Beware of the True Believers Around You

This is the story of how a woman named Mary Lou Sapone infiltrated the gun control movement on behalf of her employer, the National Rifle Association. This story should set off alarm bells in advocacy groups all throughout this country--there might be moles all around you, informing on what your organization does and sabotaging the work that you do.

Mary McFate is an advocate of environmental causes and a prominent activist within the gun control movement. For more than a decade, she volunteered for various gun violence prevention organizations, serving on the boards of anti-gun outfits, helping state groups coordinate their activities, lobbying in Washington for gun control legislation, and regularly attending strategy and organizing meetings.

Mary Lou Sapone, by contrast, is a self-described "research consultant," who for decades has covertly infiltrated citizens groups for private security firms hired by corporations that are targeted by activist campaigns. For some time, Sapone also worked for the National Rifle Association.

But these two Marys share a lot in common—a Mother Jones investigation has found that McFate and Sapone are, in fact, the same person. And this discovery has caused the leaders of gun violence prevention organizations to conclude that for years they have been penetrated—at the highest levels—by the NRA or other pro-gun parties. "It raises the question," says Paul Helmke, the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, "of what did she find out and what did they want her to find out."

Sapone got within shouting distance of being inside of the inner circle of the most prominent gun control organizations in the country. Her status as an informant for the National Rifle Association sends the veritable shot across the bow--they mean business, they're going to do whatever they can to get an advantage, and they don't respect any boundaries.

How did they discover Sapone and how extensive was this infiltration?

Outside the gun control world, Mary Lou Sapone was, as Mother Jones has previously reported, a for-hire operative who spied on citizens' groups for corporate clients. Property and phone records indicate that the two names belong to the same person. Last week, a reporter for Mother Jones called the Sarasota phone number that McFate had given her gun control allies and asked the woman who answered if she was Mary Lou Sapone. "Yes," she responded. But Sapone then refused to answer any questions about Mary McFate or her work for gun control. She quickly hung up—and did not respond to subsequent calls and emails.

During Sapone's ascent through the ranks of the gun control movement, she worked for the NRA, according to a business associate. In a 2003 deposition, Tim Ward, who had been president of the Maryland-based security firm Beckett Brown International, said that the NRA had been "a client" of Sapone's. (As a subcontractor for BBI, Sapone had planted an operative within an environmental group in Lake Charles, Louisiana.) According to Ward, at his request Sapone had introduced BBI to the NRA in early 1999. And that introduction quickly paid off. Billing records obtained by Mother Jones indicate that between May 1999 and April 2000, the NRA paid BBI nearly $80,000 for various services.

In another 2003 deposition, Jay Bly, a former Secret Service officer who worked for BBI, was asked what type of work the security firm had done for the NRA, and he responded, "Those are very sensitive issues, and I'm just not comfortable going into it. I'm really not." Later in the deposition, Bly said, "I did a number of different things for the NRA in the area of investigation, the area of personal protection, in the area of event security, in the area of intelligence gathering, okay?"

Sapone's contact at the National Rifle Association? Patrick O'Malley.

In his deposition, Ward identified Sapone's contact at the NRA as Patrick O'Malley. From the late 1990s until 2002, O'Malley was the deputy executive director of the Institute for Legislative Action, the NRA's political arm. And according to billing records from BBI (which in 2000 changed its name to S2I Corporation), O'Malley was BBI's liaison at the NRA. Recent emails indicate that in 2007 and 2008 Sapone was working with O'Malley, who lobbied for the NRA after leaving the ILA and went on to work for a government relations firm retained by his former employer. In recent years, O'Malley has served as the executive director of the Ballot Issues Coalition, an organization composed of hunting-rights groups, including the NRA.

This is an extensive operation--and the more public "face" of it is Montgomery McFate (Sapone).

In the 1990s—while working within the gun control community as McFate—Sapone formed her own intelligence-gathering business. And she enlisted family members for its operations. "In our business, it's my daughter-in-law, Montgomery Sapone [who] does all the analytic reports, forecasting, and white papers," Sapone wrote to a client in an August 1999 email obtained by Mother Jones. "She produces a very professional product." Sapone continued, "We are warning our clients that activist groups are moving towards ballot initiatives…And it's easy for groups like Greenpeace to emotionally shape a looming crisis in a 10 second TV spot 2 days before a referenda election. My daughter Shelley specializes in that aspect of our business. We are doing a lot of work now to help clients in the 2000 election."

