Breaking the Taboo on Israel's Spying Efforts on the United States
Israel runs one of the most aggressive and damaging espionage networks
targeting the U.S., yet public discussion about it is almost nil.
cratch a counterintelligence officer in the U.S. government and
they'll tell you that Israel is not a friend to the United States.
This is because Israel runs one of the most aggressive and damaging
espionage networks targeting the U.S. The fact of Israeli penetration
into the country is not a subject oft-discussed in the media or in the
circles of governance, due to the extreme sensitivity of the U.S.-
Israel relationship coupled with the burden of the Israel lobby, which
punishes legislators who dare to criticize the Jewish state. The void
where the facts should sit is filled instead with the hallucinations
of conspiracy theory -- the kind in which, for example, agents of the
Mossad, Israel’s top intelligence agency, engineer the 9/11 attacks,
while 4,000 Israelis in the Twin Towers somehow all get word to escape
before the planes hit. The effect, as disturbing as it is ironic, is
that the less the truth is addressed, the more noxious the falsity
that spreads.
Israel's spying on the U.S., however, is a matter of public record,
and neither conspiracy nor theory is needed to present the evidence.
When the FBI produces its annual report to Congress concerning
"Foreign Economic Collection and Industrial Espionage," Israel and its
intelligence services often feature prominently as a threat second
only to China. In 2005 the FBI noted, for example, that Israel
maintains "an active program to gather proprietary information within
the United States." A key Israeli method, said the FBI report, is
computer intrusion. In 1996, the Defense Intelligence Service, a
branch of the Pentagon, issued a warning that "the collection of
scientific intelligence in the United States [is] the third highest
priority of Israeli Intelligence after information on its Arab
neighbors and information on secret U.S. policies or decisions
relating to Israel." In 1979, the Central Intelligence Agency produced
a scathing survey of Israeli intelligence activities that targeted the
U.S. government. Like any worthy spy service, Israeli intelligence
early on employed wiretaps as an effective tool, according to the CIA
report. In 1954, the U.S. Ambassador in Tel Aviv discovered in his
office a hidden microphone "planted by the Israelis," and two years
later telephone taps were found in the residence of the U.S. military
attaché. In a telegram to Washington, the ambassador at the time
cabled a warning: "Department must assume that all conversations [in]
my office are known to the Israelis." The former ambassador to Qatar,
Andrew Killgore, who also served as a foreign officer in Jerusalem and
Beirut, told me Israeli taps of U.S. missions and embassies in the
Middle East were part of a "standard operating procedure."
According to the 1979 CIA report, the Israelis, while targeting
political secrets, also devote "a considerable portion of their covert
operations to obtaining scientific and technical intelligence." These
operations involved, among other machinations, "attempts to penetrate
certain classified defense projects in the United States." The
penetrations, according to the CIA report, were effected using "deep
cover enterprises," which the report described as "firms and
organizations, some specifically created for, or adaptable to, a
specific objective." At the time, the CIA singled out government-
subsidized companies such as El Al airlines and Zim, the Israeli
shipping firm, as deep cover enterprises. Other deep cover operations
included the penetration of a U.S. company that provided weapons-grade
uranium to the Department of Defense during the 1960s; Israeli agents
eventually spirited home an estimated 200 pounds of uranium as the
bulwark in Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program. Moles have
burrowed on Israel’s behalf throughout the U.S. intelligence services.
Perhaps most infamous was the case of Jonathan Pollard, a Jewish-
American employed as a civilian analyst with the U.S. Navy who
purloined an estimated 800,000 code-word protected documents from
inside the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and numerous other
U.S. agencies. While Pollard was sentenced to life in prison,
counterintelligence investigators at the FBI suspected he was linked
to a mole far higher in the food chain, ensconced somewhere in the
DIA, but this suspected Israeli operative, nicknamed "Mr. X," was
never found. Following the embarrassment of the Pollard affair -- and
its devastating effects on U.S. national security, as testified by
then Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger (who allegedly stated that
Pollard "should have been shot") -- the Israeli government vowed never
again to pursue espionage against its ally and chief benefactor.
