Shane, Scott. "Archivist Urges U.S. to Reopen Classified Files." New York Times, 3 Mar. 2006. [http://www.nytimes.com]
Shane, Scott. "Archivist Urges U.S. to Reopen Classified Files." New York Times, 3 Mar. 2006. [http://www.nytimes.com]
On 2 March 2006, Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein "directed intelligence agencies ... to stop removing previously declassified historical documents from public access and urged them to return to the shelves as quickly as possible many of the records they had already pulled."
[RefMats/Release/U.S.]
Shane, Scott. "Dodging Perils on Way to Top of Spy Game." New York Times, 8 May 2006. [http://www.nytimes.com]
"Since joining the ranks of America's top spies seven years ago, Gen. Michael V. Hayden has weathered intelligence catastrophes and controversies that might easily have ended his career: the Sept. 11 attacks, erroneous reporting on Iraqi weapons and domestic surveillance without warrants -- all on his watch at the National Security Agency. Instead, General Hayden's brainy command of facts and just-folks style of delivering them have made him not just a survivor, but the man the Bush administration turns to for solutions to its most difficult problems at the intelligence agencies."
[CIA/DCIAs/Hayden/Confirmation]
Shane, Scott. "Excessive Caution Kept NSA Passive." Baltimore Sun, 23 Jul. 2004. [http://www.baltimoresun.com]
"The 9/11 Commission Report portrays the National Security Agency before the terrorist attacks as 'almost obsessive' in protecting its intelligence-gathering methods, passive in following up on clues and excessively cautious about sharing communications intercepts with other agencies."
[GenPostCW/00s/CommissionReport; NSA/04]
Shane, Scott. "Ex-C.I.A. Chief Denies Knowing of Doubt About Defector's Word." New York Times, 2 Apr. 2005. [http://www.nytimes.com]
Former DCI George J. Tenet said on 1 April 2005 "that he had never been told of a foreign intelligence service's grave doubts about the reliability of an important source of information on Iraq's purported biological weapons program, an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball." The WMD commission "wrote in its report ... that an unnamed subordinate of Mr. Tenet's had been told in 2002 by a foreign intelligence contact not to trust Curveball." According to an Associated Press report, "John McLaughlin, who was Mr. Tenet's deputy and then acting director after he stepped down, issued his own statement, saying he, too, was not told of the doubts about Curveball."
[CIA/DCIs/Tenet; GenPostCW/00s/05/WMD]
Shane, Scott. "Ex-C.I.A. Official Says Iraq Data Was Distorted." New York Times, 11 Feb. 2006. [http://www.nytimes.com]
In the March-April 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs, Paul R. Pillar, who retired in October 2005 as NIO for the Near East and South Asia, accuses "the Bush administration of ignoring or distorting the prewar evidence on a broad range of issues related to Iraq in its effort to justify the American invasion of 2003.... Pillar is the first high-level C.I.A. insider to speak out by name on the use of prewar intelligence."
[GenPostwar/00s/06/WMD]
Shane, Scott. "Ex-Federal Employee Indicted on Documents Charge." New York Times, 24 May 2005. [http://www.nytimes.com]
Former NSA employee Kenneth Wayne Ford Jr. has been "indicted in Maryland for possession of classified documents. The federal indictment said ... Ford ... left the agency in late 2003 and was arrested on Jan. 12, 2004, for illegally possessing secret information 'relating to the national defense.'"
Associated Press, 24 May 2005, adds that the 23 May 2005 indictment included "charges of unlawfully possessing classified national defense information and making a false statement" in a submission to Lockheed Martin for a security clearance.
[SpyCases/U.S./Other]
Shane, Scott. "An Exotic Tool for Espionage: Moral Compass." New York Times, 28 Jan. 2006. [http://www.nytimes.com]
"A group of current and former intelligence officers and academic experts ... are meeting this weekend ... to begin hammering out a code of ethics for spies and to form an international association to study the subject.... 'It doesn't make much sense to me,' said Duane R. Clarridge, who retired in 1988 after 33 years as a C.I.A. operations officer.... 'Depending on where you're coming from, the whole business of espionage is unethical.'"
[Oveviews/Ethics]
Shane, Scott. "Gates Hearing in Senate May Have Echoes of 1991." New York Times, 10 Nov. 2006. [http://www.nytimes.com]
"The accusations lodged against Robert M. Gates the last time he came before the Senate for confirmation, in 1991, sound eerily contemporary in the wake of the debate over skewed prewar intelligence on Iraq.... [A]n initial survey of the possible obstacles to Mr. Gates’s confirmation suggest that they are unlikely to threaten Senate approval. Even some Democrats who opposed him in 1991 have welcomed his appointment as a long-overdue change of leadership at the Defense Department."
[CIA/DCIs/Gates]
Shane, Scott. "Government Keeps a Secret After Studying Spy Agencies." New York Times, 26 Apr. 2007. [http://www.nytimes.com]
In a telephone briefing, Ronald P. Sanders, the DNI's chief human capital officer, discussed a study of "just how many contractors work" in the Intelligence Community. Sanders said the study found "that about 25 percent of the intelligence work now contracted out resulted from personnel ceilings imposed by Congress. But 25 percent of what, he said he could not disclose."