Photo: Montgomery McFate

These days, Sean and Montgomery Sapone are better known as Sean and Montgomery McFate, a successful Washington couple whose current bios make no mention of any past intelligence-gathering or opposition-research work. Sean is currently the program director of the national security initiative at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank boasting an advisory board composed of four former Senate majority leaders: Howard Baker, Bob Dole, George Mitchell, and Tom Daschle. An expert on military affairs, he previously worked for Amnesty International and for military contractor DynCorp. According to an online biography, he helped to organize "the first major legal arms shipment to Liberia in 15 years." Montgomery has made a name for herself as one of the primary architects of the US military's human terrain program, which teams social scientists with military units in Iraq and Afghanistan to help soldiers better understand the local culture. (The controversial program has been sharply criticized by the American Anthropological Association, which fears it may cross an ethical line, and has been described by detractors as "mercenary anthropology.") Now a top Pentagon adviser, Montgomery also contributed to the Army's Counterinsurgency Field Manual drafted under the guidance of General David Petraeus.

Amazing what you find out about people, and their lack of ethics. Anyone who deals with these people is asking for serious trouble--there's no telling who they would sell out to make a dollar. For all we know, Sapone and her family are selling secrets to the highest bidder--and that's not hyperbole when you speculate that they have the capability to do that kind of thing, coupled with a long history of actually doing it. You have to seriously question anyone who acts as a "mercenary" and is willing to spend years--years--duping people for money. Who know what they've been up to, or who they plan to sell out next.

Shabby grifters is all they seem to be.



Enhanced a photo of Sapone that Mother Jones found on her erstwhile blog, which has apparently been scrubbed of "better" photos.

The Sooner the Hayden Era Ends, the Better

Of course, the man who presided over the debacle of 9/11, the fallout over waterboarding, and the explosion of private contractors probably isn't the right guy for the job--and the sooner the Michael Hayden era ends, the better. He should never again be put in charge of any agency or any aspect of US intelligence.

Soon after accepting the post of CIA director two years ago, Michael V. Hayden set an unusual goal for his scandal-beset agency: virtual invisibility.

"CIA needs to get out of the news as source or subject," he said in an internal memo to his staff in 2006.

Two years later, that goal is far from met, as Hayden has tacitly acknowledged. In a retirement ceremony last month marking the end of his military career, the Air Force general stressed the need for the agency to "stay in the shadows" while ignoring what he called the "sometimes shrill and uninformed voices of criticism."

The comment reflected the difficulties that Hayden's CIA faces in trying to turn the corner on six years of controversy at the same time that it attempts sweeping internal changes. While the agency's leadership has sought a return to normal and has launched initiatives intended to improve ties with lawmakers and foreign allies, it finds itself in the cross hairs of a Congress determined to force a reckoning over the agency's past intelligence failures and its conduct in the fight against terrorism.

The quickest way for CIA to get out of the newspapers is for CIA to stop breaking the law, stop letting contractors do their dirty work, and for Hayden and his management style to depart. The next President needs to appoint someone who will reduce the contractor workforce, emphasize professionalism over politics, and get us back into the business of Human Intelligence (HUMINT) and get us out of the business of torturing people.

--WS

The Future of the Intelligence Community

We have focused, in recent weeks, on several intelligence issues. The US intelligence community uses contractors in record numbers and may be forced to make drastic cuts soon. The community has many challenges, such as Iran and China, but no comprehensive assessment has been done as to why the community has failed with regards to 9/11 and Iraq, other than the 9/11 Commission and, to a much lesser extent, the Iraq Study Group.

Given the track record, should the intelligence community be shrunk down in size and eliminated from policy discussions? Some believe that, no matter how big the intelligence community is, it won't prevent another 9/11 attack.

Mark Lowenthal wrote last weekend that the intelligence community needs to get out of the policy game altogether and stop issuing National Intelligence Estimates:

The pressure to avoid another 9/11 or Iraq is so intense that the intelligence community is expending great effort to little gain. The state of the NIEs is a perfect example. The collectors of intelligence now have to swear by their sources, all of which will be thoroughly scrubbed. The push for consensus among the intelligence community's often squabbling agencies will end. But none of this will assure that the reliability of the estimates themselves will increase. More important, none of this will increase the likelihood that policymakers, in the executive branch or Congress, will read these often ponderous, densely written tomes.

