenhower,
January 17, 1961
Established under the Clinton administration, consolidated
under Bush, and firmly entrenched under Obama, a
bipartisan network of mostly (Jewish-Zionist (ETK))
neoconservative ideologues sealed its dominion inside the
US Department of Defense (DoD) by the dawn of 2015,
through the operation of an obscure corporate entity
outside the Pentagon, but run by the Pentagon… Known as
the ‘Highlands Forum,’ this private network has operated
as a bridge between the Pentagon and powerful American
elites outside the military since the mid-1990s…. Giant
defense contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton and Science
Applications International Corporation (SAIC) are
sometimes referred to as the ‘shadow intelligence
community’ due to the revolving doors between them and
government, and their capacity to simultaneously influence
and profit from defense policy…. The Highlands Forum has
for 20 years provided an off-the-record space for some of
the most prominent members of the shadow intelligence
community to convene with senior US government officials,
alongside other leaders in relevant industries.
Col. Richard O’Neill’s paper… outlined a strategy for
“perception management” as part of information warfare
(IW). O’Neill’s proposed strategy identified three
categories of targets for IW: 1) adversaries, 2) potential
partners, 3) civilian populations and the political
leadership.
The Highlands Forum doesn’t need to produce consensus
recommendations. Its purpose is to provide the Pentagon a
shadow social networking mechanism to cement lasting
relationships with corporate power, and to identify new
talent, that can be used to fine-tune information warfare
strategies in absolute secrecy.
Total participants in the DoD’s Highlands Forum number
over a thousand, although sessions largely consist of
small closed workshop style gatherings of maximum 25–30
people, bringing together experts and officials depending
on the subject. Delegates have included senior personnel
from SAIC and Booz Allen Hamilton, RAND Corp., Cisco,
Human Genome Sciences, eBay, PayPal, IBM, Google,
Microsoft, AT&T, the BBC, Disney, General Electric,
Enron, among innumerable others; Democrat and Republican
members of Congress and the Senate; senior executives from
the US energy industry such as Daniel Yergin of IHS
Cambridge Energy Research Associates; and key people
involved in both sides of presidential campaigns. Other
participants have included senior media professionals:
David Ignatius, associate editor of the Washington Post
and at the time the executive editor of the International
Herald Tribune; Thomas Friedman, long-time New York Times
columnist; Arnaud de Borchgrave, an editor at Washington
Times and United Press International; Steven Levy, a
former Newsweek editor, senior writer for Wired and now
chief tech editor at Medium; Lawrence Wright, staff writer
at the New Yorker; Noah Shachtmann, executive editor at
the Daily Beast; Rebecca McKinnon, co-founder of Global
Voices Online; Nik Gowing of the BBC; and John Markoff of
the New York Times.
Due to its current sponsorship by the OSD’s undersecretary
of defense for intelligence, the Forum has inside access
to the chiefs of the main US surveillance and
reconnaissance agencies, as well as the directors and
their assistants at DoD research agencies, from DARPA, to
the ONA. This also means that the Forum is deeply plugged
into the Pentagon’s policy research task forces.
Nafeez Ahmed, “How the CIA Made Google: Inside the Secret
Network Behind Mass Surveillance, Endless War, and Skynet”
From: Part 1: How The CIA Made Google (Nafeez Ahmed)
From: Part 2: Why Google Made the NSA (Nafeez Ahmed, 2017)
ETK Introduction:
1) TIs: Below are pictured some of the principle
architects of the criminal system that now “targets” you
and other honest innocent American citizens as
“adversaries”-“potential terrorist threats” cum “lab
rats.”
2) For those who think this corrupt system is viable or
valid or can persist, please view the DVD: “Enron: The
Smartest Guys in the Room,” which details the mercurial
rise and catastrophic collapse of ENRON (which played a
key role in the development of this military-industrial
surveillance-torture “corruptocracy.”)
3) As President Eisenhower pointed out in his 1961
farewell address (above epigraph quote): “Only an alert
and knowledgable citizenry can compel the proper meshing
of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense
with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and
liberty may prosper together.”
4) But it’s now probably gone way past that point. Under
the pretext of the phony War on Terrorism, the (captured?)
U.S. government and military-intelligence-corporate
complex is currently surveilling, targeting, torturing and
killing innocent American citizens, the very people they
have sworn serve and protect. We can only hope that when
this reality is fully exposed and understood, this
criminal syndicate will collapse- and the architects of
the system (some of whom are pictured below) will be tried
and punished accordingly.
PART 1. How the CIA Made Google: Inside the secret network
behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet (2015)
by Nafeez Ahmend (2015 and 2017)
INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a new crowd-funded investigative
journalism project, breaks the exclusive story of how the
United States intelligence community funded, nurtured and
incubated Google as part of a drive to dominate the world
through control of information. Seed-funded by the NSA and
CIA, Google was merely the first among a plethora of
private sector start-ups co-opted by US intelligence to
retain ‘information superiority.’
The origins of this ingenious strategy trace back to a
secret Pentagon-sponsored group, that for the last two
decades has functioned as a bridge between the US
government and elites across the business, industry,
finance, corporate, and media sectors. The group has
allowed some of the most powerful special interests in
corporate America to systematically circumvent democratic
accountability and the rule of law to influence government
policies, as well as public opinion in the US and around
the world. The results have been catastrophic: NSA mass
surveillance, a permanent state of global war, and a new
initiative to transform the US military into Skynet.
This exclusive is being released for free in the public
interest, and was enabled by crowdfunding. I’d like to
thank my amazing community of patrons for their support,
which gave me the opportunity to work on this in-depth
investigation. Please support independent, investigative
journalism for the global commons.
In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, western
governments are moving fast to legitimize expanded powers
of mass surveillance and controls on the internet, all in
the name of fighting terrorism.
US and European politicians have called to protect
NSA-style snooping, and to advance the capacity to intrude
on internet privacy by outlawing encryption. One idea is
to establish a telecoms partnership that would
unilaterally delete content deemed to “fuel hatred and
violence” in situations considered “appropriate.” Heated
discussions are going on at government and parliamentary
level to explore cracking down on lawyer-client
confidentiality.
What any of this would have done to prevent the Charlie
Hebdo attacks remains a mystery, especially given that we
already know the terrorists were on the radar of French
intelligence for up to a decade.
There is little new in this story. The 9/11 atrocity was
the first of many terrorist attacks, each succeeded by the
dramatic extension of draconian state powers at the
expense of civil liberties, backed up with the projection
of military force in regions identified as hotspots
harbouring terrorists. Yet there is little indication that
this tried and tested formula has done anything to reduce
the danger. If anything, we appear to be locked into a
deepening cycle of violence with no clear end in sight.
As our governments push to increase their powers, INSURGE
INTELLIGENCE can now reveal the vast extent to which the
US intelligence community is implicated in nurturing the
web platforms we know today, for the precise purpose of
utilizing the technology as a mechanism to fight global
‘information war’ — a war to legitimize the power of the
few over the rest of us. The lynchpin of this story is the
corporation that in many ways defines the 21st century
with its unobtrusive omnipresence: Google.
Google styles itself as a friendly, funky, user-friendly
tech firm that rose to prominence through a combination of
skill, luck, and genuine innovation. This is true. But it
is a mere fragment of the story. In reality, Google is a
smokescreen behind which lurks the US military-industrial
complex.
The inside story of Google’s rise, revealed here for the
first time, opens a can of worms that goes far beyond
Google, unexpectedly shining a light on the existence of a
parasitical network driving the evolution of the US
national security apparatus, and profiting obscenely from
its operation.
The shadow network
For the last two decades, US foreign and intelligence
strategies have resulted in a global ‘war on terror’
consisting of prolonged military invasions in the Muslim
world and comprehensive surveillance of civilian
populations. These strategies have been incubated, if not
dictated, by a secret network inside and beyond the
Pentagon.
Established under the Clinton administration, consolidated
under Bush, and firmly entrenched under Obama, this
bipartisan network of mostly neoconservative ideologues
sealed its dominion inside the US Department of Defense
(DoD) by the dawn of 2015, through the operation of an
obscure corporate entity outside the Pentagon, but run by
the Pentagon.
In 1999, the CIA created its own venture capital
investment firm, In-Q-Tel, to fund promising start-ups
that might create technologies useful for intelligence
agencies. But the inspiration for In-Q-Tel came earlier,
when the Pentagon set up its own private sector outfit.
Known as the ‘Highlands Forum,’ this private network has
operated as a bridge between the Pentagon and powerful
American elites outside the military since the mid-1990s.
Despite changes in civilian administrations, the network
around the Highlands Forum has become increasingly
successful in dominating US defense policy.
Giant defense contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton and
Science Applications International Corporation are
sometimes referred to as the ‘shadow intelligence
community’ due to the revolving doors between them and
government, and their capacity to simultaneously influence
and profit from defense policy. But while these
contractors compete for power and money, they also
collaborate where it counts. The Highlands Forum has for
20 years provided an off the record space for some of the
most prominent members of the shadow intelligence
community to convene with senior US government officials,
alongside other leaders in relevant industries.
I first stumbled upon the existence of this network in
November 2014, when I reported for VICE’s Motherboard that
US defense secretary Chuck Hagel’s newly announced
‘Defense Innovation Initiative’ was really about building
Skynet — or something like it, essentially to dominate an
emerging era of automated robotic warfare.
That story was based on a little-known Pentagon-funded
‘white paper’ published two months earlier by the National
Defense University (NDU) in Washington DC, a leading US
military-run institution that, among other things,
generates research to develop US defense policy at the
highest levels. The white paper clarified the thinking
behind the new initiative, and the revolutionary
scientific and technological developments it hoped to
capitalize on.
The Highlands Forum
The co-author of that NDU white paper is Linton Wells, a
51-year veteran US defense official who served in the Bush
administration as the Pentagon’s chief information
officer, overseeing the National Security Agency (NSA) and
other spy agencies. He still holds active top-secret
security clearances, and according to a report by
Government Executive magazine in 2006 he chaired the
‘Highlands Forum’, founded by the Pentagon in 1994.
Linton Wells II (right) former Pentagon chief information
officer and assistant secretary of defense for networks,
at a recent Pentagon Highlands Forum session. Rosemary
Wenchel, a senior official in the US Department of
Homeland Security, is sitting next to him
New Scientist magazine (paywall) has compared the
Highlands Forum to elite meetings like “Davos, Ditchley
and Aspen,” describing it as “far less well known, yet…
arguably just as influential a talking shop.” Regular
Forum meetings bring together “innovative people to
consider interactions between policy and technology. Its
biggest successes have been in the development of
high-tech network-based warfare.”
Given Wells’ role in such a Forum, perhaps it was not
surprising that his defense transformation white paper was
able to have such a profound impact on actual Pentagon
policy. But if that was the case, why had no one noticed?
Despite being sponsored by the Pentagon, I could find no
official page on the DoD website about the Forum. Active
and former US military and intelligence sources had never
heard of it, and neither did national security
journalists. I was baffled.
The Pentagon’s intellectual capital venture firm
In the prologue to his 2007 book, A Crowd of One: The
Future of Individual Identity, John Clippinger, an MIT
scientist of the Media Lab Human Dynamics Group, described
how he participated in a “Highlands Forum” gathering, an
“invitation-only meeting funded by the Department of
Defense and chaired by the assistant for networks and
information integration.” This was a senior DoD post
overseeing operations and policies for the Pentagon’s most
powerful spy agencies including the NSA, the Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA), among others. Starting from
2003, the position was transitioned into what is now the
undersecretary of defense for intelligence. The Highlands
Forum, Clippinger wrote, was founded by a retired US Navy
captain named Dick O’Neill. Delegates include senior US
military officials across numerous agencies and
divisions — “captains, rear admirals, generals, colonels,
majors and commanders” as well as “members of the DoD
leadership.”
What at first appeared to be the Forum’s main website
describes Highlands as “an informal cross-disciplinary
network sponsored by Federal Government,” focusing on
“information, science and technology.” Explanation is
sparse, beyond a single ‘Department of Defense’ logo.
But Highlands also has another website describing itself
as an “intellectual capital venture firm” with “extensive
experience assisting corporations, organizations, and
government leaders.” The firm provides a “wide range of
services, including: strategic planning, scenario creation
and gaming for expanding global markets,” as well as
“working with clients to build strategies for execution.”
‘The Highlands Group Inc.,’ the website says, organizes a
whole range of Forums on these issue.
For instance, in addition to the Highlands Forum, since
9/11 the Group runs the ‘Island Forum,’ an international
event held in association with Singapore’s Ministry of
Defense, which O’Neill oversees as “lead consultant.” The
Singapore Ministry of Defense website describes the Island
Forum as “patterned after the Highlands Forum organized
for the US Department of Defense.” Documents leaked by NSA
whistleblower Edward Snowden confirmed that Singapore
played a key role in permitting the US and Australia to
tap undersea cables to spy on Asian powers like Indonesia
and Malaysia.
The Highlands Group website also reveals that Highlands is
partnered with one of the most powerful defense
contractors in the United States. Highlands is “supported
by a network of companies and independent researchers,”
including “our Highlands Forum partners for the past ten
years at SAIC; and the vast Highlands network of
participants in the Highlands Forum.”
SAIC stands for the US defense firm, Science Applications
International Corporation, which changed its name to
Leidos in 2013, operating SAIC as a subsidiary.
SAIC/Leidos is among the top 10 largest defense
contractors in the US, and works closely with the US
intelligence community, especially the NSA. According to
investigative journalist Tim Shorrock, the first to
disclose the vast extent of the privatization of US
intelligence with his seminal book Spies for Hire, SAIC
has a “symbiotic relationship with the NSA: the agency is
the company’s largest single customer and SAIC is the
NSA’s largest contractor.”
Richard ‘Dick’ Patrick O’Neill, founding president of the
Pentagon’s Highlands Forum
The full name of Captain “Dick” O’Neill, the founding
president of the Highlands Forum, is Richard Patrick
O’Neill, who after his work in the Navy joined the DoD. He
served his last post as deputy for strategy and policy in
the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Defense for
Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence, before
setting up Highlands.
The Club of Yoda
But Clippinger also referred to another mysterious
individual revered by Forum attendees:
“He sat at the back of the room, expressionless behind
thick, black-rimmed glasses. I never heard him utter a
word… Andrew (Andy) Marshall is an icon within DoD. Some
call him Yoda, indicative of his mythical inscrutable
status… He had served many administrations and was widely
regarded as above partisan politics. He was a supporter of
the Highlands Forum and a regular fixture from its
beginning.”
Since 1973, Marshall has headed up one of the Pentagon’s
most powerful agencies, the Office of Net Assessment
(ONA), the US defense secretary’s internal ‘think tank’
which conducts highly classified research on future
planning for defense policy across the US military and
intelligence community. The ONA has played a key role in
major Pentagon strategy initiatives, including Maritime
Strategy, the Strategic Defense Initiative, the
Competitive Strategies Initiative, and the Revolution in
Military Affairs.
Andrew ‘Yoda’ Marshall, head of the Pentagon’s Office of
Net Assessment (ONA) and co-chair of the Highlands Forum,
at an early Highlands event in 1996 at the Santa Fe
Institute. Marshall is retiring as of January 2015
In a rare 2002 profile in Wired, reporter Douglas McGray
described Andrew Marshall, now 93 years old, as “the DoD’s
most elusive” but “one of its most influential” officials.
McGray added that “Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz” — widely considered the hawks of the
neoconservative movement in American politics — were among
Marshall’s “star protégés.”
Speaking at a low-key Harvard University seminar a few
months after 9/11, Highlands Forum founding president
Richard O’Neill said that Marshall was much more than a
“regular fixture” at the Forum. “Andy Marshall is our
co-chair, so indirectly everything that we do goes back
into Andy’s system,” he told the audience. “Directly,
people who are in the Forum meetings may be going back to
give briefings to Andy on a variety of topics and to
synthesize things.” He also said that the Forum had a
third co-chair: the director of the Defense Advanced
Research and Projects Agency (DARPA), which at that time
was a Rumsfeld appointee, Anthony J. Tether. Before
joining DARPA, Tether was vice president of SAIC’s
Advanced Technology Sector.
Anthony J. Tether, director of DARPA and co-chair of the
Pentagon’s Highlands Forum from June 2001 to February 2009
The Highlands Forum’s influence on US defense policy has
thus operated through three main channels: its sponsorship
by the Office of the Secretary of Defense (around the
middle of last decade this was transitioned specifically
to the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for
Intelligence, which is in charge of the main surveillance
agencies); its direct link to Andrew ‘Yoda’ Marshall’s
ONA; and its direct link to DARPA.
A slide from Richard O’Neill’s presentation at Harvard
University in 2001
According to Clippinger in A Crowd of One, “what happens
at informal gatherings such as the Highlands Forum could,
over time and through unforeseen curious paths of
influence, have enormous impact, not just within the DoD
but throughout the world.” He wrote that the Forum’s ideas
have “moved from being heretical to mainstream. Ideas that
were anathema in 1999 had been adopted as policy just
three years later.”
Although the Forum does not produce “consensus
recommendations,” its impact is deeper than a traditional
government advisory committee. “The ideas that emerge from
meetings are available for use by decision-makers as well
as by people from the think tanks,” according to O’Neill:
“We’ll include people from Booz, SAIC, RAND, or others at
our meetings… We welcome that kind of cooperation,
because, truthfully, they have the gravitas. They are
there for the long haul and are able to influence
government policies with real scholarly work… We produce
ideas and interaction and networks for these people to
take and use as they need them.”
My repeated requests to O’Neill for information on his
work at the Highlands Forum were ignored. The Department
of Defense also did not respond to multiple requests for
information and comment on the Forum.
Information warfare
The Highlands Forum has served as a two-way ‘influence
bridge’: on the one hand, for the shadow network of
private contractors to influence the formulation of
information operations policy across US military
intelligence; and on the other, for the Pentagon to
influence what is going on in the private sector. There is
no clearer evidence of this than the truly instrumental
role of the Forum in incubating the idea of mass
surveillance as a mechanism to dominate information on a
global scale.
