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.
READ PART ONE
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 conferencehosted 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, describedhis 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 meetingsfrom 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
lucrativeoverseas 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 Timesthat
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.