Fast-forward a quarter century, and the vow has proven empty. In 2004,
the authoritative Jane's Intelligence Group noted that Israel's
intelligence organizations "have been spying on the U.S. and running
clandestine operations since Israel was established." The former
deputy director of counterintelligence at FBI, Harry B. Brandon, last
year told Congressional Quarterly magazine that "the Israelis are
interested in commercial as much as military secrets. They have a
muscular technology sector themselves." According to CQ, "One
effective espionage tool is forming joint partnerships with U.S.
companies to supply software and other technology products to U.S.
government agencies."
Best-selling author James Bamford now adds another twist in this
history of infiltration in a book published last October, "The Shadow
Factory," which forms the latest installment in his trilogy of
investigations into the super-secret National Security Agency. Bamford
is regarded among journalists and intelligence officers as the
nation’s expert on the workings of the NSA, whose inner sanctums he
first exposed to the public in 1982. (So precise is his reporting that
NSA officers once threw him a book party, despite the fact that he
continually reveals their secrets.) The agency has come a long way in
the half-century since its founding in 1952. Armed with digital
technology and handed vast new funding and an almost limitless mandate
in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Bamford writes, the NSA has today
"become the largest, most costly, and most technologically
sophisticated spy organization the world has ever known." The NSA
touches on every facet of U.S. communications, its mega-computers
secretly filtering "millions of phone calls and e-mails" every hour of
operation. For those who have followed the revelations of the NSA’s
"warrantless wiretapping" program in the New York Times in 2005 and
the Wall Street Journal last year, what Bamford unveils in "The Shadow
Factory" is only confirmation of the worst fears: "There is now the
capacity," he writes of the NSA’s tentacular reach into the private
lives of Americans, "to make tyranny total."
Much less has been reported about the high-tech Israeli wiretapping
firms that service U.S. telecommunications companies, primarily AT&T
and Verizon, whose networks serve as the chief conduits for NSA
surveillance. Even less is known about the links between those Israeli
companies and the Israeli intelligence services. But what Bamford
suggests in his book accords with the history of Israeli spying in the
U.S.: Through joint partnerships with U.S. telecoms, Israel may be a
shadow arm of surveillance among the tentacles of the NSA. In other
words, when the NSA violates constitutional protections against
unlawful search and seizure to vacuum up the contents of your
telephone conversations and e-mail traffic, the Israeli intelligence
services may be gathering it up too -- a kind of mirror tap that is
effectively a two-government-in-one violation.
***
On its face, the overseas outsourcing of high-tech services would seem
de rigueur in a competitive globalized marketplace. Equipment and
services from Israel’s telecom sector are among the country’s prime
exports, courtesy of Israeli entrepreneurs who have helped pioneer
wireless telephony, voicemail and voice recognition software, instant
messaging, phone billing software, and, not least, "communications
interception solutions." Israeli telecom interception hardware and
software is appraised as some of the best in the world.
By the mid-1990s, Israeli wiretap firms would arrive in the U.S. in a
big way. The key to the kingdom was the 1994 Communications Assistance
for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which was Congress’ solution for
wiretapping in the digital age. Gone are the days when wiretaps were
conducted through on-site tinkering with copper switches. CALEA
mandated that telephonic surveillance operate through computers linked
directly into the routers and hubs of telecom companies -- a spyware
apparatus matched in real-time, all the time, to American telephones
and modems. CALEA effectively made spy equipment an inextricable
ligature in telephonic life. Without CALEA, the NSA in its spectacular
surveillance exploits could not have succeeded.