In 1989, Richard O’Neill, then a US Navy cryptologist,
wrote a paper for the US Naval War College, ‘Toward a
methodology for perception management.’ In his book,
Future Wars, Col. John Alexander, then a senior officer in
the US Army’s Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM),
records that O’Neill’s paper for the first time outlined a
strategy for “perception management” as part of
information warfare (IW). O’Neill’s proposed strategy
identified three categories of targets for IW:
adversaries, so they believe they are vulnerable;
potential partners, “so they perceive the cause [of war]
as just”; and finally, civilian populations and the
political leadership so they “perceive the cost as worth
the effort.” A secret briefing based on O’Neill’s work
“made its way to the top leadership” at DoD. “They
acknowledged that O’Neill was right and told him to bury
it.
Except the DoD didn’t bury it. Around 1994, the Highlands
Group was founded by O’Neill as an official Pentagon
project at the appointment of Bill Clinton’s then defense
secretary William Perry — who went on to join SAIC’s board
of directors after retiring from government in 2003.
In O’Neill’s own words, the group would function as the
Pentagon’s ‘ideas lab’. According to Government Executive,
military and information technology experts gathered at
the first Forum meeting “to consider the impacts of IT and
globalization on the United States and on warfare. How
would the Internet and other emerging technologies change
the world?” The meeting helped plant the idea of
“network-centric warfare” in the minds of “the nation’s
top military thinkers.”
Excluding the public
Official Pentagon records confirm that the Highlands
Forum’s primary goal was to support DoD policies on
O’Neill’s specialism: information warfare. According to
the Pentagon’s 1997 Annual Report to the President and the
Congress under a section titled ‘Information Operations,’
(IO) the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) had
authorized the “establishment of the Highlands Group of
key DoD, industry, and academic IO experts” to coordinate
IO across federal military intelligence agencies.
The following year’s DoD annual report reiterated the
Forum’s centrality to information operations: “To examine
IO issues, DoD sponsors the Highlands Forum, which brings
together government, industry, and academic professionals
from various fields.”
Notice that in 1998, the Highlands ‘Group’ became a
‘Forum.’ According to O’Neill, this was to avoid
subjecting Highlands Forums meetings to “bureaucratic
restrictions.” What he was alluding to was the Federal
Advisory Committee Act (FACA), which regulates the way the
US government can formally solicit the advice of special
interests.
Known as the ‘open government’ law, FACA requires that US
government officials cannot hold closed-door or secret
consultations with people outside government to develop
policy. All such consultations should take place via
federal advisory committees that permit public scrutiny.
FACA requires that meetings be held in public, announced
via the Federal Register, that advisory groups are
registered with an office at the General Services
Administration, among other requirements intended to
maintain accountability to the public interest.
But Government Executive reported that “O’Neill and others
believed” such regulatory issues “would quell the free
flow of ideas and no-holds-barred discussions they
sought.” Pentagon lawyers had warned that the word ‘group’
might necessitate certain obligations and advised running
the whole thing privately: “So O’Neill renamed it the
Highlands Forum and moved into the private sector to
manage it as a consultant to the Pentagon.” The Pentagon
Highlands Forum thus runs under the mantle of O’Neill’s
‘intellectual capital venture firm,’ ‘Highlands Group
Inc.’
In 1995, a year after William Perry appointed O’Neill to
head up the Highlands Forum, SAIC — the Forum’s “partner”
organization — launched a new Center for Information
Strategy and Policy under the direction of “Jeffrey
Cooper, a member of the Highlands Group who advises senior
Defense Department officials on information warfare
issues.” The Center had precisely the same objective as
the Forum, to function as “a clearinghouse to bring
together the best and brightest minds in information
warfare by sponsoring a continuing series of seminars,
papers and symposia which explore the implications of
information warfare in depth.” The aim was to “enable
leaders and policymakers from government, industry, and
academia to address key issues surrounding information
warfare to ensure that the United States retains its edge
over any and all potential enemies.”
Despite FACA regulations, federal advisory committees are
already heavily influenced, if not captured, by corporate
power. So in bypassing FACA, the Pentagon overrode even
the loose restrictions of FACA, by permanently excluding
any possibility of public engagement.
O’Neill’s claim that there are no reports or
recommendations is disingenuous. By his own admission, the
secret Pentagon consultations with industry that have
taken place through the Highlands Forum since 1994 have
been accompanied by regular presentations of academic and
policy papers, recordings and notes of meetings, and other
forms of documentation that are locked behind a login only
accessible by Forum delegates. This violates the spirit,
if not the letter, of FACA — in a way that is patently
intended to circumvent democratic accountability and the
rule of law.
The Highlands Forum doesn’t need to produce consensus
recommendations. Its purpose is to provide the Pentagon a
shadow social networking mechanism to cement lasting
relationships with corporate power, and to identify new
talent, that can be used to fine-tune information warfare
strategies in absolute secrecy.
Total participants in the DoD’s Highlands Forum number
over a thousand, although sessions largely consist of
small closed workshop style gatherings of maximum 25–30
people, bringing together experts and officials depending
on the subject. Delegates have included senior personnel
from SAIC and Booz Allen Hamilton, RAND Corp., Cisco,
Human Genome Sciences, eBay, PayPal, IBM, Google,
Microsoft, AT&T, the BBC, Disney, General Electric,
Enron, among innumerable others; Democrat and Republican
members of Congress and the Senate; senior executives from
the US energy industry such as Daniel Yergin of IHS
Cambridge Energy Research Associates; and key people
involved in both sides of presidential campaigns.
Other participants have included senior media
professionals: David Ignatius, associate editor of the
Washington Post and at the time the executive editor of
the International Herald Tribune; Thomas Friedman,
long-time New York Times columnist; Arnaud de Borchgrave,
an editor at Washington Times and United Press
International; Steven Levy, a former Newsweek editor,
senior writer for Wired and now chief tech editor at
Medium; Lawrence Wright, staff writer at the New Yorker;
Noah Shachtmann, executive editor at the Daily Beast;
Rebecca McKinnon, co-founder of Global Voices Online; Nik
Gowing of the BBC; and John Markoff of the New York Times.
Due to its current sponsorship by the OSD’s undersecretary
of defense for intelligence, the Forum has inside access
to the chiefs of the main US surveillance and
reconnaissance agencies, as well as the directors and
their assistants at DoD research agencies, from DARPA, to
the ONA. This also means that the Forum is deeply plugged
into the Pentagon’s policy research task forces.
Google: Seeded by the Pentagon
In 1994 — the same year the Highlands Forum was founded
under the stewardship of the Office of the Secretary of
Defense, the ONA, and DARPA — two young PhD students at
Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, made
their breakthrough on the first automated web crawling and
page ranking application. That application remains the
core component of what eventually became Google’s search
service. Brin and Page had performed their work with
funding from the Digital Library Initiative (DLI), a
multi-agency programme of the National Science Foundation
(NSF), NASA and DARPA.
But that’s just one side of the story.
Throughout the development of the search engine, Sergey
Brin reported regularly and directly to two people who
were not Stanford faculty at all: Dr. Bhavani
Thuraisingham and Dr. Rick Steinheiser. Both were
representatives of a sensitive US intelligence community
research programme on information security and
data-mining.
Thuraisingham is currently the Louis A. Beecherl
distinguished professor and executive director of the
Cyber Security Research Institute at the University of
Texas, Dallas, and a sought-after expert on data-mining,
data management and information security issues. But in
the 1990s, she worked for the MITRE Corp., a leading US
defense contractor, where she managed the Massive Digital
Data Systems initiative, a project sponsored by the NSA,
CIA, and the Director of Central Intelligence, to foster
innovative research in information technology.
“We funded Stanford University through the computer
scientist Jeffrey Ullman, who had several promising
graduate students working on many exciting areas,” Prof.
Thuraisingham told me. “One of them was Sergey Brin, the
founder of Google. The intelligence community’s MDDS
program essentially provided Brin seed-funding, which was
supplemented by many other sources, including the private
sector.”
This sort of funding is certainly not unusual, and Sergey
Brin’s being able to receive it by being a graduate
student at Stanford appears to have been incidental. The
Pentagon was all over computer science research at this
time. But it illustrates how deeply entrenched the culture
of Silicon Valley is in the values of the US intelligence
community.
In an extraordinary document hosted by the website of the
University of Texas, Thuraisingham recounts that from 1993
to 1999, “the Intelligence Community [IC] started a
program called Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) that I
was managing for the Intelligence Community when I was at
the MITRE Corporation.” The program funded 15 research
efforts at various universities, including Stanford. Its
goal was developing “data management technologies to
manage several terabytes to petabytes of data,” including
for “query processing, transaction management, metadata
management, storage management, and data integration.”
At the time, Thuraisingham was chief scientist for data
and information management at MITRE, where she led team
research and development efforts for the NSA, CIA, US Air
Force Research Laboratory, as well as the US Navy’s Space
and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) and
Communications and Electronic Command (CECOM). She went on
to teach courses for US government officials and defense
contractors on data-mining in counter-terrorism.
In her University of Texas article, she attaches the copy
of an abstract of the US intelligence community’s MDDS
program that had been presented to the “Annual
Intelligence Community Symposium” in 1995. The abstract
reveals that the primary sponsors of the MDDS programme
were three agencies: the NSA, the CIA’s Office of Research
& Development, and the intelligence community’s
Community Management Staff (CMS) which operates under the
Director of Central Intelligence. Administrators of the
program, which provided funding of around 3–4 million
dollars per year for 3–4 years, were identified as Hal
Curran (NSA), Robert Kluttz (CMS), Dr. Claudia Pierce
(NSA), Dr. Rick Steinheiser (ORD — standing for the CIA’s
Office of Research and Devepment), and Dr. Thuraisingham
herself.
Thuraisingham goes on in her article to reiterate that
this joint CIA-NSA program partly funded Sergey Brin to
develop the core of Google, through a grant to Stanford
managed by Brin’s supervisor Prof. Jeffrey D. Ullman:
“In fact, the Google founder Mr. Sergey Brin was partly
funded by this program while he was a PhD student at
Stanford. He together with his advisor Prof. Jeffrey
Ullman and my colleague at MITRE, Dr. Chris Clifton
[Mitre’s chief scientist in IT], developed the Query
Flocks System which produced solutions for mining large
amounts of data stored in databases. I remember visiting
Stanford with Dr. Rick Steinheiser from the Intelligence
Community and Mr. Brin would rush in on roller blades,
give his presentation and rush out. In fact the last time
we met in September 1998, Mr. Brin demonstrated to us his
search engine which became Google soon after.”
Brin and Page officially incorporated Google as a company
in September 1998, the very month they last reported to
Thuraisingham and Steinheiser. ‘Query Flocks’ was also
part of Google’s patented ‘PageRank’ search system, which
Brin developed at Stanford under the CIA-NSA-MDDS
programme, as well as with funding from the NSF, IBM and
Hitachi. That year, MITRE’s Dr. Chris Clifton, who worked
under Thuraisingham to develop the ‘Query Flocks’ system,
co-authored a paper with Brin’s superviser, Prof. Ullman,
and the CIA’s Rick Steinheiser. Titled ‘Knowledge
Discovery in Text,’ the paper was presented at an academic
conference.
“The MDDS funding that supported Brin was significant as
far as seed-funding goes, but it was probably outweighed
by the other funding streams,” said Thuraisingham. “The
duration of Brin’s funding was around two years or so. In
that period, I and my colleagues from the MDDS would visit
Stanford to see Brin and monitor his progress every three
months or so. We didn’t supervise exactly, but we did want
to check progress, point out potential problems and
suggest ideas. In those briefings, Brin did present to us
on the query flocks research, and also demonstrated to us
versions of the Google search engine.”
Brin thus reported to Thuraisingham and Steinheiser
regularly about his work developing Google.
UPDATE 2.05PM GMT [2nd Feb 2015]:
Since publication of this article, Prof. Thuraisingham has
amended her article referenced above. The amended version
includes a new modified statement, followed by a copy of
the original version of her account of the MDDS. In this
amended version, Thuraisingham rejects the idea that CIA
funded Google, and says instead:
“In fact Prof. Jeffrey Ullman (at Stanford) and my
colleague at MITRE Dr. Chris Clifton together with some
others developed the Query Flocks System, as part of MDDS,
which produced solutions for mining large amounts of data
stored in databases. Also, Mr. Sergey Brin, the cofounder
of Google, was part of Prof. Ullman’s research group at
that time. I remember visiting Stanford with Dr. Rick
Steinheiser from the Intelligence Community periodically
and Mr. Brin would rush in on roller blades, give his
presentation and rush out. During our last visit to
Stanford in September 1998, Mr. Brin demonstrated to us
his search engine which I believe became Google soon
after…
There are also several inaccuracies in Dr. Ahmed’s article
(dated January 22, 2015). For example, the MDDS program
was not a ‘sensitive’ program as stated by Dr. Ahmed; it
was an Unclassified program that funded universities in
the US. Furthermore, Sergey Brin never reported to me or
to Dr. Rick Steinheiser; he only gave presentations to us
during our visits to the Department of Computer Science at
Stanford during the 1990s. Also, MDDS never funded Google;
it funded Stanford University.”
Here, there is no substantive factual difference in
Thuraisingham’s accounts, other than to assert that her
statement associating Sergey Brin with the development of
‘query flocks’ is mistaken. Notably, this acknowledgement
is derived not from her own knowledge, but from this very
article quoting a comment from a Google spokesperson.
However, the bizarre attempt to disassociate Google from
the MDDS program misses the mark. Firstly, the MDDS never
funded Google, because during the development of the core
components of the Google search engine, there was no
company incorporated with that name. The grant was instead
provided to Stanford University through Prof. Ullman,
through whom some MDDS funding was used to support Brin
who was co-developing Google at the time. Secondly,
Thuraisingham then adds that Brin never “reported” to her
or the CIA’s Steinheiser, but admits he “gave
presentations to us during our visits to the Department of
Computer Science at Stanford during the 1990s.” It is
unclear, though, what the distinction is here between
reporting, and delivering a detailed presentation — either
way, Thuraisingham confirms that she and the CIA had taken
a keen interest in Brin’s development of Google. Thirdly,
Thuraisingham describes the MDDS program as
“unclassified,” but this does not contradict its
“sensitive” nature. As someone who has worked for decades
as an intelligence contractor and advisor, Thuraisingham
is surely aware that there are many ways of categorizing
intelligence, including ‘sensitive but unclassified.’ A
number of former US intelligence officials I spoke to said
that the almost total lack of public information on the
CIA and NSA’s MDDS initiative suggests that although the
progam was not classified, it is likely instead that its
contents was considered sensitive, which would explain
efforts to minimise transparency about the program and the
way it fed back into developing tools for the US
intelligence community. Fourthly, and finally, it is
important to point out that the MDDS abstract which
Thuraisingham includes in her University of Texas document
states clearly not only that the Director of Central
Intelligence’s CMS, CIA and NSA were the overseers of the
MDDS initiative, but that the intended customers of the
project were “DoD, IC, and other government
organizations”: the Pentagon, the US intelligence
community, and other relevant US government agencies.
In other words, the provision of MDDS funding to Brin
through Ullman, under the oversight of Thuraisingham and
Steinheiser, was fundamentally because they recognized the
potential utility of Brin’s work developing Google to the
Pentagon, intelligence community, and the federal
government at large.
==
The MDDS programme is actually referenced in several
papers co-authored by Brin and Page while at Stanford,
specifically highlighting its role in financially
sponsoring Brin in the development of Google. In their
1998 paper published in the Bulletin of the IEEE Computer
Society Technical Committeee on Data Engineering, they
describe the automation of methods to extract information
from the web via “Dual Iterative Pattern Relation
Extraction,” the development of “a global ranking of Web
pages called PageRank,” and the use of PageRank “to
develop a novel search engine called Google.” Through an
opening footnote, Sergey Brin confirms he was “Partially
supported by the Community Management Staff’s Massive
Digital Data Systems Program, NSF grant
IRI-96–31952” — confirming that Brin’s work developing
Google was indeed partly-funded by the CIA-NSA-MDDS
program.
This NSF grant identified alongside the MDDS, whose
project report lists Brin among the students supported
(without mentioning the MDDS), was different to the NSF
grant to Larry Page that included funding from DARPA and
NASA. The project report, authored by Brin’s supervisor
Prof. Ullman, goes on to say under the section
‘Indications of Success’ that “there are some new stories
of startups based on NSF-supported research.” Under
‘Project Impact,’ the report remarks: “Finally, the google
project has also gone commercial as Google.com.”
Thuraisingham’s account, including her new amended
version, therefore demonstrates that the CIA-NSA-MDDS
program was not only partly funding Brin throughout his
work with Larry Page developing Google, but that senior US
intelligence representatives including a CIA official
oversaw the evolution of Google in this pre-launch phase,
all the way until the company was ready to be officially
founded. Google, then, had been enabled with a
“significant” amount of seed-funding and oversight from
the Pentagon: namely, the CIA, NSA, and DARPA.
The DoD could not be reached for comment.
When I asked Prof. Ullman to confirm whether or not Brin
was partly funded under the intelligence community’s MDDS
program, and whether Ullman was aware that Brin was
regularly briefing the CIA’s Rick Steinheiser on his
progress in developing the Google search engine, Ullman’s
responses were evasive: “May I know whom you represent and
why you are interested in these issues? Who are your
‘sources’?” He also denied that Brin played a significant
role in developing the ‘query flocks’ system, although it
is clear from Brin’s papers that he did draw on that work
in co-developing the PageRank system with Page.
When I asked Ullman whether he was denying the US
intelligence community’s role in supporting Brin during
the development of Google, he said: “I am not going to
dignify this nonsense with a denial. If you won’t explain
what your theory is, and what point you are trying to
make, I am not going to help you in the slightest.”
The MDDS abstract published online at the University of
Texas confirms that the rationale for the CIA-NSA project
was to “provide seed money to develop data management
technologies which are of high-risk and high-pay-off,”
including techniques for “querying, browsing, and
filtering; transaction processing; accesses methods and
indexing; metadata management and data modelling; and
integrating heterogeneous databases; as well as developing
appropriate architectures.” The ultimate vision of the
program was to “provide for the seamless access and fusion
of massive amounts of data, information and knowledge in a
heterogeneous, real-time environment” for use by the
Pentagon, intelligence community and potentially across
government.
These revelations corroborate the claims of Robert Steele,
former senior CIA officer and a founding civilian deputy
director of the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, whom I
interviewed for The Guardian last year on open source
intelligence. Citing sources at the CIA, Steele had said
in 2006 that Steinheiser, an old colleague of his, was the
CIA’s main liaison at Google and had arranged early
funding for the pioneering IT firm. At the time, Wired
founder John Batelle managed to get this official denial
from a Google spokesperson in response to Steele’s
assertions:
“The statements related to Google are completely untrue.”