[DNI/07; GenPostCW/00s/07]
Shane, Scott. "How Intelligence Fails More Often Than Not." Baltimore Sun, 8 Feb. 2004. [http://www.baltimoresun.com]
"[I]t is unfair to assume that every major intelligence failure is proof of incompetence. 'I think intelligence is a very tough business,' says J. Ransom Clark, who worked for the CIA from 196[4] to 1990. 'Even if you do everything right, you're going to be wrong a whole lot of the time.' Certainly, the track record for predictions in other fields is far from perfect, even when detailed data are available.... [E]xperts on intelligence have identified a number of recurring patterns of intelligence failure." These include: Mirror-imaging, intelligence to please, signals lost in the noise, and the power of preconceptions.
[Analysis/Warning; GenPostCW/00s/04/WMD]
Shane, Scott. "In New Job, Spymaster Draws Bipartisan Criticism." New York Times, 20 Apr. 2006. [http://www.nytimes.com]
Both the top Republican and the top Democrat on the HPSCI, Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), and Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), "are disquieted by the first-year performance" of DNI John D. Negroponte. The two lawmakers fear that Negroponte "is creating just another blanket of bureaucracy." Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), "who played a central role in devising the intelligence overhaul, said she was worried about what she said was Mr. Negroponte's failure to confront the Defense Department over an aggressive grab for turf over the past year."
[DNI/06]
Shane, Scott. "Inside a 9/11 Mastermind’s Interrogation." New York Times, 22 Jun. 2008. [http://www.nytimes.com]
The focus here is the CIA's interrogation of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and the role played in this and other interrogations by an analyst named as Deuce Martinez. Shane makes an important point: "The very fact that Mr. Martinez, a career narcotics analyst who did not speak the terrorists' native languages and had no interrogation experience, would end up as a crucial player captures the ad-hoc nature of the program. Officials acknowledge that it was cobbled together under enormous pressure in 2002 by an agency nearly devoid of expertise in detention and interrogation."
[CIA/00s/08]
Shane, Scott. "Logged In and Sharing Gossip, er, Intelligence." New York Times, 2 Sep. 2007. [http://www.nytimes.com]
According to officials, the intelligence agencies will in December introduce "A-Space, a top-secret variant of the social networking Web sites MySpace and Facebook. The 'A' stands for 'analyst.'" Intelligence analysts will use A-Space to compare notes. A-Space joins "Intellipedia,... where intelligence officers from all 16 American spy agencies pool their knowledge. Sixteen months after its creation, officials say, the top-secret version of Intellipedia has 29,255 articles, with an average of 114 new articles and more than 4,800 edits to articles added each workday.
"A separate online Library of National Intelligence is to include all official intelligence reports sent out by each agency, offering Amazon.com-style suggestions: if you liked that piece on Venezuela’s oil reserves, how about this one on Russia's? And blogs, accessible only to other spies, are proliferating behind the security fences."
[GenPostCW/00s/07]
Shane, Scott. "Man in the News: John Michael McConnell, a Member of the Club." New York Times, 5 Jan. 2007. [http://www.nytimes.com]
"In choosing Mike McConnell to be director of national intelligence, President Bush is turning again to a steady intelligence professional who first achieved prominence during his father’s administration." William P. Crowell, McConnell’s deputy at NSA, "called him a 'consummate professional' who managed the agency with great care at a difficult time of severe post-cold-war budget cuts.... Former colleagues invariably remark on his quiet and courteous manner and say he rarely shows a temper."
[DNI/07]
Shane, Scott. "Negroponte Confirmed as Director of National Intelligence." New York Times, 22 Apr. 2005. [http://www.nytimes.com]
On 21 April 2005, by a vote of 98 to 2, the U.S. "Senate confirmed John D. Negroponte ... as the country's first director of national intelligence." Key senators urgied Negroponte "to assert his power quickly over the nation's 15 spy agencies, improve their sharing of information and upgrade their intelligence collection on terrorism and other threats....
"Michael V. Hayden, director of the National Security Agency for the last six years, was confirmed as principal deputy director of national intelligence. The Senate also approved his promotion from an Air Force lieutenant general to full general."
Negroponte and Hayden "are to preside over a staff of more than 500 people." On 15 April 2005, President Bush "named John Russack, the Energy Department's intelligence chief," as program manager, in which position "he will oversee information-sharing by the intelligence agencies."
[DNI/05]
Shane, Scott. "No Immunity, No Testimony." New York Times, 15 Jan. 2008. [http://www.nytimes.com]
According to an official briefed on the inquiry, Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr., the former CIA official "who ordered the destruction of interrogation videotapes in 2005, will not be required to appear on [16 January 2008] at a closed Congressional hearing on the matter." Rodriguez "has demanded immunity before he will agree to testify before the House Intelligence Committee.... The committee has made no decision on a possible grant of immunity, so it postponed Mr. Rodriguez’s appearance. He remains under subpoena, however, and the committee may call him later."
[CIA/00s/07-08/Tapes]
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