AT&T and Verizon, which together manage as much as 90 percent of the
nation’s communications traffic, contracted with Israeli firms in
order to comply with CALEA. AT&T employed the services of Narus Inc.,
which was founded in Israel in 1997. It was Narus technology that AT&T
whistleblower Mark Klein, a 22-year technician with the company,
famously unveiled in a 2006 affidavit that described the operations in
AT&T’s secret tapping room at its San Francisco facilities. (Klein’s
affidavit formed the gravamen of a lawsuit against AT&T mounted by the
Electronic Freedom Foundation, but the lawsuit died when Congress
passed the telecom immunity bill last year.) According to Klein, the
Narus supercomputer, the STA 6400, was "known to be used particularly
by government intelligence agencies because of its ability to sift
through large amounts of data looking for preprogrammed targets." The
Narus system, which was maintained by Narus technicans, also provided
a real-time mirror image of all data streaming through AT&T routers,
an image to be rerouted into the computers of the NSA.
According to Jim Bamford, who cites knowledgeable sources, Verizon’s
eavesdropping program is run by a competing Israeli firm called
Verint, a subsidiary of Comverse Technology, which was founded by a
former Israeli intelligence officer in 1984. Incorporated in New York
and Tel Aviv, Comverse is effectively an arm of the Israeli
government: 50 percent of its R&D costs are reimbursed by the Israeli
Ministry of Industry and Trade. The Verint technology deployed
throughout Verizon’s network, known as STAR-GATE, boasts an array of
Orwellian capabilities. "With STAR-GATE, service providers can access
communications on virtually any type of network," according to the
company’s literature. "Designed to manage vast numbers of targets,
concurrent sessions, call data records, and communications, STAR-GATE
transparently accesses targeted communications without alerting
subscribers or disrupting service." As with the Narus system, the
point is to be able to tap into communications unobtrusively, in real
time, all the time. A Verint spinoff firm, PerSay, takes the tap to
the next stage, deploying "advanced voice mining," which singles out
"a target’s voice within a large volume of intercepted calls,
regardless of the conversation content or method of communication."
Verint’s interception systems have gone global since the late 1990s,
and sales in 2006 reached $374 million (a doubling of its revenues
over 2003). More than 5,000 organizations -- mostly intelligence
services and police units -- in at least 100 countries today use
Verint technology.
What troubles Bamford is that executives and directors at companies
like Narus and Verint formerly worked at or maintain close connections
with the Israeli intelligence services, including Mossad; the internal
security agency Shin Bet; and the Israeli version of the NSA, Unit
8200, an arm of the Israeli Defense Forces Intelligence Corps. Unit
8200, which Bamford describes as "hypersecret," is a key player in the
eavesdropping industrial complex in Israel, its retired personnel
dispersed throughout dozens of companies. According to Ha’aretz, the
Israeli daily, "Many of the [eavesdropping] technologies in use around
the world and developed in Israel were originally military
technologies and were developed and improved by [Unit 8200] veterans."
A former commander of Unit 8200, cited by Bamford, states that Verint
technology was "directly influenced by 8200 technology….[Verint parent
company] Comverse’s main product, the Logger, is based on the Unit’s
technology." The implications for U.S. national security, writes
Bamford, are "unnerving." "Virtually the entire American
telecommunications system," he avers, "is bugged by [Israeli-formed]
companies with possible ties to Israel’s eavesdropping agency."
Congress, he says, maintains no oversight of these companies’
operations, and even their contracts with U.S. telecoms -- contracts
pivotal to NSA surveillance -- are considered trade secrets and go
undisclosed in company statements.
U.S. intelligence officers have not been quiet in their concerns about
Verint (I reported on this matter in CounterPunch.org last September).
"Phone calls are intercepted, recorded, and transmitted to U.S.
investigators by Verint, which claims that it has to be ‘hands on’
with its equipment to maintain the system," says former CIA
counterterrorism officer Philip Giraldi. The "hands on" factor is what
bothers Giraldi, specifically because of the possibility of a "trojan"
embedded in Verint wiretap software. A trojan in information security
hardware/software is a backdoor that can be accessed remotely by
parties who normally would not have access to the secure system.