This time round, despite multiple requests and
conversations, a Google spokesperson declined to comment.
UPDATE: As of 5.41PM GMT [22nd Jan 2015], Google’s
director of corporate communication got in touch and asked
me to include the following statement:
“Sergey Brin was not part of the Query Flocks Program at
Stanford, nor were any of his projects funded by US
Intelligence bodies.”
This is what I wrote back:
My response to that statement would be as follows: Brin
himself in his own paper acknowledges funding from the
Community Management Staff of the Massive Digital Data
Systems (MDDS) initiative, which was supplied through the
NSF. The MDDS was an intelligence community program set up
by the CIA and NSA. I also have it on record, as noted in
the piece, from Prof. Thuraisingham of University of Texas
that she managed the MDDS program on behalf of the US
intelligence community, and that her and the CIA’s Rick
Steinheiser met Brin every three months or so for two
years to be briefed on his progress developing Google and
PageRank. Whether Brin worked on query flocks or not is
neither here nor there.
In that context, you might want to consider the following
questions:
1) Does Google deny that Brin’s work was part-funded by
the MDDS via an NSF grant?
2) Does Google deny that Brin reported regularly to
Thuraisingham and Steinheiser from around 1996 to 1998
until September that year when he presented the Google
search engine to them?
Total Information Awareness
A call for papers for the MDDS was sent out via email list
on November 3rd 1993 from senior US intelligence official
David Charvonia, director of the research and development
coordination office of the intelligence community’s CMS.
The reaction from Tatu Ylonen (celebrated inventor of the
widely used secure shell [SSH] data protection protocol)
to his colleagues on the email list is telling: “Crypto
relevance? Makes you think whether you should protect your
data.” The email also confirms that defense contractor and
Highlands Forum partner, SAIC, was managing the MDDS
submission process, with abstracts to be sent to Jackie
Booth of the CIA’s Office of Research and Development via
a SAIC email address.
By 1997, Thuraisingham reveals, shortly before Google
became incorporated and while she was still overseeing the
development of its search engine software at Stanford, her
thoughts turned to the national security applications of
the MDDS program. In the acknowledgements to her book, Web
Data Mining and Applications in Business Intelligence and
Counter-Terrorism (2003), Thuraisingham writes that she
and “Dr. Rick Steinheiser of the CIA, began discussions
with Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on applying
data-mining for counter-terrorism,” an idea that resulted
directly from the MDDS program which partly funded Google.
“These discussions eventually developed into the current
EELD (Evidence Extraction and Link Detection) program at
DARPA.”
So the very same senior CIA official and CIA-NSA
contractor involved in providing the seed-funding for
Google were simultaneously contemplating the role of
data-mining for counter-terrorism purposes, and were
developing ideas for tools actually advanced by DARPA.
Today, as illustrated by her recent oped in the New York
Times, Thuraisingham remains a staunch advocate of
data-mining for counter-terrorism purposes, but also
insists that these methods must be developed by government
in cooperation with civil liberties lawyers and privacy
advocates to ensure that robust procedures are in place to
prevent potential abuse. She points out, damningly, that
with the quantity of information being collected, there is
a high risk of false positives.
In 1993, when the MDDS program was launched and managed by
MITRE Corp. on behalf of the US intelligence community,
University of Virginia computer scientist Dr. Anita K.
Jones — a MITRE trustee — landed the job of DARPA director
and head of research and engineering across the Pentagon.
She had been on the board of MITRE since 1988. From 1987
to 1993, Jones simultaneously served on SAIC’s board of
directors. As the new head of DARPA from 1993 to 1997, she
also co-chaired the Pentagon’s Highlands Forum during the
period of Google’s pre-launch development at Stanford
under the MDSS.
Thus, when Thuraisingham and Steinheiser were talking to
DARPA about the counter-terrorism applications of MDDS
research, Jones was DARPA director and Highlands Forum
co-chair. That year, Jones left DARPA to return to her
post at the University of Virgina. The following year, she
joined the board of the National Science Foundation, which
of course had also just funded Brin and Page, and also
returned to the board of SAIC. When she left DoD, Senator
Chuck Robb paid Jones the following tribute : “She brought
the technology and operational military communities
together to design detailed plans to sustain US dominance
on the battlefield into the next century.”
Dr. Anita Jones, head of DARPA from 1993–1997, and
co-chair of the Pentagon Highlands Forum from 1995–1997,
during which officials in charge of the CIA-NSA-MDSS
program were funding Google, and in communication with
DARPA about data-mining for counterterrorism
On the board of the National Science Foundation from 1992
to 1998 (including a stint as chairman from 1996) was
Richard N. Zare. This was the period in which the NSF
sponsored Sergey Brin and Larry Page in association with
DARPA. In June 1994, Prof. Zare, a chemist at Stanford,
participated with Prof. Jeffrey Ullman (who supervised
Sergey Brin’s research), on a panel sponsored by Stanford
and the National Research Council discussing the need for
scientists to show how their work “ties to national
needs.” The panel brought together scientists and
policymakers, including “Washington insiders.”
DARPA’s EELD program, inspired by the work of
Thuraisingham and Steinheiser under Jones’ watch, was
rapidly adapted and integrated with a suite of tools to
conduct comprehensive surveillance under the Bush
administration.
According to DARPA official Ted Senator, who led the EELD
program for the agency’s short-lived Information Awareness
Office, EELD was among a range of “promising techniques”
being prepared for integration “into the prototype TIA
system.” TIA stood for Total Information Awareness, and
was the main global electronic eavesdropping and
data-mining program deployed by the Bush administration
after 9/11. TIA had been set up by Iran-Contra conspirator
Admiral John Poindexter, who was appointed in 2002 by Bush
to lead DARPA’s new Information Awareness Office.
The Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was another
contractor among 26 companies (also including SAIC) that
received million dollar contracts from DARPA (the specific
quantities remained classified) under Poindexter, to push
forward the TIA surveillance program in 2002 onwards. The
research included “behaviour-based profiling,” “automated
detection, identification and tracking” of terrorist
activity, among other data-analyzing projects. At this
time, PARC’s director and chief scientist was John Seely
Brown. Both Brown and Poindexter were Pentagon Highlands
Forum participants — Brown on a regular basis until
recently.
TIA was purportedly shut down in 2003 due to public
opposition after the program was exposed in the media, but
the following year Poindexter participated in a Pentagon
Highlands Group session in Singapore, alongside defense
and security officials from around the world. Meanwhile,
Ted Senator continued to manage the EELD program among
other data-mining and analysis projects at DARPA until
2006, when he left to become a vice president at SAIC. He
is now a SAIC/Leidos technical fellow.
Google, DARPA and the money trail
Long before the appearance of Sergey Brin and Larry Page,
Stanford University’s computer science department had a
close working relationship with US military intelligence.
A letter dated November 5th 1984 from the office of
renowned artificial intelligence (AI) expert, Prof Edward
Feigenbaum, addressed to Rick Steinheiser, gives the
latter directions to Stanford’s Heuristic Programming
Project, addressing Steinheiser as a member of the “AI
Steering Committee.” A list of attendees at a contractor
conference around that time, sponsored by the Pentagon’s
Office of Naval Research (ONR), includes Steinheiser as a
delegate under the designation “OPNAV Op-115” — which
refers to the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations’
program on operational readiness, which played a major
role in advancing digital systems for the military.
From the 1970s, Prof. Feigenbaum and his colleagues had
been running Stanford’s Heuristic Programming Project
under contract with DARPA, continuing through to the
1990s. Feigenbaum alone had received around over $7
million in this period for his work from DARPA, along with
other funding from the NSF, NASA, and ONR.
Brin’s supervisor at Stanford, Prof. Jeffrey Ullman, was
in 1996 part of a joint funding project of DARPA’s
Intelligent Integration of Information program. That year,
Ullman co-chaired DARPA-sponsored meetings on data
exchange between multiple systems.
In September 1998, the same month that Sergey Brin briefed
US intelligence representatives Steinheiser and
Thuraisingham, tech entrepreneurs Andreas Bechtolsheim and
David Cheriton invested $100,000 each in Google. Both
investors were connected to DARPA.
As a Stanford PhD student in electrical engineering in the
1980s, Bechtolsheim’s pioneering SUN workstation project
had been funded by DARPA and the Stanford computer science
department — this research was the foundation of
Bechtolsheim’s establishment of Sun Microsystems, which he
co-founded with William Joy.
As for Bechtolsheim’s co-investor in Google, David
Cheriton, the latter is a long-time Stanford computer
science professor who has an even more entrenched
relationship with DARPA. His bio at the University of
Alberta, which in November 2014 awarded him an honorary
science doctorate, says that Cheriton’s “research has
received the support of the US Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA) for over 20 years.”
In the meantime, Bechtolsheim left Sun Microsystems in
1995, co-founding Granite Systems with his fellow Google
investor Cheriton as a partner. They sold Granite to Cisco
Systems in 1996, retaining significant ownership of
Granite, and becoming senior Cisco executives.
An email obtained from the Enron Corpus (a database of
600,000 emails acquired by the Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission and later released to the public) from Richard
O’Neill, inviting Enron executives to participate in the
Highlands Forum, shows that Cisco and Granite executives
are intimately connected to the Pentagon. The email
reveals that in May 2000, Bechtolsheim’s partner and Sun
Microsystems co-founder, William Joy — who was then chief
scientist and corporate executive officer there — had
attended the Forum to discuss nanotechnology and molecular
computing.
In 1999, Joy had also co-chaired the President’s
Information Technology Advisory Committee, overseeing a
report acknowledging that DARPA had:
“… revised its priorities in the 90’s so that all
information technology funding was judged in terms of its
benefit to the warfighter.”
Throughout the 1990s, then, DARPA’s funding to Stanford,
including Google, was explicitly about developing
technologies that could augment the Pentagon’s military
intelligence operations in war theatres.
The Joy report recommended more federal government funding
from the Pentagon, NASA, and other agencies to the IT
sector. Greg Papadopoulos, another of Bechtolsheim’s
colleagues as then Sun Microsystems chief technology
officer, also attended a Pentagon Highlands’ Forum meeting
in September 2000.
In November, the Pentagon Highlands Forum hosted Sue
Bostrom, who was vice president for the internet at Cisco,
sitting on the company’s board alongside Google
co-investors Bechtolsheim and Cheriton. The Forum also
hosted Lawrence Zuriff, then a managing partner of
Granite, which Bechtolsheim and Cheriton had sold to
Cisco. Zuriff had previously been an SAIC contractor from
1993 to 1994, working with the Pentagon on national
security issues, specifically for Marshall’s Office of Net
Assessment. In 1994, both the SAIC and the ONA were, of
course, involved in co-establishing the Pentagon Highlands
Forum. Among Zuriff’s output during his SAIC tenure was a
paper titled ‘Understanding Information War’, delivered at
a SAIC-sponsored US Army Roundtable on the Revolution in
Military Affairs.
After Google’s incorporation, the company received $25
million in equity funding in 1999 led by Sequoia Capital
and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. According to
Homeland Security Today, “A number of Sequoia-bankrolled
start-ups have contracted with the Department of Defense,
especially after 9/11 when Sequoia’s Mark Kvamme met with
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to discuss the
application of emerging technologies to warfighting and
intelligence collection.” Similarly, Kleiner Perkins had
developed “a close relationship” with In-Q-Tel, the CIA
venture capitalist firm that funds start-ups “to advance
‘priority’ technologies of value” to the intelligence
community.
John Doerr, who led the Kleiner Perkins investment in
Google obtaining a board position, was a major early
investor in Becholshtein’s Sun Microsystems at its launch.
He and his wife Anne are the main funders behind Rice
University’s Center for Engineering Leadership (RCEL),
which in 2009 received $16 million from DARPA for its
platform-aware-compilation-environment (PACE) ubiquitous
computing R&D program. Doerr also has a close
relationship with the Obama administration, which he
advised shortly after it took power to ramp up Pentagon
funding to the tech industry. In 2013, at the Fortune
Brainstorm TECH conference, Doerr applauded “how the DoD’s
DARPA funded GPS, CAD, most of the major computer science
departments, and of course, the Internet.”
From inception, in other words, Google was incubated,
nurtured and financed by interests that were directly
affiliated or closely aligned with the US military
intelligence community: many of whom were embedded in the
Pentagon Highlands Forum.
Google captures the Pentagon
In 2003, Google began customizing its search engine under
special contract with the CIA for its Intelink Management
Office, “overseeing top-secret, secret and sensitive but
unclassified intranets for CIA and other IC agencies,”
according to Homeland Security Today. That year, CIA
funding was also being “quietly” funneled through the
National Science Foundation to projects that might help
create “new capabilities to combat terrorism through
advanced technology.”
The following year, Google bought the firm Keyhole, which
had originally been funded by In-Q-Tel. Using Keyhole,
Google began developing the advanced satellite mapping
software behind Google Earth. Former DARPA director and
Highlands Forum co-chair Anita Jones had been on the board
of In-Q-Tel at this time, and remains so today.
Then in November 2005, In-Q-Tel issued notices to sell
$2.2 million of Google stocks. Google’s relationship with
US intelligence was further brought to light when an IT
contractor told a closed Washington DC conference of
intelligence professionals on a not-for-attribution basis
that at least one US intelligence agency was working to
“leverage Google’s [user] data monitoring” capability as
part of an effort to acquire data of “national security
intelligence interest.”
A photo on Flickr dated March 2007 reveals that Google
research director and AI expert Peter Norvig attended a
Pentagon Highlands Forum meeting that year in Carmel,
California. Norvig’s intimate connection to the Forum as
of that year is also corroborated by his role in guest
editing the 2007 Forum reading list.
The photo below shows Norvig in conversation with Lewis
Shepherd, who at that time was senior technology officer
at the Defense Intelligence Agency, responsible for
investigating, approving, and architecting “all new
hardware/software systems and acquisitions for the Global
Defense Intelligence IT Enterprise,” including “big data
technologies.” Shepherd now works at Microsoft. Norvig was
a computer research scientist at Stanford University in
1991 before joining Bechtolsheim’s Sun Microsystems as
senior scientist until 1994, and going on to head up
NASA’s computer science division.
Lewis Shepherd (left), then a senior technology officer at
the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, talking to
Peter Norvig (right), renowned expert in artificial
intelligence expert and director of research at Google.
This photo is from a Highlands Forum meeting in 2007.
Norvig shows up on O’Neill’s Google Plus profile as one of
his close connections. Scoping the rest of O’Neill’s
Google Plus connections illustrates that he is directly
connected not just to a wide range of Google executives,
but also to some of the biggest names in the US tech
community.
Those connections include Michele Weslander Quaid, an
ex-CIA contractor and former senior Pentagon intelligence
official who is now Google’s chief technology officer
where she is developing programs to “best fit government
agencies’ needs”; Elizabeth Churchill, Google director of
user experience; James Kuffner, a humanoid robotics expert
who now heads up Google’s robotics division and who
introduced the term ‘cloud robotics’; Mark Drapeau,
director of innovation engagement for Microsoft’s public
sector business; Lili Cheng, general manager of
Microsoft’s Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Labs; Jon
Udell, Microsoft ‘evangelist’; Cory Ondrejka, vice
president of engineering at Facebook; to name just a few.
In 2010, Google signed a multi-billion dollar no-bid
contract with the NSA’s sister agency, the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). The contract was to
use Google Earth for visualization services for the NGA.
Google had developed the software behind Google Earth by
purchasing Keyhole from the CIA venture firm In-Q-Tel.
Then a year after, in 2011, another of O’Neill’s Google
Plus connections, Michele Quaid — who had served in
executive positions at the NGA, National Reconnaissance
Office and the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence — left her government role to become Google
‘innovation evangelist’ and the point-person for seeking
government contracts. Quaid’s last role before her move to
Google was as a senior representative of the Director of
National Intelligence to the Intelligence, Surveillance,
and Reconnaissance Task Force, and a senior advisor to the
undersecretary of defense for intelligence’s director of
Joint and Coalition Warfighter Support (J&CWS). Both
roles involved information operations at their core.
Before her Google move, in other words, Quaid worked
closely with the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense
for Intelligence, to which the Pentagon’s Highlands Forum
is subordinate. Quaid has herself attended the Forum,
though precisely when and how often I could not confirm.
In March 2012, then DARPA director Regina Dugan — who in
that capacity was also co-chair of the Pentagon Highlands
Forum — followed her colleague Quaid into Google to lead
the company’s new Advanced Technology and Projects Group.
During her Pentagon tenure, Dugan led on strategic cyber
security and social media, among other initiatives. She
was responsible for focusing “an increasing portion” of
DARPA’s work “on the investigation of offensive
capabilities to address military-specific needs,” securing
$500 million of government funding for DARPA cyber
research from 2012 to 2017.
Regina Dugan, former head of DARPA and Highlands Forum
co-chair, now a senior Google executive — trying her best
to look the part
By November 2014, Google’s chief AI and robotics expert
James Kuffner was a delegate alongside O’Neill at the
Highlands Island Forum 2014 in Singapore, to explore
‘Advancement in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence:
Implications for Society, Security and Conflict.’ The
event included 26 delegates from Austria, Israel, Japan,
Singapore, Sweden, Britain and the US, from both industry
and government. Kuffner’s association with the Pentagon,
however, began much earlier. In 1997, Kuffner was a
researcher during his Stanford PhD for a Pentagon-funded
project on networked autonomous mobile robots, sponsored
by DARPA and the US Navy.
Rumsfeld and persistent surveillance
In sum, many of Google’s most senior executives are
affiliated with the Pentagon Highlands Forum, which
throughout the period of Google’s growth over the last
decade, has surfaced repeatedly as a connecting and
convening force. The US intelligence community’s
incubation of Google from inception occurred through a
combination of direct sponsorship and informal networks of
financial influence, themselves closely aligned with
Pentagon interests.
The Highlands Forum itself has used the informal
relationship building of such private networks to bring
together defense and industry sectors, enabling the fusion
of corporate and military interests in expanding the
covert surveillance apparatus in the name of national
security. The power wielded by the shadow network
represented in the Forum can, however, be gauged most
clearly from its impact during the Bush administration,
when it played a direct role in literally writing the
strategies and doctrines behind US efforts to achieve
‘information superiority.’
