by Wayne Madsen
Wayne Madsen Report
June 12, 2013
The media is quoting a number of intelligence “insiders” who are questioning NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s involvement in National Security Agency (NSA) signals intelligence and meta-data mining programs like PRISM and CIA human intelligence (HUMINT) operations.
However, the U.S. intelligence “insiders” may be trying their best to cover up the operations of a little-known hybrid NSA-CIA organizations known as the Special Collection Service (SCS), known internally at NSA as “F6,” and which is headquartered in Beltsville, Maryland in what appears to be a normal office building with a sign bearing the letters “CSSG” at its front driveway off of Springfield Road. Adjacent to the CSSG building is the State Department’s Beltsville Communications Annex, known internally at the State Department as SA-26 and part of the Diplomatic Telecommunications Service, which also handles encrypted communications to CIA stations around the world.
CSSG is listed in area phone directories as Communications Systems Support Group, 11600 Springfield Road, Laurel, Maryland, 20708-3528, with a phone number of (301) 210-1776.
“1776,” in this case, is the farthest thing from the ideals of founders like Thomas Jefferson, who developed his own encryption code, still known as the “Jefferson cipher,” in order to encode messages sent between the covert revolutionary Committees of Correspondence.
The SCS uses the State Department’s secure communications satellite channels to communicate with SCS covert electronic eavesdropping facilities embedded in U.S. diplomatic embassies and missions abroad. One of the SCS units is located at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. Snowden said he was responsible for maintaining network security at the mission.
According to the list of key foreign service officers at U.S. diplomatic posts, dated 2008, mission is located at 11 Rte de Pregny, 1292 Chambesy in Geneva. While Snowden worked at the mission, the ambassador was Warren Tichenor and the deputy chief of mission was Mark Storella. Other diplomats assigned to the mission when Snowden was assigned to it included:David Gilmour, Anne Coughlin (the Regional Security Officer),Mark G. Bandik (USAID), David Reimer, Lisa Myers,Louis Nelli, Nance Kyloh, Ritchie Miller, Kathy J. Beck (Internal Revenue Service), Don Greer, Doug Wells, Ann Chick, Jeffrey D. Kovar (FBI Legal Attaché), and Michael Klecheski (Political Officer).
Evidence is mounting that Snowden was working for the SCS in Geneva. The Swiss Foreign ministry has confirmed that Snowden was declared by the U.S. State Department as an “attaché” assigned to the mission from March 2007 to February 2009. Snowden’s name would not necessarily appear on the State Department’s diplomatic list because it only specifies “key” foreign service officers and not normally Diplomatic Telecommunications Service personnel, of which Snowden was likely one. In 2009, Snowden left the CIA to work for Dell Computers and thereafter went to work for Booz Allen Hamilton as a contractor for the NSA at “NSA Hawaii,” the Regional security Operations Center located at Kunia on Oahu and which is responsible for eavesdropping on the Asia-Pacific region.
The Special Collection Service headquarters driveway.
State Department’s Beltsville Annex.
Snowden told The Guardian that he witnessed CIA agents routinely getting a Swiss banker drunk and then encouraging him to drive home. After the banker was arrested for drunk driving, the CIA offered to bail him out of trouble if he became a CIA source.
Snowden’s involvement with the SCS would have also given him access to information on CIA stations, CIA official cover agents assigned to U.S. diplomatic posts like Geneva, and surveillance priorities for NSA, such as those depicted on a Top Secret map contained in a slide on NSA’s BOUNDLESSINFORMANT global electronic surveillance program.
SCS permits NSA to conduct surveillance on targets that are normally denied due to high levels of physical security and encryption. Black bag CIA and NSA teams penetrate physical security and place listening devices in secure areas and embed Trojan horse programs in computer systems and networks that allow NSA to bypass encryption controls.