Allegations of widespread trojan spying have rocked the Israeli
business community in recent years. "Top Israeli blue chip companies,"
reported the AP in 2005, "are suspected of using illicit surveillance
software to steal information from their rivals and enemies." Over 40
companies have come under scrutiny. "It is the largest cybercrime case
in Israeli history," Boaz Guttmann, a veteran cybercrimes investigator
with the Israeli national police, told me. "Trojan horse espionage is
part of the way of life of companies in Israel. It’s a culture of
spying."
In a wide-ranging four-part investigation into Israel-linked espionage
that aired in December 2001, Carl Cameron, a correspondent at Fox News
Channel, reported the distress among U.S. intelligence officials
warning about possible trojans cached in Verint technology. Sources
told Cameron that "while various FBI inquiries into [Verint] have been
conducted over the years," the inquiries had "been halted before the
actual equipment has ever been thoroughly tested for leaks." Cameron
also cited a 1999 internal FCC document indicating that "several
government agencies expressed deep concerns that too many unauthorized
non-law enforcement personnel can access the wiretap system." Much of
this access was facilitated through "remote maintenance."
The Fox News report reverberated throughout U.S. law enforcement,
particularly at the Drug Enforcement Agency, which makes extensive use
of wiretaps for narcotics interdiction. Security officers at DEA, an
adjunct of the Justice Department, began examining the agency’s own
relationship with Comverse/Verint. In 1997, DEA had transformed its
wiretap infrastructure with the $25 million procurement from Comverse/
Verint of a technology called "T2S2" -- "translation and transcription
support services" -- with Comverse/Verint contracted to provide the
hardware and software. The company was also tasked with "support
services, training, upgrades, enhancements and options throughout the
life of the contract," according to the DEA’s "contracts and
acquisitions" notice. In the wake of the Fox News investigation,
however, the director of security programs at DEA, Heidi Raffanello,
was rattled enough to issue an internal communiqué on the matter,
dated Dec. 18, 2001. Directly referencing Fox News, she worried that
"Comverse remote maintenance" was "not addressed in the C&A [contracts
and acquisitions] process….It remains unclear if Comverse personnel
are security cleared, and if so, who are they and what type of
clearances are on record….Bottom line we should have caught it." It is
not known what resulted from DEA’s review of the issue of remote
maintenance and access by Comverse/Verint.
Bamford devotes a portion of his argument to the detailing of the
operations of a third Israeli wiretap company, NICE Systems, which he
describes as "a major eavesdropper in the U.S." that "keeps its
government and commercial client list very secret." Formed in 1986 by
seven veterans of Unit 8200, NICE software "captures voice, email,
chat, screen activity, and essential call details," while offering
"audio compression technology that performs continuous recordings of
up to thousands of analog and digital telephone lines and radio
channels." NICE Systems has on at least one occasion shown up on the
radar of U.S. counterintelligence. During 2000-2001, when agents at
the FBI and the CIA began investigating allegations that Israeli
nationals posing as "art students" were in fact conducting espionage
on U.S. soil, one of the Israeli "art students" was discovered to be
an employee with NICE Systems. Among the targets of the art students
were facilities and offices of the Drug Enforcement Agency nationwide.
The same Israeli employee of NICE Systems, who was identified as a
former operative in the Israeli intelligence services, was carrying a
disk that contained a file labeled "DEA Groups." U.S.
counterintelligence officers concluded it was a highly suspicious
nexus: An Israeli national and alleged spy was working for an Israeli
wiretap company while carrying in his possession computer information
regarding the Drug Enforcement Agency -- at the same time this Israeli
was conducting what the DEA described as "intelligence gathering"
about DEA facilities.