In December 2001, O’Neill confirmed that strategic
discussions at the Highlands Forum were feeding directly
into Andrew Marshall’s DoD-wide strategic review ordered
by President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld to upgrade the
military, including the Quadrennial Defense Review — and
that some of the earliest Forum meetings “resulted in the
writing of a group of DoD policies, strategies, and
doctrine for the services on information warfare.” That
process of “writing” the Pentagon’s information warfare
policies “was done in conjunction with people who
understood the environment differently — not only US
citizens, but also foreign citizens, and people who were
developing corporate IT.”
The Pentagon’s post-9/11 information warfare doctrines
were, then, written not just by national security
officials from the US and abroad: but also by powerful
corporate entities in the defense and technology sectors.
In April that year, Gen. James McCarthy had completed his
defense transformation review ordered by Rumsfeld. His
report repeatedly highlighted mass surveillance as
integral to DoD transformation. As for Marshall, his
follow-up report for Rumsfeld was going to develop a
blueprint determining the Pentagon’s future in the
‘information age.’
O’Neill also affirmed that to develop information warfare
doctrine, the Forum had held extensive discussions on
electronic surveillance and “what constitutes an act of
war in an information environment.” Papers feeding into US
defense policy written through the late 1990s by RAND
consultants John Arquilla and David Rondfeldt, both
longstanding Highlands Forum members, were produced “as a
result of those meetings,” exploring policy dilemmas on
how far to take the goal of ‘Information Superiority.’
“One of the things that was shocking to the American
public was that we weren’t pilfering Milosevic’s accounts
electronically when we in fact could,” commented O’Neill.
Although the R&D process around the Pentagon
transformation strategy remains classified, a hint at the
DoD discussions going on in this period can be gleaned
from a 2005 US Army School of Advanced Military Studies
research monograph in the DoD journal, Military Review,
authored by an active Army intelligence officer.
“The idea of Persistent Surveillance as a transformational
capability has circulated within the national Intelligence
Community (IC) and the Department of Defense (DoD) for at
least three years,” the paper said, referencing the
Rumsfeld-commissioned transformation study.
The Army paper went on to review a range of high-level
official military documents, including one from the Office
of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, showing that
“Persistent Surveillance” was a fundamental theme of the
information-centric vision for defense policy across the
Pentagon.
We now know that just two months before O’Neill’s address
at Harvard in 2001, under the TIA program, President Bush
had secretly authorized the NSA’s domestic surveillance of
Americans without court-approved warrants, in what appears
to have been an illegal modification of the ThinThread
data-mining project — as later exposed by NSA
whistleblowers William Binney and Thomas Drake.
The surveillance-startup nexus
From here on, Highlands Forum partner SAIC played a key
role in the NSA roll out from inception. Shortly after
9/11, Brian Sharkey, chief technology officer of SAIC’s
ELS3 Sector (focusing on IT systems for emergency
responders), teamed up with John Poindexter to propose the
TIA surveillance program. SAIC’s Sharkey had previously
been deputy director of the Information Systems Office at
DARPA through the 1990s.
Meanwhile, around the same time, SAIC vice president for
corporate development, Samuel Visner, became head of the
NSA’s signals-intelligence programs. SAIC was then among a
consortium receiving a $280 million contract to develop
one of the NSA’s secret eavesdropping systems. By 2003,
Visner returned to SAIC to become director of strategic
planning and business development of the firm’s
intelligence group.
That year, the NSA consolidated its TIA programme of
warrantless electronic surveillance, to keep “track of
individuals” and understand “how they fit into models”
through risk profiles of American citizens and foreigners.
TIA was doing this by integrating databases on finance,
travel, medical, educational and other records into a
“virtual, centralized grand database.”
This was also the year that the Bush administration drew
up its notorious Information Operations Roadmap.
Describing the internet as a “vulnerable weapons system,”
Rumsfeld’s IO roadmap had advocated that Pentagon strategy
“should be based on the premise that the Department [of
Defense] will ‘fight the net’ as it would an enemy weapons
system.” The US should seek “maximum control” of the “full
spectrum of globally emerging communications systems,
sensors, and weapons systems,” advocated the document.
The following year, John Poindexter, who had proposed and
run the TIA surveillance program via his post at DARPA,
was in Singapore participating in the Highlands 2004
Island Forum. Other delegates included then Highlands
Forum co-chair and Pentagon CIO Linton Wells; president of
notorious Pentagon information warfare contractor, John
Rendon; Karl Lowe, director of the Joint Forces Command
(JFCOM) Joint Advanced Warfighting Division; Air Vice
Marshall Stephen Dalton, capability manager for
information superiority at the UK Ministry of Defense; Lt.
Gen. Johan Kihl, Swedish army Supreme Commander HQ’s chief
of staff; among others.
As of 2006, SAIC had been awarded a multi-million dollar
NSA contract to develop a big data-mining project called
ExecuteLocus, despite the colossal $1 billion failure of
its preceding contract, known as ‘Trailblazer.’ Core
components of TIA were being “quietly continued” under
“new code names,” according to Foreign Policy’s Shane
Harris, but had been concealed “behind the veil of the
classified intelligence budget.” The new surveillance
program had by then been fully transitioned from DARPA’s
jurisdiction to the NSA.
This was also the year of yet another Singapore Island
Forum led by Richard O’Neill on behalf of the Pentagon,
which included senior defense and industry officials from
the US, UK, Australia, France, India and Israel.
Participants also included senior technologists from
Microsoft, IBM, as well as Gilman Louie, partner at
technology investment firm Alsop Louie Partners.
Gilman Louie is a former CEO of In-Q-Tel — the CIA firm
investing especially in start-ups developing data mining
technology. In-Q-Tel was founded in 1999 by the CIA’s
Directorate of Science and Technology, under which the
Office of Research and Development (ORD) — which was part
of the Google-funding MDSS program — had operated. The
idea was to essentially replace the functions once
performed by the ORD, by mobilizing the private sector to
develop information technology solutions for the entire
intelligence community.
Louie had led In-Q-Tel from 1999 until January
2006 — including when Google bought Keyhole, the
In-Q-Tel-funded satellite mapping software. Among his
colleagues on In-Q-Tel’s board in this period were former
DARPA director and Highlands Forum co-chair Anita Jones
(who is still there), as well as founding board member
William Perry: the man who had appointed O’Neill to set-up
the Highlands Forum in the first place. Joining Perry as a
founding In-Q-Tel board member was John Seely Brown, then
chief scientist at Xerox Corp and director of its Palo
Alto Research Center (PARC) from 1990 to 2002, who is also
a long-time senior Highlands Forum member since inception.
In addition to the CIA, In-Q-Tel has also been backed by
the FBI, NGA, and Defense Intelligence Agency, among other
agencies. More than 60 percent of In-Q-Tel’s investments
under Louie’s watch were “in companies that specialize in
automatically collecting, sifting through and
understanding oceans of information,” according to Medill
School of Journalism’s News21, which also noted that Louie
himself had acknowledged it was not clear “whether privacy
and civil liberties will be protected” by government’s use
of these technologies “for national security.”
The transcript of Richard O’Neill’s late 2001 seminar at
Harvard shows that the Pentagon Highlands Forum had first
engaged Gilman Louie long before the Island Forum, in
fact, shortly after 9/11 to explore “what’s going on with
In-Q-Tel.” That Forum session focused on how to “take
advantage of the speed of the commercial market that
wasn’t present inside the science and technology community
of Washington” and to understand “the implications for the
DoD in terms of the strategic review, the QDR, Hill
action, and the stakeholders.” Participants of the meeting
included “senior military people,” combatant commanders,
“several of the senior flag officers,” some “defense
industry people” and various US representatives including
Republican Congressman William Mac Thornberry and Democrat
Senator Joseph Lieberman.
Both Thornberry and Lieberman are staunch supporters of
NSA surveillance, and have consistently acted to rally
support for pro-war, pro-surveillance legislation.
O’Neill’s comments indicate that the Forum’s role is not
just to enable corporate contractors to write Pentagon
policy, but to rally political support for government
policies adopted through the Forum’s informal brand of
shadow networking.
Repeatedly, O’Neill told his Harvard audience that his job
as Forum president was to scope case studies from real
companies across the private sector, like eBay and Human
Genome Sciences, to figure out the basis of US
‘Information Superiority’ — “how to dominate” the
information market — and leverage this for “what the
president and the secretary of defense wanted to do with
regard to transformation of the DoD and the strategic
review.”
By 2007, a year after the Island Forum meeting that
included Gilman Louie, Facebook received its second round
of $12.7 million worth of funding from Accel Partners.
Accel was headed up by James Breyer, former chair of the
National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) where Louie
also served on the board while still CEO of In-Q-Tel. Both
Louie and Breyer had previously served together on the
board of BBN Technologies — which had recruited ex-DARPA
chief and In-Q-Tel trustee Anita Jones.
Facebook’s 2008 round of funding was led by Greylock
Venture Capital, which invested $27.5 million. The firm’s
senior partners include Howard Cox, another former NVCA
chair who also sits on the board of In-Q-Tel. Apart from
Breyer and Zuckerberg, Facebook’s only other board member
is Peter Thiel, co-founder of defense contractor Palantir
which provides all sorts of data-mining and visualization
technologies to US government, military and intelligence
agencies, including the NSA and FBI, and which itself was
nurtured to financial viability by Highlands Forum
members.
Palantir co-founders Thiel and Alex Karp met with John
Poindexter in 2004, according to Wired, the same year
Poindexter had attended the Highlands Island Forum in
Singapore. They met at the home of Richard Perle, another
Andrew Marshall acolyte. Poindexter helped Palantir open
doors, and to assemble “a legion of advocates from the
most influential strata of government.” Thiel had also met
with Gilman Louie of In-Q-Tel, securing the backing of the
CIA in this early phase.
And so we come full circle. Data-mining programs like
ExecuteLocus and projects linked to it, which were
developed throughout this period, apparently laid the
groundwork for the new NSA programmes eventually disclosed
by Edward Snowden. By 2008, as Facebook received its next
funding round from Greylock Venture Capital, documents and
whistleblower testimony confirmed that the NSA was
effectively resurrecting the TIA project with a focus on
Internet data-mining via comprehensive monitoring of
e-mail, text messages, and Web browsing.
We also now know thanks to Snowden that the NSA’s
XKeyscore ‘Digital Network Intelligence’ exploitation
system was designed to allow analysts to search not just
Internet databases like emails, online chats and browsing
history, but also telephone services, mobile phone audio,
financial transactions and global air transport
communications — essentially the entire global
telecommunications grid. Highlands Forum partner SAIC
played a key role, among other contractors, in producing
and administering the NSA’s XKeyscore, and was recently
implicated in NSA hacking of the privacy network Tor.
The Pentagon Highlands Forum was therefore intimately
involved in all this as a convening network—but also quite
directly. Confirming his pivotal role in the expansion of
the US-led global surveillance apparatus, then Forum
co-chair, Pentagon CIO Linton Wells, told FedTech magazine
in 2009 that he had overseen the NSA’s roll out of “an
impressive long-term architecture last summer that will
provide increasingly sophisticated security until 2015 or
so.”
The Goldman Sachs connection
When I asked Wells about the Forum’s role in influencing
US mass surveillance, he responded only to say he would
prefer not to comment and that he no longer leads the
group.
As Wells is no longer in government, this is to be
expected — but he is still connected to Highlands. As of
September 2014, after delivering his influential white
paper on Pentagon transformation, he joined the Monterey
Institute for International Studies (MIIS) Cyber Security
Initiative (CySec) as a distinguished senior fellow.
Sadly, this was not a form of trying to keep busy in
retirement. Wells’ move underscored that the Pentagon’s
conception of information warfare is not just about
surveillance, but about the exploitation of surveillance
to influence both government and public opinion.
The MIIS CySec initiative is now formally partnered with
the Pentagon Highlands Forum through a Memorandum of
Understanding signed with MIIS provost Dr Amy Sands, who
sits on the Secretary of State’s International Security
Advisory Board. The MIIS CySec website states that the MoU
signed with Richard O’Neill:
“… paves the way for future joint MIIS CySec-Highlands
Group sessions that will explore the impact of technology
on security, peace and information engagement. For nearly
20 years the Highlands Group has engaged private sector
and government leaders, including the Director of National
Intelligence, DARPA, Office of the Secretary of Defense,
Office of the Secretary of Homeland Security and the
Singaporean Minister of Defence, in creative conversations
to frame policy and technology research areas.”
Who is the financial benefactor of the new Pentagon
Highlands-partnered MIIS CySec initiative? According to
the MIIS CySec site, the initiative was launched “through
a generous donation of seed funding from George Lee.”
George C. Lee is a senior partner at Goldman Sachs, where
he is chief information officer of the investment banking
division, and chairman of the Global Technology, Media and
Telecom (TMT) Group.
But here’s the kicker. In 2011, it was Lee who engineered
Facebook’s $50 billion valuation, and previously handled
deals for other Highlands-connected tech giants like
Google, Microsoft and eBay. Lee’s then boss, Stephen
Friedman, a former CEO and chairman of Goldman Sachs, and
later senior partner on the firm’s executive board, was a
also founding board member of In-Q-Tel alongside Highlands
Forum overlord William Perry and Forum member John Seely
Brown.
In 2001, Bush appointed Stephen Friedman to the
President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, and then to chair
that board from 2005 to 2009. Friedman previously served
alongside Paul Wolfowitz and others on the 1995–6
presidential commission of inquiry into US intelligence
capabilities, and in 1996 on the Jeremiah Panel that
produced a report to the Director of the National
Reconnaisance Office (NRO) — one of the surveillance
agencies plugged into the Highlands Forum. Friedman was on
the Jeremiah Panel with Martin Faga, then senior vice
president and general manager of MITRE Corp’s Center for
Integrated Intelligence Systems — where Thuraisingham, who
managed the CIA-NSA-MDDS program that inspired DARPA
counter-terrorist data-mining, was also a lead engineer.
In the footnotes to a chapter for the book, Cyberspace and
National Security (Georgetown University Press),
SAIC/Leidos executive Jeff Cooper reveals that another
Goldman Sachs senior partner Philip J. Venables — who as
chief information risk officer leads the firm’s programs
on information security — delivered a Highlands Forum
presentation in 2008 at what was called an ‘Enrichment
Session on Deterrence.’ Cooper’s chapter draws on
Venables’ presentation at Highlands “with permission.” In
2010, Venables participated with his then boss Friedman at
an Aspen Institute meeting on the world economy. For the
last few years, Venables has also sat on various NSA
cybersecurity award review boards.
In sum, the investment firm responsible for creating the
billion dollar fortunes of the tech sensations of the 21st
century, from Google to Facebook, is intimately linked to
the US military intelligence community; with Venables, Lee
and Friedman either directly connected to the Pentagon
Highlands Forum, or to senior members of the Forum.
Fighting terror with terror
The convergence of these powerful financial and military
interests around the Highlands Forum, through George Lee’s
sponsorship of the Forum’s new partner, the MIIS Cysec
initiative, is revealing in itself.
MIIS Cysec’s director, Dr, Itamara Lochard, has long been
embedded in Highlands. She regularly “presents current
research on non-state groups, governance, technology and
conflict to the US Office of the Secretary of Defense
Highlands Forum,” according to her Tufts University bio.
She also, “regularly advises US combatant commanders” and
specializes in studying the use of information technology
by “violent and non-violent sub-state groups.”
Dr Itamara Lochard is a senior Highlands Forum member and
Pentagon information operations expert. She directs the
MIIS CyberSec initiative that now supports the Pentagon
Highlands Forum with funding from Goldman Sachs partner
George Lee, who led the valuations of Facebook and Google.
Dr Lochard maintains a comprehensive database of 1,700
non-state groups including “insurgents, militias,
terrorists, complex criminal organizations, organized
gangs, malicious cyber actors and strategic non-violent
actors,” to analyze their “organizational patterns, areas
of cooperation, strategies and tactics.” Notice, here, the
mention of “strategic non-violent actors” — which perhaps
covers NGOs and other groups or organizations engaged in
social political activity or campaigning, judging by the
focus of other DoD research programs.
As of 2008, Lochard has been an adjunct professor at the
US Joint Special Operations University where she teaches a
top secret advanced course in ‘Irregular Warfare’ that she
designed for senior US special forces officers. She has
previously taught courses on ‘Internal War’ for senior
“political-military officers” of various Gulf regimes.
Her views thus disclose much about what the Highlands
Forum has been advocating all these years. In 2004,
Lochard was co-author of a study for the US Air Force’s
Institute for National Security Studies on US strategy
toward ‘non-state armed groups.’ The study on the one hand
argued that non-state armed groups should be urgently
recognized as a ‘tier one security priority,’ and on the
other that the proliferation of armed groups “provide
strategic opportunities that can be exploited to help
achieve policy goals. There have and will be instances
where the United States may find collaborating with armed
group is in its strategic interests.” But “sophisticated
tools” must be developed to differentiate between
different groups and understand their dynamics, to
determine which groups should be countered, and which
could be exploited for US interests. “Armed group profiles
can likewise be employed to identify ways in which the
United States may assist certain armed groups whose
success will be advantageous to US foreign policy
objectives.”
In 2008, Wikileaks published a leaked restricted US Army
Special Operations field manual, which demonstrated that
the sort of thinking advocated by the likes of Highlands
expert Lochard had been explicitly adopted by US special
forces.
Lochard’s work thus demonstrates that the Highlands Forum
sat at the intersection of advanced Pentagon strategy on
surveillance, covert operations and irregular warfare:
mobilizing mass surveillance to develop detailed
information on violent and non-violent groups perceived as
potentially threatening to US interests, or offering
opportunities for exploitation, thus feeding directly into
US covert operations.
That, ultimately, is why the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon,
spawned Google. So they could run their secret dirty wars
with even greater efficiency than ever before.
Dr Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist,
bestselling author and international security scholar. A
former Guardian writer, he writes the ‘System Shift’
column for VICE’s Motherboard, and is also a columnist for
Middle East Eye. He is the winner of a 2015 Project
Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism
for his Guardian work.
