Two Thumbs Up For A CIA Documentary Film

H/T to The Snake's Mommy for telling me about the most interesting Cold War history artifact that I've seen in some time, a CIA in-house documentary film about the long imprisonment in China of CIA Operations Officers John Downey and Richard Fecteau.

I was generally aware that the two had been captured when their plane went down over mainland China during the Korean War and that they were not released until the Nixon administration's rapprochement with China, but the entire story is much more complicated and interesting. You can read it here, in a CIA in-house journal article:

Beijing’s capture, imprisonment, and eventual release of CIA officers John T. Downey and Richard G. Fecteau is an amazing story that too few know about today. Shot down over Communist China on their first operational mission in 1952, these young men spent the next two decades imprisoned, often in solitary confinement, while their government officially denied they were CIA officers. Fecteau was released in 1971, Downey in 1973. They came home to an America vastly different from the place they had left, but both adjusted surprisingly well and continue to live full lives.

Even though Downey and Fecteau were welcomed back as heroes by the CIA family more than 30 years ago and their story has been covered in open literature — albeit in short and generally flawed accounts — institutional memory regarding these brave officers has dimmed. Their ordeal is not well known among today’s officers, judging by the surprise and wonder CIA historians encounter when relating it in internal lectures and training courses.

Downey and Fecteau were not joyriding on a CIA support flight over China, as the "generally flawed" accounts had it, but were assigned to that flight in order to operate a winch and recover an agent who was to be picked up from the ground using the All-American System, a modified version of a military mail retrieval technique. [See more on that system here. My thanks to commenter Charles Lathrop for correcting my error in first describing that as the Skyhook system, which was a later development.] However, the agents on the ground had been captured and were fully cooperating with the Chinese, and the support flight was shot down. The doubled agents even sent a signal reporting that the agent extraction had been successful, with the result that the CIA assumed its aircraft must have crashed on its return flight, and all aboard were initially reported dead.

The documentary is titled "Extraordinary Fidelity." You can watch it on YouTube, or - but only if you have an hour to spare - click on the embedded video below.

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Shocking Revelation About Andrew Warren

The WaPo's SpyTalk column has some more details on the arrest of Andrew Warren, the former CIA Station Chief who today resides in the hospital wing of the Norfolk, Virginia, City Jail.

Ex-CIA fugitive was subdued with Taser:

Ex-CIA operative Andrew Warren had to be subdued twice with electric shocks when a fugitive task force tried to arrest him at a Norfolk hotel this week, according to law enforcement sources.

“He appeared to be under the influence of drugs or alcohol,” a law enforcement official, who asked for anonymity in exchange for quoting from a field report on the incident, said of Warren.

The official said that Warren, ordered to put his hands behind his head, “made numerous affirmative movements toward his mid-torso,” when police spotted a gun handle in his waistband.

Police then shocked Warren, 42, with a Taser, which shoots an electrically charged wire at a target. When Warren continued to struggle, he was “dry-tasered,” or stunned with a direct application to his back.

He was tasered twice? I'll bet that hurt.

Some of his former colleagues, however, say they were not surprised at the turn of events.

They say that Warren, a Muslim convert, had earned an unsavory reputation long before his prestigious Algiers assignment, citing what they said was a habit of frequenting strip clubs and prostitutes with his informants.

“He was despised by his peers, in training and in the division, after graduation,” said one former colleague, echoing the views of a handful of others.

“His conduct in Algeria was not a surprise or aberration. These personality and performance issues were on display in his three previous tours.”

There's a bit more background on Warren and his fast-rising, and even faster-falling, CIA career from ABC News.

"Warren ... Andrew Warren"

A bit more news came out today that clarifies yesterday's arrest of Andrew Warren, the former CIA Station Chief who is currently awaiting trial on charges of sexual assault allegedly committed while he was posted at U.S. Embassy Algiers.

It turns out that Warren had failed to appear for a court hearing in Washington DC last Wednesday, after which a bench warrant was issued for his arrest. Warren, however, was already in hiding by then because back on April 3 his neighbors in Norfolk, Virginia, had called the police to report him for indecent exposure.

Judging by the quotes from "Stacy" and "Jessica" in the news stories linked above, Mr. Warren sounds like quite the suave character. A real smooth operator. Actually, he sounds a lot more like a pimp than like James Bond.

Former CIA Algiers Station Chief Arrested Again

When I'd last heard of him, Andrew M. Warren, the former CIA Station Chief in Algiers who is under indictment for sexual assaults allegedly committed while he was assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Algiers, Algeria, was coming up for a trial date in June.

This afternoon at 4PM, Warren was arrested at a hotel in Norfolk, Virginia, by agents of the Diplomatic Security Service, Deputy U.S. Marshals, and local police, on both a local arrest warrant and a federal warrant.

