COLOMBIA: From Espionage to Sabotage – and the Dirty War (Part 3)

• Analysis by Constanza Vieira* (bogotÁ)
• Tuesday, August 25, 2009
• Inter Press Service

Early this year, the Colombian press reported that the Administrative Security Department (DAS), Colombia's main intelligence agency, which answers to the president's office, had for years been carrying out illegal wiretap activities against opposition politicians, human rights defenders, journalists and even Supreme Court judges, who were described as 'targets.'

The position taken by the rightwing government of Álvaro Uribe is that a few 'rotten apples' took advantage of the culture of secrecy characteristic of the military and intelligence forces, to use it to their own ends. To back up that argument, administration officials point out that the list of individuals who were spied on includes high-level officials and pro-Uribe politicians.

But the DAS agents who leaked the scandal to the press told Semana magazine in February that they had wiretapped several senior officials in order to protect themselves, given the fact that they were following 'irregular' orders.

The chief difference between the government officials and other Uribe loyalists on one hand and anti-government or opposition 'targets' on the other was that the former were apparently not objects of 'offensive intelligence' actions.

Many in Colombia still believe the most serious aspect of the scandal was the illegal invasion of privacy by means of wiretaps and human surveillance, rather than the way the DAS used that information for offensive intelligence against dissidents.

'Surprisingly, there is some disagreement about the definition of these terms,' said Steven Aftergood, a senior research analyst at the Washington-based Federation of American Scientists, where he heads the Project on Government Secrecy, whose aim is to challenge excessive government secrecy and promote public oversight.

'Generally speaking, intelligence refers to the collection of information regarding potential threats to the security of the nation. There may be different interpretations of the concepts of 'security' and 'threat.' But intelligence gathering per se does not have an offensive component,' he told IPS.

'Sometimes, however, paramilitary or political operations targeted against another country in the form of 'covert action' are included within the definition of 'intelligence.' Such operations may well be considered offensive intelligence operations,' he added.

'Offensive information operations seek to deny, degrade, destroy, disrupt, deceive, and exploit adversary command and control (C2) systems,' says the July-September 1999 issue of the U.S. Army Intelligence Centre's Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin.

Offensive information 'help(s) the commander to seize and retain the initiative by degrading the enemy’s information system. This will slow the enemy’s tempo, disrupting their decision cycles and their ability to generate combat power,' the Bulletin adds.

Thousands and thousands of pages were found in the 104 A-Z expanding files turned over by the DAS to the attorney general's office in March as a result of the scandal triggered by press reports on the illegal wiretapping activities of the Special Intelligence Group, a DAS unit known as the G-3, created to gather intelligence on opponents of the Uribe administration.

The G-3 carried out warrantless surveillance and used the information to intimidate its targets and sabotage their activities.

The sabotage included anonymous death threats, as admitted by former counterintelligence chief Jorge Alberto Lagos, who was sacked in February and arrested after warrants were issued Jul. 31 for his arrest and that of nine other former and acting DAS officials.

For example, funeral wreaths were sent to at least three journalists, as indicated by orders appearing in the G-3 files.

One of the targets, Alirio Uribe, the head of the José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers Collective - a human rights group with United Nations consultative status – who suffered the most invasive surveillance, said 'intelligence used in the way the DAS has used it is the heart of the country's dirty war,' according to the Bogotá newspaper El Espectador.

The G-3, created in 2003, never appeared on the DAS organisation chart, and 'in theory, the group was dissolved in November 2005,' the attorney general's office concluded. But, it added, 'some G-3 activities were continued by the so-called GONI (Grupo de Observación Nacional e Internacional – National and International Observation Group),' another DAS unit, which was in turn supposedly dismantled in March.

Until March, the DAS denied the existence of the G-3.

Privacy – only on paper

The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) 'monitors the telephone, radio and other communications of both friends and adversaries of the United States. Surreptitiously, it reads the world's mail.

'Its daily intercept traffic is huge. In times of tension, vast arrays of NSA personnel fluent in the relevant languages are sitting with earphones, monitoring in real time everything from encrypted commands from the target nation's General Staff to pillow talk.

'For other material there are key words by which computers cull out for human attention specific messages or conversations of current urgent concern. Everything is stored, so that retrospectively it is possible to go back to the magnetic tapes and to trace the first appearance of a codeword, say, or command responsibility in a crisis.'

These quotes do not come from a conspiracy theorist, but from famed U.S. astrophysicist Carl Sagan in his book 'The Demon-Haunted World', published in 1995, a year before his death.

According to Sagan, 'the intercepts are made from listening posts in nearby countries�from aircraft and ships patrolling nearby, or from ferret satellites in Earth orbit.'

The NSA's main missions are to protect U.S. national security systems and produce foreign signals intelligence information, by collecting - 'including through clandestine means,' as its web site says – processing, analysing, producing, and disseminating intelligence information.

The agency has military and civilian personnel stationed all over the world, and complements the work of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the lesser-known Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA).

After World War II, the NSA continued to work in collaboration with the United Kingdom, the closest U.S. ally, through a pact known as the UK-USA Security Agreement, which later incorporated the governments of New Zealand, Australia and Canada.

ECHELON is a global monitoring system - or signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection and analysis network - run by the UK-USA Security Agreement members.

In 2001, a European Parliament committee presented a report 'on the existence of a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications (ECHELON interception system).'

The committee had been set up because of concern on the part of European industry that the spying system was used to the commercial disadvantage of members of the European Union other than the UK.

The committee's report stated that the existence of the ECHELON system – which has not been formally acknowledged by the governments of either the U.S. or the UK, although it has been by Australia and New Zealand – 'is no longer in doubt,' and that its purpose is 'to intercept, at the very least, private and commercial communications, and not military communications'.

The committee examined 'cases of industrial espionage and/or competitive intelligence which have been described in the press.'

The focus, then, is no longer on cooperation among intelligence agencies to fight communism or terrorism, or for national defence, but on economic and commercial espionage against governments and companies, in which one EU member (the UK) was involved against competitors from that bloc.

One of the cases studied by the committee was the award to the French firm Thomson-Alcatel of a 1.4-billion-dollar Brazilian contract for the satellite monitoring of the Amazon Basin. After communications to and from Thomson-Alcatel were intercepted by ECHELON, the contract was awarded to the U.S. firm Raytheon.

According to British investigative journalist Duncan Campbell – who reported the existence of ECHELON in 1988 and provided the European Parliament committee with a document describing the magnitude of the surveillance – the members of the UK-USA Security Agreement were using 120 satellites by 1999.

The European debate over ECHELON has gone on for years, although it never went so far as to jeopardise business deals between EU countries and their main trading partner, the U.S. Nor did it give rise to a confrontation between the rest of the EU countries and the bloc's leading military power, the UK.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government of George W. Bush (2001-2009) found a basis in the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 to waive the requirement of warrants for routine spying on citizens.

In any case, history is full of illustrations demonstrating that privacy in communications is an illusion, and that it only continues to exist on paper, in constitutions, national laws and international rules and treaties – and sometimes not even there.

The question is what use is made of the information obtained from electronic surveillance. * With additional reporting by Diana Cariboni in Montevideo, Uruguay.

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service