Nafeez has also written for The Independent, Sydney
Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The
Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde
diplomatique, New Internationalist, Counterpunch,
Truthout, among others. He is the author of A User’s Guide
to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010),
and the scifi thriller novel ZERO POINT, among other
books. His work on the root causes and covert operations
linked to international terrorism officially contributed
to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest.
This exclusive is being released for free in the public
interest, and was enabled by crowdfunding. I’d like to
thank my amazing community of patrons for their support,
which gave me the opportunity to work on this in-depth
investigation. Please support independent, investigative
journalism for the global commons.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
PART 2: Why Google made the NSA: Inside the secret network
behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet— (2017)
INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a new crowd-funded investigative
journalism project, breaks the exclusive story of how the
United States intelligence community funded, nurtured and
incubated Google as part of a drive to dominate the world
through control of information. Seed-funded by the NSA and
CIA, Google was merely the first among a plethora of
private sector start-ups co-opted by US intelligence to
retain ‘information superiority.’
The origins of this ingenious strategy trace back to a
secret Pentagon-sponsored group, that for the last two
decades has functioned as a bridge between the US
government and elites across the business, industry,
finance, corporate, and media sectors. The group has
allowed some of the most powerful special interests in
corporate America to systematically circumvent democratic
accountability and the rule of law to influence government
policies, as well as public opinion in the US and around
the world. The results have been catastrophic: NSA mass
surveillance, a permanent state of global war, and a new
initiative to transform the US military into Skynet.
This exclusive is being released for free in the public
interest, and was enabled by crowdfunding. I’d like to
thank my amazing community of patrons for their support,
which gave me the opportunity to work on this in-depth
investigation. Please support independent, investigative
journalism for the global commons.
Mass surveillance is about control. It’s promulgators may
well claim, and even believe, that it is about control for
the greater good, a control that is needed to keep a cap
on disorder, to be fully vigilant to the next threat. But
in a context of rampant political corruption, widening
economic inequalities, and escalating resource stress due
to climate change and energy volatility, mass surveillance
can become a tool of power to merely perpetuate itself, at
the public’s expense.
A major function of mass surveillance that is often
overlooked is that of knowing the adversary to such an
extent that they can be manipulated into defeat. The
problem is that the adversary is not just terrorists. It’s
you and me. To this day, the role of information warfare
as propaganda has been in full swing, though
systematically ignored by much of the media.
Here, INSURGE INTELLIGENCE exposes how the Pentagon
Highlands Forum’s co-optation of tech giants like Google
to pursue mass surveillance, has played a key role in
secret efforts to manipulate the media as part of an
information war against the American government, the
American people, and the rest of the world: to justify
endless war, and ceaseless military expansionism.
The war machine
In September 2013, the website of the Montery Institute
for International Studies’ Cyber Security Initiative (MIIS
CySec) posted a final version of a paper on
‘cyber-deterrence’ by CIA consultant Jeffrey Cooper, vice
president of the US defense contractor SAIC and a founding
member of the Pentagon’s Highlands Forum. The paper was
presented to then NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander at a
Highlands Forum session titled ‘Cyber Commons, Engagement
and Deterrence’ in 2010.
Gen. Keith Alexander (middle), who served as director of
the NSA and chief of the Central Security Service from
2005 to 2014, as well as commander of the US Cyber Command
from 2010 to 2014, at the 2010 Highlands Forum session on
cyber-deterrence
MIIS CySec is formally partnered with the Pentagon’s
Highlands Forum through an MoU signed between the provost
and Forum president Richard O’Neill, while the initiative
itself is funded by George C. Lee: the Goldman Sachs
executive who led the billion dollar valuations of
Facebook, Google, eBay, and other tech companies.
Cooper’s eye-opening paper is no longer available at the
MIIS site, but a final version of it is available via the
logs of a public national security conference hosted by
the American Bar Association. Currently, Cooper is chief
innovation officer at SAIC/Leidos, which is among a
consortium of defense technology firms including Booz
Allen Hamilton and others contracted to develop NSA
surveillance capabilities.
The Highlands Forum briefing for the NSA chief was
commissioned under contract by the undersecretary of
defense for intelligence, and based on concepts developed
at previous Forum meetings. It was presented to Gen.
Alexander at a “closed session” of the Highlands Forum
moderated by MIIS Cysec director, Dr. Itamara Lochard, at
the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)
in Washington DC.
SAIC/Leidos’ Jeffrey Cooper (middle), a founding member of
the Pentagon’s Highlands Forum, listening to Phil Venables
(right), senior partner at Goldman Sachs, at the 2010
Forum session on cyber-deterrence at the CSIS
Like Rumsfeld’s IO roadmap, Cooper’s NSA briefing
described “digital information systems” as both a “great
source of vulnerability” and “powerful tools and weapons”
for “national security.” He advocated the need for US
cyber intelligence to maximize “in-depth knowledge” of
potential and actual adversaries, so they can identify
“every potential leverage point” that can be exploited for
deterrence or retaliation. “Networked deterrence” requires
the US intelligence community to develop “deep
understanding and specific knowledge about the particular
networks involved and their patterns of linkages,
including types and strengths of bonds,” as well as using
cognitive and behavioural science to help predict
patterns. His paper went on to essentially set out a
theoretical architecture for modelling data obtained from
surveillance and social media mining on potential
“adversaries” and “counterparties.”
A year after this briefing with the NSA chief, Michele
Weslander Quaid — another Highlands Forum
delegate — joined Google to become chief technology
officer, leaving her senior role in the Pentagon advising
the undersecretary of defense for intelligence. Two months
earlier, the Defense Science Board (DSB) Task Force on
Defense Intelligence published its report on
Counterinsurgency (COIN), Intelligence, Surveillance and
Reconnaissance (IRS) Operations. Quaid was among the
government intelligence experts who advised and briefed
the Defense Science Board Task Force in preparing the
report. Another expert who briefed the Task Force was
Highlands Forum veteran Linton Wells. The DSB report
itself had been commissioned by Bush appointee James
Clapper, then undersecretary of defense for
intelligence — who had also commissioned Cooper’s
Highlands Forum briefing to Gen. Alexander. Clapper is now
Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, in which
capacity he lied under oath to Congress by claiming in
March 2013 that the NSA does not collect any data at all
on American citizens.
Michele Quaid’s track record across the US military
intelligence community was to transition agencies into
using web tools and cloud technology. The imprint of her
ideas are evident in key parts of the DSB Task Force
report, which described its purpose as being to “influence
investment decisions” at the Pentagon “by recommending
appropriate intelligence capabilities to assess
insurgencies, understand a population in their
environment, and support COIN operations.”
The report named 24 countries in South and Southeast Asia,
North and West Africa, the Middle East and South America,
which would pose “possible COIN challenges” for the US
military in coming years. These included Pakistan, Mexico,
Yemen, Nigeria, Guatemala, Gaza/West Bank, Egypt, Saudi
Arabia, Lebanon, among other “autocratic regimes.” The
report argued that “economic crises, climate change,
demographic pressures, resource scarcity, or poor
governance could cause these states (or others) to fail or
become so weak that they become targets for
aggressors/insurgents.” From there, the “global
information infrastructure” and “social media” can rapidly
“amplify the speed, intensity, and momentum of events”
with regional implications. “Such areas could become
sanctuaries from which to launch attacks on the US
homeland, recruit personnel, and finance, train, and
supply operations.”
The imperative in this context is to increase the
military’s capacity for “left of bang” operations — before
the need for a major armed forces commitment — to avoid
insurgencies, or pre-empt them while still in incipient
phase. The report goes on to conclude that “the Internet
and social media are critical sources of social network
analysis data in societies that are not only literate, but
also connected to the Internet.” This requires “monitoring
the blogosphere and other social media across many
different cultures and languages” to prepare for
“population-centric operations.”
The Pentagon must also increase its capacity for
“behavioral modeling and simulation” to “better understand
and anticipate the actions of a population” based on
“foundation data on populations, human networks,
geography, and other economic and social characteristics.”
Such “population-centric operations” will also
“increasingly” be needed in “nascent resource conflicts,
whether based on water-crises, agricultural stress,
environmental stress, or rents” from mineral resources.
This must include monitoring “population demographics as
an organic part of the natural resource framework.”
Other areas for augmentation are “overhead video
surveillance,” “high resolution terrain data,” “cloud
computing capability,” “data fusion” for all forms of
intelligence in a “consistent spatio-temporal framework
for organizing and indexing the data,” developing “social
science frameworks” that can “support spatio-temporal
encoding and analysis,” “distributing multi-form biometric
authentication technologies [“such as fingerprints, retina
scans and DNA samples”] to the point of service of the
most basic administrative processes” in order to “tie
identity to all an individual’s transactions.” In
addition, the academy must be brought in to help the
Pentagon develop “anthropological, socio-cultural,
historical, human geographical, educational, public
health, and many other types of social and behavioral
science data and information” to develop “a deep
understanding of populations.”
A few months after joining Google, Quaid represented the
company in August 2011 at the Pentagon’s Defense
Information Systems Agency (DISA) Customer and Industry
Forum. The forum would provide “the Services, Combatant
Commands, Agencies, coalition forces” the “opportunity to
directly engage with industry on innovative technologies
to enable and ensure capabilities in support of our
Warfighters.” Participants in the event have been integral
to efforts to create a “defense enterprise information
environment,” defined as “an integrated platform which
includes the network, computing, environment, services,
information assurance, and NetOps capabilities,” enabling
warfighters to “connect, identify themselves, discover and
share information, and collaborate across the full
spectrum of military operations.” Most of the forum
panelists were DoD officials, except for just four
industry panelists including Google’s Quaid.
DISA officials have attended the Highlands Forum,
too — such as Paul Friedrichs, a technical director and
chief engineer of DISA’s Office of the Chief Information
Assurance Executive.
Knowledge is Power
Given all this it is hardly surprising that in 2012, a few
months after Highlands Forum co-chair Regina Dugan left
DARPA to join Google as a senior executive, then NSA chief
Gen. Keith Alexander was emailing Google’s founding
executive Sergey Brin to discuss information sharing for
national security. In those emails, obtained under Freedom
of Information by investigative journalist Jason Leopold,
Gen. Alexander described Google as a “key member of [the
US military’s] Defense Industrial Base,” a position
Michele Quaid was apparently consolidating. Brin’s jovial
relationship with the former NSA chief now makes perfect
sense given that Brin had been in contact with
representatives of the CIA and NSA, who partly funded and
oversaw his creation of the Google search engine, since
the mid-1990s.
In July 2014, Quaid spoke at a US Army panel on the
creation of a “rapid acquisition cell” to advance the US
Army’s “cyber capabilities” as part of the Force 2025
transformation initiative. She told Pentagon officials
that “many of the Army’s 2025 technology goals can be
realized with commercial technology available or in
development today,” re-affirming that “industry is ready
to partner with the Army in supporting the new paradigm.”
Around the same time, most of the media was trumpeting the
idea that Google was trying to distance itself from
Pentagon funding, but in reality, Google has switched
tactics to independently develop commercial technologies
which would have military applications the Pentagon’s
transformation goals.
Yet Quaid is hardly the only point-person in Google’s
relationship with the US military intelligence community.
One year after Google bought the satellite mapping
software Keyhole from CIA venture capital firm In-Q-Tel in
2004, In-Q-Tel’s director of technical assessment Rob
Painter — who played a key role in In-Q-Tel’s Keyhole
investment in the first place — moved to Google. At
In-Q-Tel, Painter’s work focused on identifying,
researching and evaluating “new start-up technology firms
that were believed to offer tremendous value to the CIA,
the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the
Defense Intelligence Agency.” Indeed, the NGA had
confirmed that its intelligence obtained via Keyhole was
used by the NSA to support US operations in Iraq from 2003
onwards.
A former US Army special operations intelligence officer,
Painter’s new job at Google as of July 2005 was federal
manager of what Keyhole was to become: Google Earth
Enterprise. By 2007, Painter had become Google’s federal
chief technologist.
That year, Painter told the Washington Post that Google
was “in the beginning stages” of selling advanced secret
versions of its products to the US government. “Google has
ramped up its sales force in the Washington area in the
past year to adapt its technology products to the needs of
the military, civilian agencies and the intelligence
community,” the Post reported. The Pentagon was already
using a version of Google Earth developed in partnership
with Lockheed Martin to “display information for the
military on the ground in Iraq,” including “mapping out
displays of key regions of the country” and outlining
“Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad, as well as US
and Iraqi military bases in the city. Neither Lockheed nor
Google would say how the geospatial agency uses the data.”
Google aimed to sell the government new “enhanced versions
of Google Earth” and “search engines that can be used
internally by agencies.”
White House records leaked in 2010 showed that Google
executives had held several meetings with senior US
National Security Council officials. Alan Davidson,
Google’s government affairs director, had at least three
meetings with officials of the National Security Council
in 2009, including White House senior director for Russian
affairs Mike McFaul and Middle East advisor Daniel
Shapiro. It also emerged from a Google patent application
that the company had deliberately been collecting
‘payload’ data from private wifi networks that would
enable the identification of “geolocations.” In the same
year, we now know, Google had signed an agreement with the
NSA giving the agency open-ended access to the personal
information of its users, and its hardware and software,
in the name of cyber security — agreements that Gen.
Alexander was busy replicating with hundreds of telecoms
CEOs around the country.
Thus, it is not just Google that is a key contributor and
foundation of the US military-industrial complex: it is
the entire Internet, and the wide range of private sector
companies — many nurtured and funded under the mantle of
the US intelligence community (or powerful financiers
embedded in that community) — which sustain the Internet
and the telecoms infrastructure; it is also the myriad of
start-ups selling cutting edge technologies to the CIA’s
venture firm In-Q-Tel, where they can then be adapted and
advanced for applications across the military intelligence
community. Ultimately, the global surveillance apparatus
and the classified tools used by agencies like the NSA to
administer it, have been almost entirely made by external
researchers and private contractors like Google, which
operate outside the Pentagon.
This structure, mirrored in the workings of the Pentagon’s
Highlands Forum, allows the Pentagon to rapidly capitalize
on technological innovations it would otherwise miss,
while also keeping the private sector at arms length, at
least ostensibly, to avoid uncomfortable questions about
what such technology is actually being used for.
But isn’t it obvious, really? The Pentagon is about war,
whether overt or covert. By helping build the
technological surveillance infrastructure of the NSA,
firms like Google are complicit in what the
military-industrial complex does best: kill for cash.
As the nature of mass surveillance suggests, its target is
not merely terrorists, but by extension, ‘terrorism
suspects’ and ‘potential terrorists,’ the upshot being
that entire populations — especially political
activists — must be targeted by US intelligence
surveillance to identify active and future threats, and to
be vigilant against hypothetical populist insurgencies
both at home and abroad. Predictive analytics and
behavioural profiles play a pivotal role here.
Mass surveillance and data-mining also now has a
distinctive operational purpose in assisting with the
lethal execution of special operations, selecting targets
for the CIA’s drone strike kill lists via dubious
algorithms, for instance, along with providing geospatial
and other information for combatant commanders on land,
air and sea, among many other functions. A single social
media post on Twitter or Facebook is enough to trigger
being placed on secret terrorism watch-lists solely due to
a vaguely defined hunch or suspicion; and can potentially
even land a suspect on a kill list.
The push for indiscriminate, comprehensive mass
surveillance by the military-industrial
complex — encompassing the Pentagon, intelligence
agencies, defense contractors, and supposedly friendly
tech giants like Google and Facebook — is therefore not an
end in itself, but an instrument of power, whose goal is
self-perpetuation. But there is also a self-rationalizing
justification for this goal: while being great for the
military-industrial complex, it is also, supposedly, great
for everyone else.
The ‘long war’
No better illustration of the truly chauvinistic,
narcissistic, and self-congratulatory ideology of power at
the heart of the military-industrial complex is a book by
long-time Highlands Forum delegate, Dr. Thomas Barnett,
The Pentagon’s New Map. Barnett was assistant for
strategic futures in the Pentagon’s Office of Force
Transformation from 2001 to 2003, and had been recommended
to Richard O’Neill by his boss Vice Admiral Arthur
Cebrowski. Apart from becoming a New York Times
bestseller, Barnett’s book had been read far and wide in
the US military, by senior defense officials in Washington
and combatant commanders operating on the ground in the
Middle East.
Barnett first attended the Pentagon Highlands Forum in
1998, then was invited to deliver a briefing about his
work at the Forum on December 7th 2004, which was attended
by senior Pentagon officials, energy experts, internet
entrepreneurs, and journalists. Barnett received a glowing
review in the Washington Post from his Highlands Forum
buddy David Ignatius a week later, and an endorsement from
another Forum friend, Thomas Friedman, both of which
helped massively boost his credibility and readership.
Barnett’s vision is neoconservative to the root. He sees
the world as divided into essentially two realms: The
Core, which consists of advanced countries playing by the
rules of economic globalization (the US, Canada, UK,
Europe and Japan) along with developing countries
committed to getting there (Brazil, Russia, India, China,
and some others); and the rest of the world, which is The
Gap, a disparate wilderness of dangerous and lawless
countries defined fundamentally by being “disconnected”
from the wonders of globalization. This includes most of
the Middle East and Africa, large swathes of South
America, as well as much of Central Asia and Eastern
Europe. It is the task of the United States to “shrink The
Gap,” by spreading the cultural and economic “rule-set” of
globalization that characterizes The Core, and by
enforcing security worldwide to enable that “rule-set” to
spread.
These two functions of US power are captured by Barnett’s
concepts of “Leviathan” and “System Administrator.” The
former is about rule-setting to facilitate the spread of
capitalist markets, regulated via military and civilian
law. The latter is about projecting military force into
The Gap in an open-ended global mission to enforce
security and engage in nation-building. Not “rebuilding,”
he is keen to emphasize, but building “new nations.”
For Barnett, the Bush administration’s 2002 introduction
of the Patriot Act at home, with its crushing of habeas
corpus, and the National Security Strategy abroad, with
its opening up of unilateral, pre-emptive war, represented
the beginning of the necessary re-writing of rule-sets in
The Core to embark on this noble mission. This is the only
way for the US to achieve security, writes Barnett,
because as long as The Gap exists, it will always be a
source of lawless violence and disorder. One paragraph in
particular sums up his vision:
“America as global cop creates security. Security creates
common rules. Rules attract foreign investment. Investment
creates infrastructure. Infrastructure creates access to
natural resources. Resources create economic growth.