The blunt truth? The intelligence community would be far better off scrapping NIEs altogether and going to a streamlined, better written product similar to the sharper assessments produced in Britain and Australia. And if we are going to be serious about improving intelligence analysis, we have to stop publishing the end products -- even in redacted forms that can show up in the pages of this newspaper. More than anything else, this certainty that internal assessments will wind up on public display stifles the vibrant, edgy, out-of-the-box analysis that everyone says they want -- until it disagrees with their political point of view, of course.

Those "sharper" assessments written in Britain and Australia didn't serve those countries any better when it came to warning them of attacks in London and Bali. We can learn a lot from our allies about intelligence gathering, but the fact remains that their governments are structured differently. We are supposed to have oversight and compliance as our operating principle, and if we get back to that, we'll see marked improvement in the way the government functions. We've had over 7 years of virtually no oversight and compliance, and look where the signing statements and the bald-faced lying to Congress has gotten us.

The appropriate reaction to Lowenthal's ideas comes in the form of Eric Rosenbach's editorial in rebuttal, which was published today in the Washington Post:

A better way to separate intelligence from politics would be to rebuild trust with Congress. Senators who learn about controversial intelligence programs from the front page of The Washington Post, as in the case of CIA interrogations and secret prisons, won't be willing to defend the intelligence community and may very likely lambast it. Key intelligence leaders should make more frequent trips to the Hill to keep the oversight committees "fully informed," per the requirements of the National Security Act of 1947. And if there's a time for the intelligence community to stand up, it's when the White House asks that Congress be kept in the dark. To their credit, both CIA Director Hayden and DNI McConnell have opened up on several key issues over the past two years and as a result, the Senate Intelligence Committee has provided them increased support. Unfortunately, the CIA is now allowing the White House to withhold access to intelligence about the Israeli bombing of an alleged Syrian nuclear facility. Don't be surprised if this leads to another round of intelligence bashing on Capitol Hill.

Lowenthal's assertion that intelligence hasn't improved in recent years largely because there wasn't much room to improve -- is also puzzling. The intelligence community today is arguably more proactive and capable than at any time since the Cold War. The newest generation of spies no longer waits for defectors to walk into their arms. They actively pursue new sources of information on hard targets, like Iran and al Qaeda. The most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, for example, impressively contained information from almost 1,500 sources. Our intelligence operators now also eliminate top terrorist leaders on a regular basis. This powerful and effective capability stands in stark contrast to the days when Richard Clarke, then-White House counterterrorism czar, begged in vain for the CIA to do anything that would take terrorists off the streets.

Lowenthal's conclusion, that reports like the National Intelligence Estimates have little policy impact and therefore should be scrapped, underestimates the influential role such assessments play in debates on the Hill. He's wrong to say that the "slam dunk" NIE warning that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction didn't influence Congress in the run-up to war. Even senators who didn't read the entire document knew and considered its bottom line. And look at the latest NIE on the Iranian nuclear program. Nearly all foreign policy analysts believe that it dramatically lowered the probability of U.S. military action. The intelligence assessment process places the intelligence community in the middle of heated policy debates, which is exactly where the nation needs an objective and credible voice.

Given that the Democrats are likely to hold on to the Senate this fall, that means less of the administration-enabling shenanigans of Pat Roberts and hopefully a lot less of the telecom immunity-wishywashyedness of Jay Rockefeller. The Senate needs new leadership and new committee chairmen, badly. There is no reason for the Senate to go into another session of Congress with Rockefeller and Lieberman where they are.

Lowenthal does attempt to get one thing right, but he misses one crucial point:

Indeed, the notorious October 2002 NIE warning that Iraq possessed WMD had virtually no effect on anyone's decision about whether to go to war. It probably did not influence President Bush or other senior policymakers, who had pretty much made up their minds to invade Iraq months earlier. It had no effect on the Senate: As The Washington Post reported in 2004, no more than six senators read beyond the five-page executive summary of the NIE, although 77 senators voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq. Nor did the NIE have much effect on the United Nations: The Security Council declined to support the hawkish U.S. and British position despite the NIE's alarming (and alarmist) assessment of Iraq's arsenal.

Senator Bob Graham provided that missing link for us way back in 2005:

For his part, President Bush claims that Democrats examined the evidence before the war. "They looked at the same intelligence I did, and they voted -- many of them voted -- to support the decision I made," said the president.