No news has been released yet beyond the sketchy facts of his arrest. However, that there was a local arrest warrant suggests to me that Warren has committed new offenses. And the federal warrant suggests that Mr. Warren may have violated the terms of his pretrial release. He was armed with a pistol when he was arrested today, which is probably another violation of the terms of his release.

CIA Identities Protection and the John Adams Project

The Washington Times has a bit more on a story they first reported two weeks ago concerning a conflict between the CIA and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) over a certain type of legal assistance that DOJ allows for Gitmo detainees. Bill Gertz, a reporter with a long record of receiving leaks from inside the intelligence community, says that a CIA security assessment has concluded that the privileged interaction of certain Gitmo detainees with their legal teams creates a danger for CIA officers.

See CIA Says Gitmo Officers at Risk of Exposure:

A team of CIA counterintelligence officials recently visited the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and concluded that CIA interrogators face the risk of exposure to al Qaeda through inmates' contacts with defense attorneys, according to U.S. officials.

The agency's "tiger team" of security specialists was dispatched as part of an ongoing investigation conducted jointly with the Justice Department into a program backed by the American Civil Liberties Union. The program, called the John Adams Project, has photographed covert CIA interrogators and shown the pictures to some of the five senior al Qaeda terrorists held there in an effort to identify them further.

Details of the review could not be learned. However, the CIA team came away from the review, conducted the week of March 14, "very concerned" that agency personnel have been put in danger by military rules allowing interaction between the five inmates and defense attorneys, according to an intelligence source close to the review.

The team also expressed concerns about the inmates' access to laptop computers in the past. Some of the inmates who are representing themselves in legal proceedings were granted laptop computers without Internet access. However, the officials fear that future unfavorable court rulings could provide the inmates with the capability of communicating outside the island prison.

The joint investigation, which recently added U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald to the Justice Department team, was stepped up earlier this month after a disagreement between Justice Department and CIA officials over whether CIA officers' lives were put in danger at the prison.

The probe was launched last year but was given renewed attention after CIA counterintelligence officials expressed alarm at the recent discovery of photographs of CIA officers, without their names on the photos, in a cell at the prison.

Mr. Fitzgerald, who investigated the press disclosure of clandestine CIA officer Valerie Plame beginning in 2003, has been meeting with CIA officials for the past several weeks as part of the probe.

The prosecutor was called into the case after agency officials voiced worries that Justice Department investigators did not share their level of concern over the danger that al Qaeda terrorists at Guantanamo, including Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, could secretly send information on the identities of CIA officers to al Qaeda terrorists outside the prison through the attorneys.

A senior Justice Department National Security Division official, Donald Vieira, recused himself from the probe earlier this month as a result of the interagency dispute. Mr. Vieira was a Democratic counsel on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, before taking a post at the Justice Department.

Spokesmen for the CIA and Justice Department had no comment. The new chief defense counsel for Guantanamo, Marine Corps Col. Jeff Colwell, also declined to comment on the recent CIA security review conducted at Guantanamo.

Spokesmen for the ACLU and the John Adams Project have denied that any lawyers working to represent Guantanamo detainees have compromised the security of CIA personnel, asserting that they have operated within rules set by a military judge.

[TSB note: I'm sure no lawyer would violate those rules; well, some would, but the ACLU's word is good enough for me.]

Military lawyers and some civilian lawyers seeking to represent the detainees have held meetings with the detainees over the past several months.

[TSB note: the detainees are meeting lawyers who are "seeking to represent" them? The Gitmo Gang is such a hot property that they are fielding offers now? Next we'll hear that these lawyers compete for Gitmo clients by offering percentages of future book, movie and lecture revenues, and that the ACLU is sending literary agents to look out for the Gitmo Gang's interests.]

Regarding the interagency dispute, some CIA officials are said to be concerned that Justice Department investigators may have been advocates on behalf of the Guantanamo Bay detainees prior to joining the Obama administration.

The worries were heightened after the recent disclosure that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. had signed Supreme Court briefs supporting a court review of the case of convicted terrorist Jose Padilla. Mr. Holder apologized last week for failing to disclose his role in the briefs during Senate confirmation hearings last year to be attorney general.

Mr. Holder announced in November that he would shift military trials of five al Qaeda terrorists at Guantanamo to a federal court in New York. However, under protests from critics, he reversed the decision and is expected to announce soon either another civilian trial location or military trials at the Cuban prison.

Newsweek magazine reported March 29 that CIA concerns were heightened after 20 color photographs of CIA officials were found in the cell of Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, a detainee who U.S. officials think is one of the financiers of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Officials familiar with the photos said they included snapshots of CIA officers in public areas.