Growth creates stability. Stability creates markets. And
once you’re a growing, stable part of the global market,
you’re part of the Core. Mission accomplished.”
Much of what Barnett predicted would need to happen to
fulfill this vision, despite its neoconservative bent, is
still being pursued under Obama. In the near future,
Barnett had predicted, US military forces will be
dispatched beyond Iraq and Afghanistan to places like
Uzbekistan, Djibouti, Azerbaijan, Northwest Africa,
Southern Africa and South America.
Barnett’s Pentagon briefing was greeted with near
universal enthusiasm. The Forum had even purchased copies
of his book and had them distributed to all Forum
delegates, and in May 2005, Barnett was invited back to
participate in an entire Forum themed around his
“SysAdmin” concept.
The Highlands Forum has thus played a leading role in
defining the Pentagon’s entire conceptualization of the
‘war on terror.’ Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a retired IMB
vice president who co-chaired the President’s Information
Technology Advisory Committee from 1997 to 2001, described
his experience of one 2007 Forum meeting in telling terms:
“Then there is the War on Terror, which DoD has started to
refer to as the Long War, a term that I first heard at the
Forum. It seems very appropriate to describe the overall
conflict in which we now find ourselves. This is a truly
global conflict… the conflicts we are now in have much
more of the feel of a battle of civilizations or cultures
trying to destroy our very way of life and impose their
own.”
The problem is that outside this powerful Pentagon-hosted
clique, not everyone else agrees. “I’m not convinced that
Barnett’s cure would be any better than the disease,”
wrote Dr. Karen Kwiatowski, a former senior Pentagon
analyst in the Near East and South Asia section, who blew
the whistle on how her department deliberately
manufactured false information in the run-up to the Iraq
War. “It would surely cost far more in American liberty,
constitutional democracy and blood than it would be
worth.”
Yet the equation of “shrinking The Gap” with sustaining
the national security of The Core leads to a slippery
slope. It means that if the US is prevented from playing
this leadership role as “global cop,” The Gap will widen,
The Core will shrink, and the entire global order could
unravel. By this logic, the US simply cannot afford
government or public opinion to reject the legitimacy of
its mission. If it did so, it would allow The Gap to grow
out of control, undermining The Core, and potentially
destroying it, along with The Core’s protector, America.
Therefore, “shrinking The Gap” is not just a security
imperative: it is such an existential priority, that it
must be backed up with information war to demonstrate to
the world the legitimacy of the entire project.
Based on O’Neill’s principles of information warfare as
articulated in his 1989 US Navy brief, the targets of
information war are not just populations in The Gap, but
domestic populations in The Core, and their governments:
including the US government. That secret brief, which
according to former senior US intelligence official John
Alexander was read by the Pentagon’s top leadership,
argued that information war must be targeted at:
adversaries to convince them of their vulnerability;
potential partners around the world so they accept “the
cause as just”; and finally, civilian populations and the
political leadership so they believe that “the cost” in
blood and treasure is worth it.
Barnett’s work was plugged by the Pentagon’s Highlands
Forum because it fit the bill, in providing a compelling
‘feel good’ ideology for the US military-industrial
complex.
But neoconservative ideology, of course, hardly originated
with Barnett, himself a relatively small player, even
though his work was extremely influential throughout the
Pentagon. The regressive thinking of senior officials
involved in the Highlands Forum is visible from long
before 9/11, which was ceased upon by actors linked to the
Forum as a powerful enabling force that legitimized the
increasingly aggressive direction of US foreign and
intelligence policies.
Yoda and the Soviets
The ideology represented by the Highlands Forum can be
gleaned from long before its establishment in 1994, at a
time when Andrew ‘Yoda’ Marshall’s ONA was the primary
locus of Pentagon activity on future planning.
A widely-held myth promulgated by national security
journalists over the years is that the ONA’s reputation as
the Pentagon’s resident oracle machine was down to the
uncanny analytical foresight of its director Marshall.
Supposedly, he was among the few who made the prescient
recognition that the Soviet threat had been overblown by
the US intelligence community. He had, the story goes,
been a lone, but relentless voice inside the Pentagon,
calling on policymakers to re-evaluate their projections
of the USSR’s military might.
Except the story is not true. The ONA was not about sober
threat analysis, but about paranoid threat projection
justifying military expansionism. Foreign Policy’s Jeffrey
Lewis points out that far from offering a voice of reason
calling for a more balanced assessment of Soviet military
capabilities, Marshall tried to downplay ONA findings that
rejected the hype around an imminent Soviet threat. Having
commissioned a study concluding that the US had
overestimated Soviet aggressiveness, Marshall circulated
it with a cover note declaring himself “unpersuaded” by
its findings. Lewis charts how Marshall’s threat
projection mind-set extended to commissioning absurd
research supporting staple neocon narratives about the
(non-existent) Saddam-al-Qaeda link, and even the
notorious report by a RAND consultant calling for
re-drawing the map of the Middle East, presented to the
Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board on the invitation of
Richard Perle in 2002.
Investigative journalist Jason Vest similarly found from
Pentagon sources that during the Cold War, Marshall had
long hyped the Soviet threat, and played a key role in
giving the neoconservative pressure group, the Committee
on the Present Danger, access to classified CIA
intelligence data to re-write the National Intelligence
Estimate on Soviet Military Intentions. This was a
precursor to the manipulation of intelligence after 9/11
to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Former ONA
staffers confirmed that Marshall had been belligerent
about an imminent Soviet threat “until the very end.”
Ex-CIA sovietologist Melvin Goodman, for instance,
recalled that Marshall was also instrumental in pushing
for the Afghan mujahideen to be provided with Stinger
missiles — a move which made the war even more brutal,
encouraging the Russians to use scorched earth tactics.
Enron, the Taliban and Iraq
The post-Cold War period saw the Pentagon’s creation of
the Highlands Forum in 1994 under the wing of former
defense secretary William Perry — a former CIA director
and early advocate of neocon ideas like preventive war.
Surprisingly, the Forum’s dubious role as a
government-industry bridge can be clearly discerned in
relation to Enron’s flirtations with the US government.
Just as the Forum had crafted the Pentagon’s intensifying
policies on mass surveillance, it simultaneously fed
directly into the strategic thinking that culminating in
the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
On November 7th 2000, George W. Bush ‘won’ the US
presidential elections. Enron and its employees had given
over $1 million to the Bush campaign in total. That
included contributing $10,500 to Bush’s Florida recount
committee, and a further $300,000 for the inaugural
celebrations afterwards. Enron also provided corporate
jets to shuttle Republican lawyers around Florida and
Washington lobbying on behalf of Bush for the December
recount. Federal election documents later showed that
since 1989, Enron had made a total of $5.8 million in
campaign donations, 73 percent to Republicans and 27
percent to Democrats — with as many as 15 senior Bush
administration officials owning stock in Enron, including
defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, senior advisor Karl
Rove, and army secretary Thomas White.
Yet just one day before that controversial election,
Pentagon Highlands Forum founding president Richard
O’Neill wrote to Enron CEO, Kenneth Lay, inviting him to
give a presentation at the Forum on modernizing the
Pentagon and the Army. The email from O’Neill to Lay was
released as part of the Enron Corpus, the emails obtained
by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, but has
remained unknown until now.
The email began “On behalf of Assistant Secretary of
Defense (C3I) and DoD CIO Arthur Money,” and invited Lay
“to participate in the Secretary of Defense’s Highlands
Forum,” which O’Neill described as “a cross-disciplinary
group of eminent scholars, researchers, CEO’s/CIO’s/CTO’s
from industry, and leaders from the media, the arts and
the professions, who have met over the past six years to
examine areas of emerging interest to all of us.” He added
that Forum sessions include “seniors from the White House,
Defense, and other agencies of government (we limit
government participation to about 25%).”
Here, O’Neill reveals that the Pentagon Highlands Forum
was, fundamentally, about exploring not just the goals of
government, but the interests of participating industry
leaders like Enron. The Pentagon, O’Neill went on, wanted
Lay to feed into “the search for information/
transformation strategies for the Department of Defense
(and government in general),” particularly “from a
business perspective (transformation, productivity,
competitive advantage).” He offered high praise of Enron
as “a remarkable example of transformation in a highly
rigid, regulated industry, that has created a new model
and new markets.”
O’Neill made clear that the Pentagon wanted Enron to play
a pivotal role in the DoD’s future, not just in the
creation of “an operational strategy which has information
superiority,” but also in relation to the DoD’s “enormous
global business enterprise which can benefit from many of
the best practices and ideas from industry.”
“ENRON is of great interest to us,” he reaffirmed. “What
we learn from you may help the Department of Defense a
great deal as it works to build a new strategy. I hope
that you have time on your busy schedule to join us for as
much of the Highlands Forum as you can attend and speak
with the group.”
That Highlands Forum meeting was attended by senior White
House and US intelligence officials, including CIA deputy
director Joan A. Dempsey, who had previously served as
assistant defense secretary for intelligence, and in 2003
was appointed by Bush as executive director of the
President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, in which
capacity she praised extensive information sharing by the
NSA and NGA after 9/11. She went on to become executive
vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton, a major Pentagon
contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan that, among other
things, created the Coalition Provisional Authority’s
database to track what we now know were highly corrupt
reconstruction projects in Iraq.
Enron’s relationship with the Pentagon had already been in
full swing the previous year. Thomas White, then vice
chair of Enron energy services, had used his extensive US
military connections to secure a prototype deal at Fort
Hamilton to privatize the power supply of army bases.
Enron was the only bidder for the deal. The following
year, after Enron’s CEO was invited to the Highlands
Forum, White gave his first speech in June just “two weeks
after he became secretary of the Army,” where he “vowed to
speed up the awarding of such contracts,” along with
further “rapid privatization” of the Army’s energy
services. “Potentially, Enron could benefit from the
speedup in awarding contracts, as could others seeking the
business,” observed USA Today.
That month, on the authority of defense secretary Donald
Rumsfeld — who himself held significant shares in
Enron — Bush’s Pentagon invited another Enron executive
and one of Enron’s senior external financial advisors to
attend a further secret Highlands Forum session.
An email from Richard O’Neill dated June 22nd, obtained
via the Enron Corpus, showed that Steven Kean, then
executive vice president and chief of staff of Enron, was
due to give another Highlands presentation on Monday 25th.
“We are approaching the Secretary of Defense-sponsored
Highlands Forum and very much looking forward to your
participation,” wrote O’Neill, promising Kean that he
would be “the centerpiece of discussion. Enron’s
experience is quite important to us as we seriously
consider transformative change in the Department of
Defense.”
Steven Kean is now president and COO (and incoming CEO) of
Kinder Morgan, one of the largest energy companies in
North America, and a major supporter of the controversial
Keystone XL pipeline project.
Due to attend the same Highlands Forum session with Kean
was Richard Foster, then a senior partner at the financial
consultancy McKinsey. “I have given copies of Dick
Foster’s new book, Creative Destruction, to the Deputy
Secretary of Defense as well as the Assistant Secretary,”
said O’Neill in his email, “and the Enron case that he
outlines makes for important discussion. We intend to hand
out copies to the participants at the Forum.”
Foster’s firm, McKinsey, had provided strategic financial
advice to Enron since the mid-1980s. Joe Skilling, who in
February 2001 became Enron CEO while Kenneth Lay moved to
chair, had been head of McKinsey’s energy consulting
business before joining Enron in 1990.
McKinsey and then partner Richard Foster were intimately
involved in crafting the core Enron financial management
strategies responsible for the company’s rapid, but
fraudulent, growth. While McKinsey has always denied being
aware of the dodgy accounting that led to Enron’s demise,
internal company documents showed that Foster had attended
an Enron finance committee meeting a month before the
Highlands Forum session to discuss the “need for outside
private partnerships to help drive the company’s explosive
growth” — the very investment partnerships responsible for
the collapse of Enron.
McKinsey documents showed that the firm was “fully aware
of Enron’s extensive use of off-balance-sheet funds.” As
The Independent’s economics editor Ben Chu remarks,
“McKinsey fully endorsed the dubious accounting methods,”
which led to the inflation of Enron’s market valuation and
“that caused the company to implode in 2001.”
Indeed, Foster himself had personally attended six Enron
board meetings from October 2000 to October 2001. That
period roughly coincided with Enron’s growing influence on
the Bush administration’s energy policies, and the
Pentagon’s planning for Afghanistan and Iraq.
But Foster was also a regular attendee at the Pentagon
Highlands Forum — his LinkedIn profile describes him as
member of the Forum since 2000, the year he ramped up
engagement with Enron. He also delivered a presentation at
the inaugural Island Forum in Singapore in 2002.
Enron’s involvement in the Cheney Energy Task Force
appears to have been linked to the Bush administration’s
2001 planning for both the invasions of Afghanistan and
Iraq, motivated by control of oil. As noted by Prof.
Richard Falk, a former board member of Human Rights Watch
and ex-UN investigator, Enron’s Kenneth Lay “was the main
confidential consultant relied upon by Vice President Dick
Cheney during the highly secretive process of drafting a
report outlining a national energy policy, widely regarded
as a key element in the US approach to foreign policy
generally and the Arab world in particular.”
The intimate secret meetings between senior Enron
executives and high-level US government officials via the
Pentagon Highlands Forum, from November 2000 to June 2001,
played a central role in establishing and cementing the
increasingly symbiotic link between Enron and Pentagon
planning. The Forum’s role was, as O’Neill has always
said, to function as an ideas lab to explore the mutual
interests of industry and government.
Enron and Pentagon war planning
In February 2001, when Enron executives including Kenneth
Lay began participating concertedly in the Cheney Energy
Task Force, a classified National Security Council
document instructed NSC staffers to work with the task
force in “melding” previously separate issues:
“operational policies towards rogue states” and “actions
regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas
fields.”
According to Bush’s treasury secretary Paul O’Neill, as
quoted by Ron Suskind in The Price of Loyalty (2004),
cabinet officials discussed an invasion of Iraq in their
first NSC meeting, and had even prepared a map for a
post-war occupation marking the carve-up of Iraq’s oil
fields. The message at that time from President Bush was
that officials must “find a way to do this.”
Cheney Energy Task Force documents obtained by Judicial
Watch under Freedom of Information revealed that by March,
with extensive industry input, the task force had prepared
maps of Gulf state and especially Iraqi oilfields,
pipelines, and refineries, along with a list titled
‘Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.’ By April,
a think-tank report commissioned by Cheney, overseen by
former secretary of state James Baker, and put together by
a committee of energy industry and national security
experts, urged the US government “to conduct an immediate
policy review toward Iraq including military, energy,
economic and political/diplomatic assessments,” to deal
with Iraq’s “destabilizing influence” on oil flows to
global markets. The report included recommendations from
Highlands Forum delegate and Enron chair, Kenneth Lay.
But Cheney’s Energy Task Force was also busily pushing
forward plans for Afghanistan involving Enron, that had
been in motion under Clinton. Through the late 1990s,
Enron was working with California-based US energy company
Unocal to develop an oil and gas pipeline that would tap
Caspian basin reserves, and carry oil and gas across
Afghanistan, supplying Pakistan, India and potentially
other markets. The endeavor had the official blessing of
the Clinton administration, and later the Bush
administration, which held several meetings with Taliban
representatives to negotiate terms for the pipeline deal
throughout 2001. The Taliban, whose conquest of
Afghanistan had received covert assistance under Clinton,
was to receive formal recognition as the legitimate
government of Afghanistan in return for permitting the
installation of the pipeline. Enron paid $400 million for
a feasibility study for the pipeline, a large portion of
which was siphoned off as bribes to Taliban leaders, and
even hired CIA agents to help facilitate.
Then in summer 2001, while Enron officials were liaising
with senior Pentagon officials at the Highlands Forum, the
White House’s National Security Council was running a
cross-departmental ‘working group’ led by Rumsfeld and
Cheney to help complete an ongoing Enron project in India,
a $3 billion power plant in Dabhol. The plant was slated
to receive its energy from the Trans-Afghan pipeline. The
NSC’s ‘Dabhol Working Group,’ chaired by Bush’s national
security adviser Condoleeza Rice, generated a range of
tactics to enhance US government pressure on India to
complete the Dabhol plant — pressure that continued all
the way to early November. The Dabhol project, and the
Trans-Afghan pipeline, was by far Enron’s most lucrative
overseas deal.
Throughout 2001, Enron officials, including Ken Lay,
participated in Cheney’s Energy Task Force, along with
representatives across the US energy industry. Starting
from February, shortly after the Bush administration took
office, Enron was involved in about half a dozen of these
Energy Task Force meetings. After one of these secret
meetings, a draft energy proposal was amended to include a
new provision proposing to dramatically boost oil and
natural gas production in India in a way that would apply
only to Enron’s Dabhol power plant. In other words,
ensuring the flow of cheap gas to India via the
Trans-Afghan pipeline was now a matter of US ‘national
security.’
A month or two after this, the Bush administration gave
the Taliban $43 million, justified by its crackdown on
opium production, despite US-imposed UN sanctions
preventing aid to the group for not handing over Osama bin
Laden.
Then in June 2001, the same month that Enron’s executive
vice president Steve Kean attended the Pentagon Highlands
Forum, the company’s hopes for the Dabhol project were
dashed when the Trans-Afghan pipeline failed to
materialize, and as a consequence, construction on the
Dabhol power plant was shut down. The failure of the $3
billion project contributed to Enron’s bankruptcy in
December. That month, Enron officials met with Bush’s
commerce secretary, Donald Evans, about the plant, and
Cheney lobbied India’s main opposition party about the
Dhabol project. Ken Lay had also reportedly contacted the
Bush administration around this time to inform officials
about the firm’s financial troubles.
By August, desperate to pull off the deal, US officials
threatened Taliban representatives with war if they
refused to accept American terms: namely, to cease
fighting and join in a federal alliance with the
opposition Northern Alliance; and to give up demands for
local consumption of the gas. On the 15th of that month,
Enron lobbyist Pat Shortridge told then White House
economic advisor Robert McNally that Enron was heading for
a financial meltdown that could cripple the country’s
energy markets.