That is a claim made by many administration officials in the past two weeks -- that everyone saw the same intelligence. But former Sen. Bob Graham, who is also a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence committee, disagrees. Graham notes that members of Congress do not have access to the President's Daily Brief, a highly classified document containing specific and contextual intelligence. And he says he was stunned to find that in the run-up to the war, the president did not order a National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq, despite the fact that the Senate Intelligence Committee demanded that one be drawn up.

When the document was finally prepared, "what we got was a document that was slanted towards 'yes, there were weapons of mass destruction at 550 sites in Iraq,'" says Graham, who claims that Congress did not have access to anywhere near the amount of raw data that the president did. The quality of that intelligence is now a major part of the fight between the White House and Democrats on the Hill. The administration clearly perceives this fight as a threat to its credibility, a threat that it must answer in no uncertain terms.

This is clearly a case of selective memory and wishful thinking. As in, people have not been given a comprehensive accounting for why we were lied into war, and wishing it would all just go away isn't in the best interests of our country.

Rosenbach writes:

Here's some advice for the next Director of National Intelligence: Don't whine to policymakers about the difficulty of your job. Don't make excuses for your failures. And definitely don't claim that the intelligence community can't do any better.

Here's to former Senator Bob Graham being the NEXT Director of National Intelligence.

Booz Allen Divests Itself of Government Contractors

Booz Allen Hamilton, a company that has prospered under the Bush Administration through lucrative contracts to supply our intelligence agencies with a massive contractor workforce, has sold off the division that handled that work:

Booz Allen Hamilton, the giant McLean consulting company and government contractor, announced this morning that it will separate its U.S. government and commercial businesses, selling a majority stake in the government business to the Carlyle Group, the District-based private equity behemoth, for $2.54 billion.

The government unit, based in McLean with 18,000 employees worldwide, is one of the largest private contractors for the U.S. government, doing work for the Department of Defense, National Security Agency and Centers for Disease Control. The commercial unit, based in New York, will become a separate company under the arrangement.

Booz Allen is one of the area's largest local employers, with 13,000 employees.

The announcement culminates sixth months of discussions among senior Booz Allen executives about the future of the company. Motivating the split have been growing differences between the government and commercial units over the past few years: They recruit from different places, have different internal structures and serve vastly different clients. Perhaps most importantly, the two units have had diverging business success: The government unit's revenues surged after the post-Sept. 11 boom in government spending. But the commercial side did not grow as fast.

The transaction must meet shareholder and regulatory approvals and is expected to close by the end of the year.

"This separation of our core businesses marks a dynamic new chapter in our history," Ralph W. Shrader, chairman and chief executive of Booz Allen, said in a statement. "For 94 years, Booz Allen has adapted and evolved as market realities have changed and our areas of expertise have grown."

The use of contractors has mushroomed since the start of the second Clinton administration:

Since the mid-1990s, intelligence outsourcing has increased 38 percent to reach $42 billion in 2005, with an estimate of 60,000 to 70,000 contracting personnel. According to multiple press accounts, more than $34 billion, or 70 percent of the intelligence community’s budget for fiscal year 2007, was spent on private contractors for tasks ranging from intelligence collection to dissemination. Media reports suggest that 60 percent of the Central Intelligence Agency is supported by contractors, and 70 percent of its counterintelligence field activities are as well.

Congress estimated that the government spent on average $126,500 annually to support a full-time intelligence civilian. At least $250,000 is necessary to support a core contractor with overhead fees. Many supporters of outsourcing argued that even though a core contractor costs substantially more than a full-time civilian, the total expenditure to pay for the civilian benefits and retirements far exceeds the short-term cost.

The use of contractors for intelligence work has raised concerns. Misconduct by contractors, or at least the danger of that, may have played a part in the dismantling of the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) office:

The Pentagon is expected to shut a controversial intelligence office that has drawn fire from lawmakers and civil liberties groups who charge that it was part of an effort by the Defense Department to expand into domestic spying.

The move, government officials say, is part of a broad effort under Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to review, overhaul and, in some cases, dismantle an intelligence architecture built by his predecessor, Donald H. Rumsfeld.

The intelligence unit, called the Counterintelligence Field Activity office, was created by Mr. Rumsfeld after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as part of an effort to counter the operations of foreign intelligence services and terror groups inside the United States and abroad.