The SCS is also used to recruit foreign nationals who would be helpful in providing access to government and commercial networks and databases. Chief targets for such recruitment are
database managers, systems administrators, and computer security technicians, in other words, people like Snowden. Even Swiss bankers with access to secret accounts would be targeted by the SCS to provide system passwords and remote access techniques to banking networks. The Swiss government has sent a diplomatic note to the U.S. government demanding an explanation of Snowden’s allegations about the recruitment of the Swiss banker. Swiss counter-intelligence is rated among the best in the world.
Communications Security establishment Canada (CSEC) officer Mike Frost was the first to reveal details about SCS in his 1994 book Spyworld: Inside the Canadian and American Intelligence Establishments. Frost was trained to conduct covert communications surveillance in foreign capitals at SCS, which, before moving to the Beltsville facility, was located in a strip shopping center in College Park, Maryland behind a false retail operation. CSEC’s operation was code named PILGRIM and it used an NSA system code named ORATORY to conduct surveillance from Canadian embassies in countries around the world.
NSA, like CSEC, Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Australia’s Defense Signals Directorate (DSD), and New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Board (GCSB)– known as the UK-USA or “Five Eyes” countries — conduct covert electronic surveillance from the nation’s embassies and consulates abroad. The operations are supported by SCS. Not only does the NSA and CIA maintain special collections units at the U.S. mission in Geneva but most U.S. diplomatic missions, including the ill-fated diplomatic mission in Benghazi, housed SCS surveillance units.
Snowden, in his televised interview with The Guardian, referred to NSA’s “partners,” which are the Five Eyes English-speaking nations. He also spoke of “third parties,” which are non-English speaking nations that are part of the signals intelligence “club,” countries like Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Belgium. NSA also maintain agreements with Third Parties, which, in what could be an unfortunate for Snowden, the People’s Republic of China. Two NSA listening stations in Xinjiang in western China, located at Qitai and Korla, were code named SAUGUS and SAUCEPAN, respectively. In addition, GCHQ maintains an SCS surveillance station at its Hong Kong consulate, which is nicknamed “the Alamo.”
The NSA’s eavesdropping system ran out of the U.S. embassy in Moscow was once code named BROADSIDE. CSEC PILGRIM surveillance units, operated under Canadian embassy and high commission diplomatic cover and supported by SCS, were present in Caracas (ARTICHOKE), Beijing (BADGER), Mexico City (CORNFLOWER), New Delhi (DAISY), Kingston, Jamaica (EGRET), Rabat (IRIS), Abidjan (JASMINE), Bucharest (HOLLYHOCK), and Moscow (SPHINX). Other PILGRIM units operated in Canadian embassies in Rome; San Jose, Costa Rica; Tokyo; and Warsaw.
SCS maintained a surveillance unit at the Canadian High Commiission in New Delhi.
Among the most storied SCS operations was the planting in 2001 of 27 bugging devices on the Boeing-767 delivered to China for use by Chinese President Jiang Zemin as his official plane. Chinese counter-intelligence discovered the bugs before they were activated. SCS also reportedly set up a surveillance unit a mile from Osama Bin Laden’s alleged compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. SCS units were also deployed to Chechnya during the first Russo-Chechen war to assist Chechen leader Dzhokhar Dudayev in evading Russian signals intelligence direction finding operations targeting his personal satellite phone. In 1996, Dudayev ran out of luck after visiting President Bill Clinton helped embattled President Boris Yeltsin’s re-election chances by providing the Russian President with Dudayev’s NSA-triangulated fix. Dudayev was killed, while talking on his phone, by a Russian air-to ground missile.
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Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist. He has written for several renowned papers and blogs. Madsen is a regular contributor on Russia Today. He has been a frequent political and national security commentator on Fox News and has also appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, and MS-NBC. Madsen has taken on Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity on their television shows. He has been invited to testifty as a witness before the US House of Representatives, the UN Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and an terrorism investigation panel of the French government. As a U.S. Naval Officer, he managed one of the first computer security programs for the U.S. Navy. He subsequently worked for the National Security Agency, the Naval Data Automation Command, Department of State, RCA Corporation, and Computer Sciences Corporation. Madsen is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), Association for Intelligence Officers …
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