The Bush administration must have anticipated the
Taliban’s rejection of the deal, because they had planned
a war on Afghanistan from as early as July. According to
then Pakistani foreign minister Niaz Naik, who had
participated in the US-Taliban negotiations, US officials
told him they planned to invade Afghanistan in mid-October
2001. No sooner had the war commenced, Bush’s ambassador
to Pakistan, Wendy Chamberlain, called Pakistani’s oil
minister Usman Aminuddin to discuss “the proposed
Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan gas pipeline project,”
according to the Frontier Post, a Pakistani
English-language broadsheet. They reportedly agreed that
the “project opens up new avenues of multi-dimensional
regional cooperation particularly in view of the recent
geo-political developments in the region.”
Two days before 9/11, Condoleeza Rice received the draft
of a formal National Security Presidential Directive that
Bush was expected to sign immediately. The directive
contained a comprehensive plan to launch a global war on
al-Qaeda, including an “imminent” invasion of Afghanistan
to topple the Taliban. The directive was approved by the
highest levels of the White House and officials of the
National Security Council, including of course Rice and
Rumsfeld. The same NSC officials were simultaneously
running the Dhabol Working Group to secure the Indian
power plant deal for Enron’s Trans-Afghan pipeline
project. The next day, one day before 9/11, the Bush
administration formally agreed on the plan to attack the
Taliban.
The Pentagon Highlands Forum’s background link with the
interests involved in all this, show they were not unique
to the Bush administration — which is why, as Obama was
preparing to pull troops out of Afghanistan, he
re-affirmed his government’s support for the Trans-Afghan
pipeline project, and his desire for a US firm to
construct it.
The Pentagon’s propaganda fixer
Throughout this period, information war played a central
role in drumming up public support for war — and the
Highlands Forum led the way.
In December 2000, just under a year before 9/11 and
shortly after George W. Bush’s election victory, key Forum
members participated in an event at the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace to explore “the impact of the
information revolution, globalization, and the end of the
Cold War on the US foreign policy making process.” Rather
than proposing “incremental reforms,” the meeting was for
participants to “build from scratch a new model that is
optimized to the specific properties of the new global
environment.”
Among the issues flagged up in the meeting was the ‘Global
Control Revolution’: the “distributed” nature of the
information revolution was altering “key dynamics of world
politics by challenging the primacy of states and
inter-state relations.” This was “creating new challenges
to national security, reducing the ability of leading
states to control global policy debates, challenging the
efficacy of national economic policies, etc.”
In other words, how can the Pentagon find a way to exploit
the information revolution to “control global policy
debates,” particularly on “national economic policies”?
The meeting was co-hosted by Jamie Metzl, who at the time
served on Bill Clinton’s National Security Council, where
he had just led the drafting of Clinton’s Presidential
Decision Directive 68 on International Public Information
(IPI), a new multiagency plan to coordinate US public
information dissemination abroad. Metzl went on to
coordinate IPI at the State Department.
The preceding year, a senior Clinton official revealed to
the Washington Times that Metz’s IPI was really aimed at
“spinning the American public,” and had “emerged out of
concern that the US public has refused to back President
Clinton’s foreign policy.” The IPI would plant news
stories favorable to US interests via TV, press, radio and
other media based abroad, in hopes it would get picked up
in American media. The pretext was that “news coverage is
distorted at home and they need to fight it at all costs
by using resources that are aimed at spinning the news.”
Metzl ran the IPI’s overseas propaganda operations for
Iraq and Kosovo.
Other participants of the Carnegie meeting in December
2000, included two founding members of the Highlands
Forum, Richard O’Neill and SAIC’s Jeff Cooper — along with
Paul Wolfowitz, another Andrew Marshall acolyte who was
about to join the incoming Bush administration as
Rumsfelds’ deputy defense secretary. Also present was a
figure who soon became particularly notorious in the
propaganda around Afghanistan and Iraq War 2003: John W.
Rendon, Jr., founding president of The Rendon Group (TRG)
and another longtime Pentagon Highlands Forum member.
John Rendon (right) at the Highlands Forum, accompanied by
BBC anchor Nik Gowing (left) and Jeff Jonas, IBM Entity
Analytics chief engineer (middle)
TRG is a notorious communications firm that has been a US
government contractor for decades. Rendon played a pivotal
role in running the State Department’s propaganda
campaigns in Iraq and Kosovo under Clinton and Metzl. That
included receiving a Pentagon grant to run a news website,
the Balkans Information Exchange, and a US Agency for
International Development (USAID) contract to promote
“privatization.”
Rendon’s central role in helping the Bush administration
hype up the non-existent threat of weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) to justify a US military invasion is now
well-known. As James Bamford famously exposed in his
seminal Rolling Stone investigation, Rendon played an
instrumental role on behalf of the Bush administration in
deploying “perception management” to “create the
conditions for the removal of Hussein from power” under
multi-million dollar CIA and Pentagon contracts.
Among Rendon’s activities was the creation of Ahmed
Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress (INC) on behalf of the
CIA, a group of Iraqi exiles tasked with disseminating
propaganda, including much of the false intelligence about
WMD. That process had begun concertedly under the
administration of George H W. Bush, then rumbled along
under Clinton with little fanfare, before escalating after
9/11 under George W. Bush. Rendon thus played a large role
in the manufacture of inaccurate and false news stories
relating to Iraq under lucrative CIA and Pentagon
contracts — and he did so in the period running up to the
2003 invasion as an advisor to Bush’s National Security
Council: the same NSC, of course, that planned the
invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, achieved with input
from Enron executives who were simultaneously engaging the
Pentagon Highlands Forum.
But that is the tip of iceberg. Declassified documents
show that the Highlands Forum was intimately involved in
the covert processes by which key officials engineered the
road to war on Iraq, based on information warfare.
A redacted 2007 report by the DoD’s Inspector General
reveals that one of the contractors used extensively by
the Pentagon Highlands Forum during and after the Iraq War
was none other than The Rendon Group. TRG was contracted
by the Pentagon to organize Forum sessions, determine
subjects for discussion, as well as to convene and
coordinate Forum meetings. The Inspector General
investigation had been prompted by accusations raised in
Congress about Rendon’s role in manipulating information
to justify the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.
According to the Inspector General report:
“… the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and
Information Integration/Chief Information Officer employed
TRG to conduct forums that would appeal to a
cross-disciplinary group of nationally regarded leaders.
The forums were in small groups discussing information and
technologies and their effects on science, organizational
and business processes, international relations,
economics, and national security. TRG also conducted a
research program and interviews to formulate and develop
topics for the Highlands Forum focus group. The Office of
the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and
Information Integration would approve the subjects, and
TRG would facilitate the meetings.”
TRG, the Pentagon’s private propaganda arm, thus played a
central role in literally running the Pentagon Highlands
Forum process that brought together senior government
officials with industry executives to generate DoD
information warfare strategy.
The Pentagon’s internal investigation absolved Rendon of
any wrongdoing. But this is not surprising, given the
conflict of interest at stake: the Inspector General at
the time was Claude M. Kicklighter, a Bush nominee who had
directly overseen the administration’s key military
operations. In 2003, he was director of the Pentagon’s
Iraq Transition Team, and the following year he was
appointed to the State Department as special advisor on
stabilization and security operations in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
The surveillance-propaganda nexus
Even more telling, Pentagon documents obtained by Bamford
for his Rolling Stone story revealed that Rendon had been
given access to the NSA’s top-secret surveillance data to
carry out its work on behalf of the Pentagon. TRG, the DoD
documents said, is authorized “to research and analyze
information classified up to Top Secret/SCI/SI/TK/G/HCS.”
‘SCI’ means Sensitive Compartmented Information, data
classified higher than Top Secret, while ‘SI’ designates
Special Intelligence, that is, highly secret
communications intercepted by the NSA. ‘TK’ refers to
Talent/Keyhole, code names for imagery from reconnaissance
aircraft and spy satellites, while ‘G’ stands for Gamma,
encompassing communications intercepts from extremely
sensitive sources, and ‘HCS’ means Humint Control
System — information from a very sensitive human source.
In Bamford’s words:
“Taken together, the acronyms indicate that Rendon enjoys
access to the most secret information from all three forms
of intelligence collection: eavesdropping, imaging
satellites and human spies.”
So the Pentagon had:
1. contracted Rendon, a propaganda firm;
2. given Rendon access to the intelligence community’s
most classified information including data from NSA
surveillance;
3. tasked Rendon to facilitating the DoD’s development of
information operations strategy by running the Highlands
Forum process;
4. and further, tasked Rendon with overseeing the concrete
execution of this strategy developed through the Highlands
Forum process, in actual information operations around the
world in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond.
TRG chief executive John Rendon remains closely involved
in the Pentagon Highlands Forum, and ongoing DoD
information operations in the Muslim world. His November
2014 biography for the Harvard Kennedy School ‘Emerging
Leaders’ course describes him as “a participant in
forward-thinking organizations such as the Highlands
Forum,” “one of the first thought-leaders to harness the
power of emerging technologies in support of real time
information management,” and an expert on “the impact of
emerging information technologies on the way populations
think and behave.” Rendon’s Harvard bio also credits him
with designing and executing “strategic communications
initiatives and information programs related to
operations, Odyssey Dawn (Libya), Unified Protector
(Libya), Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), Iraqi Freedom,
Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan), Allied Force and Joint
Guardian (Kosovo), Desert Shield, Desert Storm (Kuwait),
Desert Fox (Iraq) and Just Cause (Panama), among others.”
Rendon’s work on perception management and information
operations has also “assisted a number of US military
interventions” elsewhere, as well as running US
information operations in Argentina, Colombia, Haiti, and
Zimbabwe — in fact, a total of 99 countries. As a former
executive director and national political director of the
Democratic Party, John Rendon remains a powerful figure in
Washington under the Obama administration.
Pentagon records show that TRG has received over $100
million from the DoD since 2000. In 2009, the US
government cancelled a ‘strategic communications’ contract
with TRG after revelations it was being used to weed out
reporters who might write negative stories about the US
military in Afghanistan, and to solely promote journalists
supportive of US policy. Yet in 2010, the Obama
administration re-contracted Rendon to supply services for
“military deception” in Iraq.
Since then, TRG has provided advice to the US Army’s
Training and Doctrine Command, the Special Operations
Command, and is still contracted to the Office of the
Secretary of Defense, the US Army’s Communications
Electronic Command, as well as providing “communications
support” to the Pentagon and US embassies on
counter-narcotics operations.
TRG also boasts on its website that it provides “Irregular
Warfare Support,” including “operational and planning
support” that “assists our government and military clients
in developing new approaches to countering and eroding an
adversary’s power, influence and will.” Much of this
support has itself been fine-tuned over the last decade or
more inside the Pentagon Highlands Forum.
Irregular war and pseudo-terrorism
The Pentagon Highlands Forum’s intimate link, via Rendon,
to the propaganda operations pursued under Bush and Obama
in support of the ‘Long War,’ demonstrate the integral
role of mass surveillance in both irregular warfare and
‘strategic communications.’
One of the major proponents of both is Prof John Arquilla
of the Naval Postgraduate School, the renowned US defense
analyst credited with developing the concept of ‘netwar,’
who today openly advocates the need for mass surveillance
and big data mining to support pre-emptive operations to
thwart terrorist plots. It so happens that Arquilla is
another “founding member” of the Pentagon’s Highlands
Forum.
Much of his work on the idea of ‘networked warfare,’
‘networked deterrence,’ ‘information warfare,’ and
‘swarming,’ largely produced for RAND under Pentagon
contract, was incubated by the Forum during its early
years and thus became integral to Pentagon strategy. For
instance, in Arquilla’s 1999 RAND study, The Emergence of
Noopolitik: Toward an American Information Strategy, he
and his co-author David Ronfeldt express their gratitude
to Richard O’Neill “for his interest, support and
guidance,” and to “members of the Highlands Forum” for
their advance comments on the study. Most of his RAND work
credits the Highlands Forum and O’Neill for their support.
Prof. John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School, and
a founding member of the Pentagon Highlands Forum
Arquilla’s work was cited in a 2006 National Academy of
Sciences study on the future of network science
commissioned by the US Army, which found based on his
research that: “Advances in computer-based technologies
and telecommunications are enabling social networks that
facilitate group affiliations, including terrorist
networks.” The study conflated risks from terror and
activist groups: “The implications of this fact for
criminal, terror, protest and insurgency networks has been
explored by Arquilla and Ronfeldt (2001) and are a common
topic of discussion by groups like the Highlands Forum,
which perceive that the United States is highly vulnerable
to the interruption of critical networks.” Arquilla went
on to help develop information warfare strategies “for the
military campaigns in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq,”
according to military historian Benjamin Shearer in his
biographical dictionary, Home Front Heroes (2007) — once
again illustrating the direct role played by certain key
Forum members in executing Pentagon information operations
in war theatres.
In his 2005 New Yorker investigation, the Pulitzer
Prize-winning Seymour Hersh referred to a series of
articles by Arquilla elaborating on a new strategy of
“countering terror” with pseudo-terror. “It takes a
network to fight a network,” said Arquilla, drawing on the
thesis he had been promoting in the Pentagon through the
Highlands Forum since its founding:
“When conventional military operations and bombing failed
to defeat the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya in the 1950s,
the British formed teams of friendly Kikuyu tribesmen who
went about pretending to be terrorists. These ‘pseudo
gangs’, as they were called, swiftly threw the Mau Mau on
the defensive, either by befriending and then ambushing
bands of fighters or by guiding bombers to the terrorists’
camps.”
Arquilla went on to advocate that western intelligence
services should use the British case as a model for
creating new “pseudo gang” terrorist groups, as a way of
undermining “real” terror networks:
“What worked in Kenya a half-century ago has a wonderful
chance of undermining trust and recruitment among today’s
terror networks. Forming new pseudo gangs should not be
difficult.”
Essentially, Arquilla’s argument was that as only networks
can fight networks, the only way to defeat enemies
conducting irregular warfare is to use techniques of
irregular warfare against them. Ultimately, the
determining factor in victory is not conventional military
defeat per se, but the extent to which the direction of
the conflict can be calibrated to influence the population
and rally their opposition to the adversary. Arquilla’s
‘pseudo-gang’ strategy was, Hersh reported, already being
implemented by the Pentagon:
“Under Rumsfeld’s new approach, I was told, US military
operatives would be permitted to pose abroad as corrupt
foreign businessmen seeking to buy contraband items that
could be used in nuclear-weapons systems. In some cases,
according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could
be recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or
terrorists…
The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to
set up what it calls ‘action teams’ in the target
countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate
terrorist organizations. ‘Do you remember the right-wing
execution squads in El Salvador?’ the former high-level
intelligence official asked me, referring to the
military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early
nineteen-eighties. ‘We founded them and we financed them,’
he said. ‘The objective now is to recruit locals in any
area we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about
it.’ A former military officer, who has knowledge of the
Pentagon’s commando capabilities, said, ‘We’re going to be
riding with the bad boys.’”
Official corroboration that this strategy is now
operational came with the leak of a 2008 US Army special
operations field manual. The US military, the manual said,
can conduct irregular and unconventional warfare by using
surrogate non-state groups such as “paramilitary forces,
individuals, businesses, foreign political organizations,
resistant or insurgent organizations, expatriates,
transnational terrorism adversaries, disillusioned
transnational terrorism members, black marketers, and
other social or political ‘undesirables.’” Shockingly, the
manual specifically acknowledged that US special
operations can involve both counterterrorism and
“Terrorism,” as well as: “Transnational criminal
activities, including narco-trafficking, illicit
arms-dealing, and illegal financial transactions.” The
purpose of such covert operations is, essentially,
population control — they are “specifically focused on
leveraging some portion of the indigenous population to
accept the status quo,” or to accept “whatever political
outcome” is being imposed or negotiated.
By this twisted logic, terrorism can in some cases be
defined as a legitimate tool of US statecraft by which to
influence populations into accepting a particular
“political outcome” — all in the name fighting terrorism.
Is this what the Pentagon was doing by coordinating the
nearly $1 billion of funding from Gulf regimes to
anti-Assad rebels, most of which according to the CIA’s
own classified assessments ended up in the coffers of
violent Islamist extremists linked to al-Qaeda, who went
on to spawn the ‘Islamic State’?
The rationale for the new strategy was first officially
set out in an August 2002 briefing for the Pentagon’s
Defense Science Board, which advocated the creation of a
‘Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group’ (P2OG) within the
National Security Council. P2OG, the Board proposed, must
conduct clandestine operations to infiltrate and
“stimulate reactions” among terrorist networks to provoke
them into action, and thus facilitate targeting them.
The Defense Science Board is, like other Pentagon
agencies, intimately related with the Highlands Forum,
whose work feeds into the Board’s research, which in turn
is regularly presented at the Forum.
According to the US intelligence sources who spoke to
Hersh, Rumsfeld had ensured that the new brand of black
operations would be conducted entirely under Pentagon
jurisdiction, firewalled off from the CIA and regional US
military commanders, and executed by its own secret
special operations command. That chain of command would
include, apart from the defense secretary himself, two of
his deputies including the undersecretary of defense for
intelligence: the position overseeing the Highlands Forum.
Strategic communications: war propaganda at home and
abroad
Within the Highlands Forum, the special operations
techniques explored by Arquilla have been taken up by
several others in directions focused increasingly on
propaganda — among them, Dr. Lochard, as seen previously,
and also Dr. Amy Zalman, who focuses particularly on the
idea of the US military using ‘strategic narratives’ to
influence public opinion and win wars.
Like her colleague, Highlands Forum founding member Jeff
Cooper, Zalman was schooled in the bowels of SAIC/Leidos.
From 2007 to 2012, she was a senior SAIC strategist,
before becoming Department of Defense Information
Integration Chair at the US Army’s National War College,
where she focused on how to fine-tune propaganda to elicit
the precise responses desired from target groups, based on
complete understanding of those groups. As of summer last
year, she became CEO of the World Futures Society.
Dr. Amy Zalman, an ex-SAIC strategist, is CEO of the World
Futures Society, and a long-time Pentagon Highlands Forum
delegate consulting for the US government on strategic
communications in irregular warfare
In 2005, the same year Hersh reported that the Pentagon
strategy of “stimulating reactions” among terrorists by
provoking them was underway, Zalman delivered a briefing
to the Pentagon Highlands Forum titled, ‘In Support of a
Narrative Theory Approach to US Strategic Communication.’
Since then, Zalman has been a long-time Highlands Forum
delegate, and has presented her work on strategic
communications to a range of US government agencies, NATO
forums, as well as teaching courses in irregular warfare
to soldiers at the US Joint Special Operations University.