[SNIP]


Some current and former Pentagon officials expressed concern that putting the mission of countering foreign intelligence services under the Defense Intelligence Agency could signal a decline in its priority. But Colonel Ryder, the Pentagon spokesman, said the recommendation to close the counterintelligence office was intended to strengthen counterintelligence operations.

Pentagon officials said that the database that housed information about the war protesters was built to track terrorist threats against domestic military bases and that reports about war protesters were put into it by mistake. Mr. Clapper ordered an end to the database, called Talon, last year.

The disclosure that the Pentagon was collecting information about citizens in the United States prompted memories of its activities decades ago, when the military used electronic surveillance to monitor civilians protesting the Vietnam War. The Pentagon is traditionally barred from conducting domestic intelligence operations.

The counterintelligence office was also brought into the scandal surrounding Representative Randy Cunningham, a California Republican, who resigned from Congress in 2005 after pleading guilty to taking bribes from military contractors. Some of the contracts that Mr. Cunningham channeled to Mitchell J. Wade, a longtime friend, were for programs of the counterintelligence office.

Newly declassified documents released on Tuesday shed more light on another activity coordinated by the Pentagon’s counterintelligence office, issuing letters to banks and credit agencies to obtain financial records in terrorism and espionage investigations.

The Pentagon has issued hundreds of so-called national security letters, which are noncompulsory, as a tool to examine the income of employees suspected of collaborating with a foreign spy service or international terrorist network.

Many were unaware of the degree to which this was being done:

“Red alert: Our national security is being outsourced. The most intriguing secrets of the ‘war on terror’ have nothing to do with al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers. They’re about the mammoth private spying industry that all but runs U.S. intelligence operations today… the private spy industry has succeeded where no foreign government has: It has penetrated the CIA and is running the show.” Those are the opening lines to a recent article in the Washington Post by R.J Hillhouse, a blogger and novelist who closely tracks the privatization of the nation’s intelligence agencies.

According to Hillhouse more than 50 percent of the National Clandestine Service has been outsourced to private firms such as Abraxas, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Hillhouse’s article in the Washington Post created a firestorm of controversy within the intelligence community. A week later the Office of the Director of National Intelligence responded defending the use of private contractors.

Now Hillhouse has exposed that the reach of these corporations has extended into the Oval Office. Private companies are now heavily involved in creating the analytical products that underlie the nation’s most important and most sensitive national security document—the President’s Daily Brief. And there appears to be few safeguards from preventing corporations from inserting items favorable to itself or its clients into the President’s Daily Brief in order to influence the country’s national security agenda.

CORRECTION: There is no involvement of "contractors" in the processing of the PDB.

Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, was with Booz Allen Hamilton when the company grew exponentially, thanks to the increase in government contracting business:

McConnell is a former director of the National Security Agency and the current director [now former] of defense programs at Booz Allen—one of the nation’s biggest defense and intelligence contractors. Under his watch, Booz Allen has been deeply involved in some of the most controversial counterterrorism programs run by the Bush administration, including the infamous Total Information Awareness data-mining scheme. McConnell has also been a leading figure in outsourcing U.S. intelligence operations to private industry.

House Fails to Override Veto

Probably just a symbolic attempt, but nonetheless:

HR 2082 was the bill that was designed to ban waterboarding. The full description was: "To authorize appropriations for fiscal year 2008 for intelligence and intelligence-related activities of the United States Government, the Community Management Account, and the Central Intelligence Agency Retirement and Disability System, and for other purposes."

[A waterboarding ban was part of that.]

These three Democrats voted to uphold Bush's veto and joined the Republicans, and they had previously joined three other Democrats in voting against the legislation in December:

Nay OH-10 Kucinich, Dennis [D]
Nay GA-8 Marshall, James [D]
Nay CA-35 Waters, Maxine [D]

I tried to find an explanation for the votes, but I couldn't locate one. Perhaps they're just being "consistent" in their desire to not vote for any program that funds or supports the intelligence community. I don't think they are "FOR" waterboarding. I think they want to draw attention to themselves by voting against their party and against funding the intelligence community. And that's, umm, to put it mildly, brain-dead and immature.

Either way, this is another example as to why we need to have BETTER DEMOCRATS in the Congress. Kucinich, Marshall and Waters aren't the kinds of Democrats we need. They are self-centered, self-important, and in it for themselves.

I don't know--instead of grandstanding and all that, instead of being difficult, can't you just vote with the Democrats once in a while?