The History of America’s Secret Wars: Corporate Espionage and the Outsourcing of National Security, By Greg Guma, Global Research, June 14, 2013
This text is excerpted from Big Lies: How Our Corporate Overlords, Politicians and Media Establishment Warp Reality and Undermine Democracy
Pre-9/11 Flashback
When NATO’s US and British troops in Macedonia began evacuating Albanian rebels in June 2001, officials claimed that they were merely trying to help Europe avert a devastating civil war. Most media dutifully repeated this spin as fact. But the explanation only made sense if you ignored a troublesome contradiction; namely, US support for both the Macedonian Armed Forces and the Albanians fighting them. Beyond that, there was a decade of confused and manipulative Western policies, climaxing with NATO bombing and the imposition of “peace” through aggression in Kosovo. Together, these moves effectively destabilized the region.
In Macedonia, the main “cut out” – spook-speak for “intermediary” –was Military Professional Resources, Inc. (MPRI), then a major private military company (PMC) whose Macedonian field commander was a former US general with strong ties to Kosovo Liberation Army Commander Agim Ceku and Macedonian General Jovan Andrejevski.
MPRI and other PMCs that have succeeded it receive much of their funding from the US State Department, Pentagon, and CIA. For example, MPRI trained and equipped the Bosnian Croat Muslim Federation Army with a large State Department contract. Over the years, the company claimed to have “helped” Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, and Macedonia – in effect, arming and training all parties. In 2000, it pulled in at least $70 million from its global operations.
Working closely with the Pentagon, MPRI also arranged for the Kosovo Liberation Army’s (KLA) training and weapons in the run up to the war on Yugoslavia. Later, the same firm channeled token military aid to the Macedonian army, new US weapons to the rebels, and military intelligence to both sides.
Actually, it was a standard procedure, applied with great success in the Middle East for decades: Keep warring parties from overwhelming one other and you strengthen the bargaining power of the puppeteer behind the scenes. Better yet, combine this with disinformation; that is, tell the public one thing while doing the opposite.
It’s not a question of allies and enemies. Those designations can change for any number of reasons. In 1999, ethnic Albanians were victims and freedom fighters. In 2001, they were “officially” a threat. Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden were just three of the friends-turned-pariahs who learned that lesson.
And what was the real objective in Macedonia? The country was in a financial straight jacket, its budget basically controlled by the IMF and the World Bank on behalf of international creditors. Since the IMF had placed a ceiling on military expenditures, the only funding option left was privatization. According to Jane’s Defense Weekly, the process started with the sale of the government’s stake in Macedonian Telekom.
Even more was at stake – things like strategic pipeline routes and transport corridors through the country. But that wouldn’t become obvious for years, if ever. This is another traditional tactic: Keep the true agenda under wraps for as long as possible.
Pretexts for War
Despite 24-hour news and talk about transparency, there’s much we don’t know about our past, much less current events. What’s worse, some of what we think we know isn’t true.
The point is that it’s no accident. Consider, for example, the proximate circumstances that led to open war in Vietnam. According to official history, two US destroyers patrolling in the Gulf of Tonkin off North Vietnam were victims of unprovoked attacks in August 1964, leading to a congressional resolution that gave President Johnson the power “to take all necessary measures.”
In fact, the destroyers were spy ships, part of a National Security Agency (NSA) eavesdropping program operating near the coast as a way to provoke the North Vietnamese into turning on their radar and other communications channels. The more provocative the maneuvers, the more signals that could be captured. Meanwhile, US raiding parties were shelling mainland targets. Documents revealed later indicated that the August 4 attack on the USS Maddox – the pretext for passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution – may not even have taken place.
But even if it did, the incident was still stage managed to build up congressional and public support for the war. Evidence suggests that the plan was based on Operation Northwoods, a scheme developed in 1962 to justify an invasion of Cuba. Among the tactics the Joint Chiefs of Staff considered then were blowing up a ship in Guantanamo Bay, a phony “communist Cuba terror campaign” in Florida and Washington, DC, and an elaborate plan to convince people that Cuba had shot down a civilian airliner filled with students. That operation wasn’t implemented, but two years later, desperate for a war, the administration’s military brass found a way to create the necessary conditions in Vietnam.
NSA and Echelon
For more than half a century, the eyes and ears of US power to monitor and manipulate information (and with it, mass perceptions) has been the NSA, initially designed to assist the CIA. Its original task was to collect raw information about threats to US security, cracking codes and using the latest technology to provide accurate intelligence on the intentions and activities of enemies. Emerging after World War II, its early focus was the Soviet Union. But it never did crack a high-level Soviet cipher system. On the other hand, it used every available means to eavesdrop on not only enemies but also allies and US citizens.
In Body of Secrets, James Bamford described a bureaucratic and secretive behemoth, based in an Orwellian Maryland complex known as Crypto City. From there, supercomputers linked it to spy satellites, subs, aircraft, and equally covert, strategically placed listening posts worldwide. By 2000, it had a $7 billion annual budget and directly employed at least 38,000 people, more than the CIA and FBI. It was also the leader of an international intelligence club, UKUSA, which includes Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Together, they monitored and recorded billions of encrypted communications, telephone calls, radio messages, faxes, and e-mails around the world.
Invisible Threats
Shortly after his appointment as NSA
director in 1999, Michael Hayden went to see the film Enemy of the
State, in which Will Smith is pursued by an all-seeing, all hearing NSA
and former operative Gene Hackman decries the agency’s dangerous power.
In Body of Secrets, author Bamford says Hayden found the film
entertaining, yet offensive and highly inaccurate. Still, the NSA chief
was comforted by “a society that makes its bogeymen secrecy and power.
That’s really what the movie’s about.”
After 9/11 the plan was to go further with a project code named Tempest. The goal was to capture computer signals such as keystrokes or monitor images through walls or from other buildings, even if the computers weren’t linked to a network. An NSA document, “Compromising Emanations Laboratory Test Requirements, Electromagnetics,” described procedures for capturing the radiation emitted from a computer-through radio waves and the telephone, serial, network, or power cables attached to it.
Other NSA programs have included Oasis, designed to reduce audiovisual images into machine-readable text for easier filtering, and Fluent, which expanded Echelon’s multilingual capabilities. And let’s not forget the government’s Carnivore Internet surveillance program, capable of collecting all communications over any segment of the network being watched.
Put such elements together, combine them with business imperatives and covert foreign policy objectives, then throw PMCS into the mix, and you get a glimpse of the extent to which information can be translated into raw power and secretly used to shape events. Although most pieces of the puzzle remain obscure, enough is visible to justify suspicion, outrage, and a campaign to pull away the curtain on this Wizard of Oz. But fighting a force that is largely invisible and unaccountable – and able to eavesdrop on the most private exchanges, that is a daunting task, perhaps even more difficult than confronting the mechanisms of corporate globalization that it protects and promotes.
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