Her 2005 Highlands Forum briefing is not publicly
available, but the thrust of Zalman’s input into the
information component of Pentagon special operations
strategies can be gleaned from some of her published work.
In 2010, when she was still attached to SAIC, her NATO
paper noted that a key component of irregular war is
“winning some degree of emotional support from the
population by influencing their subjective perceptions.”
She advocated that the best way of achieving such
influence goes far further than traditional propaganda and
messaging techniques. Rather, analysts must “place
themselves in the skins of the people under observation.”
Zalman released another paper the same year via the IO
Journal, published by the Information Operations
Institute, which describes itself as a “special interest
group” of the Associaton of Old Crows. The latter is a
professional association for theorists and practitioners
of electronic warfare and information operations, chaired
by Kenneth Israel, vice president of Lockheed Martin, and
vice chaired by David Himes, who retired last year from
his position as senior advisor in electronic warfare at
the US Air Force Research Laboratory.
In this paper, titled ‘Narrative as an Influence Factor in
Information Operations,’ Zalman laments that the US
military has “found it difficult to create compelling
narratives — or stories — either to express its strategic
aims, or to communicate in discrete situations, such as
civilian deaths.” By the end, she concludes that “the
complex issue of civilian deaths” should be approached not
just by “apologies and compensation” — which barely occurs
anyway — but by propagating narratives that portray
characters with whom the audience connects (in this case,
‘the audience’ being ‘populations in war zones’). This is
to facilitate the audience resolving struggles in a
“positive way,” defined, of course, by US military
interests. Engaging emotionally in this way with
“survivors of those dead” from US military action might
“prove to be an empathetic form of influence.” Throughout,
Zalman is incapable of questioning the legitimacy of US
strategic aims, or acknowledging that the impact of those
aims in the accumulation of civilian deaths, is precisely
the problem that needs to change — as opposed to the way
they are ideologically framed for populations subjected to
military action.
‘Empathy,’ here, is merely an instrument by which to
manipulate.
In 2012, Zalman wrote an article for The Globalist seeking
to demonstrate how the rigid delineation of ‘hard power’
and ‘soft power’ needed to be overcome, to recognize that
the use of force requires the right symbolic and cultural
effect to guarantee success:
“As long as defense and economic diplomacy remain in a box
labeled ‘hard power,’ we fail to see how much their
success relies on their symbolic effects as well as their
material ones. As long as diplomatic and cultural efforts
are stored in a box marked ‘soft power,’ we fail to see
the ways in which they can be used coercively or produce
effects that are like those produced by violence.”
Given SAIC’s deep involvement in the Pentagon Highlands
Forum, and through it the development of information
strategies on surveillance, irregular warfare, and
propaganda, it is hardly surprising that SAIC was the
other key private defense firm contracted to generate
propaganda in the run up to Iraq War 2003, alongside TRG.
“SAIC executives have been involved at every stage… of the
war in Iraq,” reported Vanity Fair, ironically, in terms
of deliberately disseminating false claims about WMD, and
then investigating the ‘intelligence failure’ around false
WMD claims. David Kay, for instance, who had been hired by
the CIA in 2003 to hunt for Saddam’s WMD as head of the
Iraq Survey Group, was until October 2002 a senior SAIC
vice president hammering away “at the threat posed by
Iraq” under Pentagon contract. When WMD failed to emerge,
President Bush’s commission to investigate this US
‘intelligence failure’ included three SAIC executives,
among them Highlands Forum founding member Jeffrey Cooper.
The very year of Kay’s appointment to the Iraq Survey
Group, Clinton’s defense secretary William Perry — the man
under whose orders the Highlands Forum was set-up — joined
the board of SAIC. The investigation by Cooper and all let
the Bush administration off the hook for manufacturing
propaganda to legitimize war — unsurprisingly, given
Cooper’s integral role in the very Pentagon network that
manufactured that propaganda.
SAIC was also among the many contractors that profited
handsomely from Iraqi reconstruction deals, and was
re-contracted after the war to promote pro-US narratives
abroad. In the same vein as Rendon’s work, the idea was
that stories planted abroad would be picked up by US media
for domestic consumption.
Delegates at the Pentagon’s 46th Highlands Forum in
December 2011, from right to left: John Seely Brown, chief
scientist/director at Xerox PARC from 1990–2002 and an
early board member of In-Q-Tel; Ann Pendleton-Jullian,
co-author with Brown of a manuscript, Design Unbound;
Antonio and Hanna Damasio, a neurologist and
neurobiologist respectively who are part of a DARPA-funded
project on propaganda
But the Pentagon Highlands Forum’s promotion of advanced
propaganda techniques is not exclusive to core,
longstanding delegates like Rendon and Zalman. In 2011,
the Forum hosted two DARPA-funded scientists, Antonio and
Hanna Damasio, who are principal investigators in the
‘Neurobiology of Narrative Framing’ project at the
University of Southern California. Evoking Zalman’s
emphasis on the need for Pentagon psychological operations
to deploy “empathetic influence,” the new DARPA-backed
project aims to investigate how narratives often appeal
“to strong, sacred values in order to evoke an emotional
response,” but in different ways across different
cultures. The most disturbing element of the research is
its focus on trying to understand how to increase the
Pentagon’s capacity to deploy narratives that influence
listeners in a way that overrides conventional reasoning
in the context of morally-questionable actions.
The project description explains that the psychological
reaction to narrated events is “influenced by how the
narrator frames the events, appealing to different values,
knowledge, and experiences of the listener.” Narrative
framing that “targets the sacred values of the listener,
including core personal, nationalistic, and/or religious
values, is particularly effective at influencing the
listener’s interpretation of narrated events,” because
such “sacred values” are closely tied with “the psychology
of identity, emotion, moral decision making, and social
cognition.” By applying sacred framing to even mundane
issues, such issues “can gain properties of sacred values
and result in a strong aversion to using conventional
reasoning to interpret them.” The two Damasios and their
team are exploring what role “linguistic and
neuropsychological mechanisms” play in determining “the
effectiveness of narrative framing using sacred values in
influencing a listener’s interpretation of events.”
The research is based on extracting narratives from
millions of American, Iranian and Chinese weblogs, and
subjecting them to automated discourse analysis to compare
them quantitatively across the three languages. The
investigators then follow up using behavioral experiments
with readers/listeners from different cultures to gauge
their reaction different narratives “where each story
makes an appeal to a sacred value to explain or justify a
morally-questionable behavior of the author.” Finally, the
scientists apply neurobiological fMRI scanning to
correlate the reactions and personal characteristics of
subjects with their brain responses.
Why is the Pentagon funding research investigating how to
exploit people’s “sacred values” to extinguish their
capacity for logical reasoning, and enhance their
emotional openness to “morally-questionable behavior”?
The focus on English, Farsi and Chinese may also reveal
that the Pentagon’s current concerns are overwhelmingly
about developing information operations against two key
adversaries, Iran and China, which fits into longstanding
ambitions to project strategic influence in the Middle
East, Central Asia and Southeast Asia. Equally, the
emphasis on English language, specifically from American
weblogs, further suggests the Pentagon is concerned about
projecting propaganda to influence public opinion at home.
Rosemary Wenchel (left) of the US Department of Homeland
Security with Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter, a former musician and
now US defense consultant who has worked for contractors
like SAIC and Northrup Grumman. SAIC/Leidos executive Jeff
Cooper is behind them
Lest one presume that DARPA’s desire to mine millions of
American weblogs as part of its ‘neurobiology of narrative
framing’ research is a mere case of random selection, an
additional co-chair of the Pentagon Highlands Forum in
recent years is Rosemary Wenchel, former director of cyber
capabilities and operations support at the Office of the
Secretary of Defense. Since 2012, Wenchel has been deputy
assistant secretary for strategy and policy in the
Department of Homeland Security.
As the Pentagon’s extensive funding of propaganda on Iraq
and Afghanistan demonstrates, population influence and
propaganda is critical not just in far-flung theatres
abroad in strategic regions, but also at home, to quell
the risk of domestic public opinion undermining the
legitimacy of Pentagon policy. In the photo above, Wenchel
is talking to Jeff Baxter, a long-time US defense and
intelligence consultant. In September 2005, Baxter was
part of a supposedly “independent” study group (chaired by
NSA-contractor Booz Allen Hamilton) commissioned by the
Department of Homeland Security, which recommended a
greater role for US spy satellites in monitoring the
domestic population.
Meanwhile, Zalman and Rendon, while both remaining closely
involved in the Pentagon Highlands Forum, continue to be
courted by the US military for their expertise on
information operations. In October 2014, both participated
in a major Strategic Multi-Layer Assessment conference
sponsored by the US Department of Defense and the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, titled ‘A New Information Paradigm? From
Genes to “Big Data” and Instagram to Persistent
Surveillance… Implications for National Security.’ Other
delegates represented senior US military officials,
defense industry executives, intelligence community
officials, Washington think-tanks, and academics.
John Rendon, CEO of The Rendon Group, at a Highlands Forum
session in 2010
Rendon and SAIC/Leidos, two firms that have been central
to the very evolution of Pentagon information operations
strategy through their pivotal involvement in the
Highlands Forum, continue to be contracted for key
operations under the Obama administration. A US General
Services Administration document, for instance, shows that
Rendon was granted a major 2010–2015 contract providing
general media and communications support services across
federal agencies. Similarly, SAIC/Leidos has a $400
million 2010–2015 contract with the US Army Research
Laboratory for “Expeditionary Warfare; Irregular Warfare;
Special Operations; Stabilization and Reconstruction
Operations” — a contract which is “being prepared now for
recomplete.”
The empire strikes back
Under Obama, the nexus of corporate, industry, and
financial power represented by the interests that
participate in the Pentagon Highlands Forum has
consolidated itself to an unprecedented degree.
Coincidentally, the very day Obama announced Hagel’s
resignation, the DoD issued a media release highlighting
how Robert O. Work, Hagel’s deputy defense secretary
appointed by Obama in 2013, planned to take forward the
Defense Innovation Initiative that Hagel had just
announced a week earlier. The new initiative was focused
on ensuring that the Pentagon would undergo a long-term
transformation to keep up with leading edge disruptive
technologies across information operations.
Whatever the real reasons for Hagel’s ejection, this was a
symbolic and tangible victory for Marshall and the
Highlands Forum vision. Highlands Forum co-chair Andrew
Marshall, head of the ONA, may indeed be retiring. But the
post-Hagel Pentagon is now staffed with his followers.
Robert Work, who now presides over the new DoD
transformation scheme, is a loyal Marshall acolyte who had
previously directed and analyzed war games for the Office
of Net Assessment. Like Marshall, Wells, O’Neill and other
Highlands Forum members, Work is also a robot fantasist
who lead authored the study, Preparing for War in the
Robotic Age, published early last year by the Center for a
New American Security (CNAS).
Work is also pitched to determine the future of the ONA,
assisted by his strategist Tom Ehrhard and DoD
undersecretary for intelligence Michael G. Vickers, under
whose authority the Highlands Forum currently runs.
Ehrard, an advocate of “integrating disruptive
technologies in DoD,” previously served as Marshall’s
military assistant in the ONA, while Mike Vickers — who
oversees surveillance agencies like the NSA — was also
previously hired by Marshall to consult for the Pentagon.
Vickers is also a leading proponent of irregular warfare.
As assistant defense secretary for special operations and
low intensity conflict under former defense secretary
Robert Gates in both the Bush and Obama administrations,
Vickers’s irregular warfare vision pushed for “distributed
operations across the world,” including “in scores of
countries with which the US is not at war,” as part of a
program of “counter network warfare” using a “network to
fight a network” — a strategy which of course has the
Highlands Forum all over it. In his previous role under
Gates, Vickers increased the budget for special operations
including psychological operations, stealth transport,
Predator drone deployment and “using high-tech
surveillance and reconnaissance to track and target
terrorists and insurgents.”
To replace Hagel, Obama nominated Ashton Carter, former
deputy defense secretary from 2009 to 2013, whose
expertise in budgets and procurement according to the Wall
Street Journal is “expected to boost some of the
initiatives championed by the current Pentagon deputy,
Robert Work, including an effort to develop new strategies
and technologies to preserve the US advantage on the
battlefield.”
Back in 1999, after three years as Clinton’s assistant
defense secretary, Carter co-authored a study with former
defense secretary William J. Perry advocating a new form
of ‘war by remote control’ facilitated by “digital
technology and the constant flow of information.” One of
Carter’s colleagues in the Pentagon during his tenure at
that time was Highlands Forum co-chair Linton Wells; and
it was Perry of course that as then-defense secretary
appointed Richard O’Neill to set-up the Highlands Forum as
the Pentagon’s IO think-tank back in 1994.
Highlands Forum overlord Perry went on to join the board
of SAIC, before eventually becoming chairman of another
giant defense contractor, Global Technology Partners
(GTP). And Ashton Carter was on GTP’s board under Perry,
before being nominated to defense secretary by Obama.
During Carter’s previous Pentagon stint under Obama, he
worked closely with Work and current undersecretary of
defense Frank Kendall. Defense industry sources rejoice
that the new Pentagon team will “dramatically improve”
chances to “push major reform projects” at the Pentagon
“across the finish line.”
Indeed, Carter’s priority as defense chief nominee is
identifying and acquiring new commercial “disruptive
technology” to enhance US military strategy — in other
words, executing the DoD Skynet plan.
The origins of the Pentagon’s new innovation initiative
can thus be traced back to ideas that were widely
circulated inside the Pentagon decades ago, but which
failed to take root fully until now. Between 2006 and
2010, the same period in which such ideas were being
developed by Highlands Forum experts like Lochard, Zalman
and Rendon, among many others, the Office of Net
Assessment provided a direct mechanism to channel these
ideas into concrete strategy and policy development
through the Quadrennial Defense Reviews, where Marshall’s
input was primarily responsible for the expansion of the
“black” world: “special operations,” “electronic warfare”
and “information operations.”
Andrew Marshall, now retired head of the DoD’s Office of
Net Assessment and Highlands Forum co-chair, at a Forum
session in 2008
Marshall’s pre-9/11 vision of a fully networked and
automated military system found its fruition in the
Pentagon’s Skynet study released by the National Defense
University in September 2014, which was co-authored by
Marshall’s colleague at the Highlands Forum, Linton Wells.
Many of Wells’ recommendations are now to be executed via
the new Defense Innovation Initiative by veterans and
affiliates of the ONA and Highlands Forum.
Given that Wells’ white paper highlighted the Pentagon’s
keen interest in monopolizing AI research to monopolize
autonomous networked robot warfare, it is not entirely
surprising that the Forum’s sponsoring partners at
SAIC/Leidos display a bizarre sensitivity about public use
of the word ‘Skynet.’
On a Wikipedia entry titled ‘Skynet (fictional)’, people
using SAIC computers deleted several paragraphs under the
‘Trivia’ section pointing out real-world ‘Skynets’, such
as the British military satellite system, and various
information technology projects.
Hagel’s departure paved the way for Pentagon officials
linked to the Highlands Forum to consolidate government
influence. These officials are embedded in a longstanding
shadow network of political, industry, media and corporate
officials that sit invisibly behind the seat of
government, yet literally write its foreign and domestic
national security policies whether the administration is
Democrat of Republican, by contributing ‘ideas’ and
forging government-industry relationships.
It is this sort of closed-door networking that has
rendered the American vote pointless. Far from protecting
the public interest or helping to combat terrorism, the
comprehensive monitoring of electronic communications has
been systematically abused to empower vested interests in
the energy, defense, and IT industries.
The state of permanent global warfare that has resulted
from the Pentagon’s alliances with private contractors and
unaccountable harnessing of information expertise, is not
making anyone safer, but has spawned a new generation of
terrorists in the form of the so-called ‘Islamic
State’ — itself a Frankenstein by-product of the putrid
combination of Assad’s brutality and longstanding US
covert operations in the region. This Frankenstein’s
existence is now being cynically exploited by private
contractors seeking to profit exponentially from expanding
the national security apparatus, at a time when economic
volatility has pressured governments to slash defense
spending.
According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, from
2008 to 2013, the five largest US defense contractors lost
14 percent of their employees, as the winding down of US
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan led to lack of business and
squeezed revenues. The continuation of the ‘Long War’
triggered by ISIS has, for now, reversed their fortunes.
Companies profiting from the new war include many
connected to the Highlands Forum, such as Leidos, Lockheed
Martin, Northrup Grumman, and Boeing. War is, indeed, a
racket.
No more shadows
Yet in the long-run, the information imperialists have
already failed. This investigation is based entirely on
open source techniques, made viable largely in the context
of the same information revolution that enabled Google.
The investigation has been funded entirely by members of
the public, through crowd-funding. And the investigation
has been published and distributed outside the circuits of
traditional media, precisely to make the point that in
this new digital age, centralized top-down concentrations
of power cannot overcome the power of people, their love
of truth and justice, and their desire to share.
What are the lessons of this irony? Simple, really: The
information revolution is inherently decentralized, and
decentralizing. It cannot be controlled and co-opted by
Big Brother. Efforts to do so will in the end invariably
fail, in a way that is ultimately self-defeating.
The latest mad-cap Pentagon initiative to dominate the
world through control of information and information
technologies, is not a sign of the all-powerful nature of
the shadow network, but rather a symptom of its deluded
desperation as it attempts to ward off the acceleration of
its hegemonic decline.
But the decline is well on its way. And this story, like
so many before it, is one small sign that the
opportunities to mobilize the information revolution for
the benefit of all, despite the efforts of power to hide
in the shadows, are stronger than ever.
Dr Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist,
bestselling author and international security scholar. A
former Guardian writer, he writes the ‘System Shift’
column for VICE’s Motherboard, and is also a columnist for
Middle East Eye. He is the winner of a 2015 Project
Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism
for his Guardian work.
Nafeez has also written for The Independent, Sydney
Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The
Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde
diplomatique, New Internationalist, Counterpunch,
Truthout, among others. He is the author of A User’s Guide
to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010),
and the scifi thriller novel ZERO POINT, among other
books. His work on the root causes and covert operations
linked to international terrorism officially contributed
to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest.
This exclusive is being released for free in the public
interest, and was enabled by crowdfunding. I’d like to
thank my amazing community of patrons for their support,
which gave me the opportunity to work on this in-depth
investigation. Please support independent, investigative
journalism for the global commons.
|