***
A former senior counterintelligence official in the Bush
administration told me that as early as 1999, "CIA was very concerned
about [Israeli wiretapping companies]" -- Verint in particular. "I
know that CIA has tried to monitor what the Israelis were doing --
technically watch what they were doing on the networks in terms of
remote access. Other countries were concerned as well," said the
intelligence official. Jim Bamford, who notes that Verint "can
automatically access the mega-terabytes of stored and real-time data
secretly and remotely from anywhere," reports that Australian
lawmakers in 2004 held hearings on this remote monitoring capability.
"[Y]ou can access data from overseas," the lawmakers told a Verint
representative during the hearings, "but [the legislature] seems
restricted to access data within that system." The Australians found
this astonishing. In 2000, the Canadian intelligence service, the
Royal Canadian Mounted Police, conducted "a probe related to
allegations that [Israeli] spies used rigged software to hack into
Canada's top secret intelligence files," according to an article in
the Toronto Star. Several sources in the U.S. intelligence community
told me the Canadians liaised with their American counterparts to try
to understand the problem. According to the Bush administration
official who spoke with me, "the Dutch also had come to the CIA very
concerned about what the Israelis were doing with this." The Dutch
intelligence service, under contract with Verint, "had discovered
strange things were going on -- there was activity on the network, the
Israelis uploading and downloading stuff out of the switches,
remotely, and apparently using it for their own wiretap purposes. The
CIA was very embarrassed to say, ‘We have the same problem.’ But the
CIA didn’t have an answer for them. ‘We hear you, we’re surprised, and
we understand your concern.’" Indeed, sources in the Dutch
counterintelligence community in 2002 claimed there was "strong
evidence that the Israeli secret service has uncontrolled access to
confidential tapping data collected by the Dutch police and
intelligence services," according to the Dutch broadcast radio station
Evangelische Omroep (EO). In January 2003, the respected Dutch
technology and computing magazine, C’T, ran a follow-up to the EO
story, headlined "Dutch Tapping Room not Kosher." The article states:
"All tapping equipment of the Dutch intelligence services and half the
tapping equipment of the national police force [is] insecure and is
leaking information to Israel."
"The key to this whole thing is that Australian meeting," Bamford told
me in a recent interview. "They accused Verint of remote access and
Verint said they won’t do it again -- which implies they were doing it
in the past. It’s a matter of a backdoor into the system, and those
backdoors should not be allowed to exist. You can tell by the
Australian example that it was certainly a concern of Australian
lawmakers."
Congress doesn’t seem to share the concern. "Part of the
responsibility of Congress," says Bamford, "is not just to oversee the
intelligence community but to look into the companies with which the
intelligence community contracts. They’re just very sloppy about
this." According to the Bush administration intelligence official who
spoke with me, "Frustratingly, I did not get the sense that our
government was stepping up to this and grasping the bull by the
horns." Another former high level U.S. intelligence official told me,
"The fact of the vulnerability of our telecom backbone is
indisputable. How it came to pass, why nothing has been done, who has
done what -- these are the incendiary questions." There is also the
fundamental fact that the wiretap technologies implemented by Verint,
Narus and other Israeli companies are fully in place and no
alternative is on the horizon. "There is a technical path dependence
problem," says the Bush administration official. "I have been told
nobody else makes software like this for the big digital switches, so
that is part of the problem. Other issues," he adds, "compound the
problem" -- referring to the sensitivity of the U.S.-Israel
relationship.
And that, of course, is the elephant in the room. "Whether it’s a
Democratic or Republican administration, you don’t bad-mouth Israel if
you want to get ahead," says former CIA counterterrorism officer
Philip Giraldi. "Most of the people in the agency were very concerned
about Israeli espionage and Israeli actions against U.S. interests.
Everybody was aware of it. Everybody hated it. But they wouldn’t get
promoted if they spoke out. Israel has a privileged position and
that’s the way things are. It’s crazy. And everybody knows it’s crazy."