According to U.S. officials, the photographs were obtained by the John Adams Project through private investigators who were able to track down the CIA officials.

Trial Date Nears for Ex-CIA Algiers Station Chief

Way back in the January 2009 the public learned that the CIA Station Chief in Algiers had been removed from post two months earlier, arrested by Diplomatic Security Agents, and charged with multiple counts of rape. Today, the WaPo is reporting that a trial date is finally getting close.

From CIA official's rape case headed to June trial:

[I]t looks like the increasingly lurid case of Andrew Warren, the CIA’s station chief in Algeria until he was removed under a cloud of rape charges in October 2008, is heading for court.

The Justice Department and Warren’s Florida-based attorney, Mark David Hunter, confirmed independently that the erstwhile covert operator is heading for a Washington trial, scheduled now for sometime in June. Hunter otherwise declined to comment.

The accused is now attempting to get some of the evidence against him suppressed by alleging improprieties in the conduct of the investigation. The government has filed a supplemental brief asking that the defense motion for suppression be denied.

Who knows which way the court will rule? But, judging by the affidavits of the State Department investigators that are linked in the WaPo article, it seems there is ample evidence to convict the miscreant whichever way the motions go.

Cold War Records on "Project Azorian" Declassified

The National Security Archive at The George Washington University has posted a new collection of documents on the CIA's declassified history of the Glomar Explorer, the 1974 attempt to covertly raise a sunken Soviet submarine from the Pacific floor.

Washington, D.C., February 12, 2010 - For the first time, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has declassified substantive information on one of its most secret and sensitive schemes, "Project Azorian," the Agency codename for its ambitious plan to raise a sunken Soviet submarine from the floor of the Pacific Ocean in order to retrieve its secrets. Today the National Security Archive publishes "Project Azorian: The Story of the Hughes Glomar Explorer," a 50-page article from the fall 1985 edition of the Agency's in-house journal Studies in Intelligence. Written by a participant in the operation whose identity remains classified, the article discusses the conception and planning of the retrieval effort and the creation of a special ship, the Glomar Explorer, which raised portions of the submarine in August 1974. The National Security Archive had submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the CIA for the document on December 12, 2007.

-- snip --

Internal evidence suggests that the article was written in 1978, but it was prepared at such a high level of classification that it was apparently unpublishable until the Agency made decisions in 1985 to downgrade it to "Secret."

The basic story has long been in the public sphere, but these documents fill in the background and add some new information.

The Cold War has been over for so long that I got an odd sense of surprised recollection, kind of like when you find some long-lost but familiar object, when I read this snippet from the CIA's account:

The Hughes Glomar Explorer's recovery operations were greatly complicated by almost 14 days of near-continuous surveillance of the ship's work by two Soviet naval vessels. Despite the presence of the Soviet surveillance vessels, recovery work did not stop. But fearing that the Soviets might try to land personnel on his ship by helicopter, on July 18, 1974, the CIA mission director on the Glomar Explorer ordered crates stacked on his ship's helicopter deck to prevent the Soviets from landing on it. According to the article, orders were given to "be prepared to order emergency destruction of sensitive material which could compromise the mission if the Soviets attempted to board the ship. The team designated to defend the control room long enough to destroy the material ... was alerted, but guns were not issued."

Ah, the good old days. Intrusive surveillance ... emergency destruction drills ... internal defense preparations ... 'they-wouldn't-really-do-that-would-they' thoughts. All merely the stuff of Cold War nostalgia now, but they were very real concerns during the 1970s.

These documents are the first materials related to "Project Azorian" to be declassified other than for a video of the burial at sea of six sailors whose remains were recovered inside portions of the sub that were raised. The tape was delivered to the Soviet Union in the 1990s, and was subsequently released pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request made to the CIA.



I find that burial ceremony strangely affecting. I assume it was filmed partly for foreign relations purposes, as in, 'although we couldn't return their remains to you at the time due to the exigencies of the Cold War, we recorded this ceremony to document that we treated your dead with respect and rendered to them all proper military courtesies.' But it also looks and sounds perfectly sincere. There was a distinctly non-bellicose tone to the wording of the service, like this part:

"So long as men and nations are suspicious of each other, instruments of war will be constructed and brave men will die, as these men have died, in the service of their country."

Taking my Cold War hat out of storage, I could nit-pick that language. Are there not good reasons for suspicion and military preparation when some men and nations are held captive by others? And, weren't the military forces of the Soviet Union acting not in the service of a country or nation - the legitimacy of national identity being denied by Marxist-Leninism - but rather in the interests of the working class, a social construction that theoretically gave the Soviet Union a justification to insert itself anywhere in the world?

But, that no longer matters. The Cold War is over, we won, and today I'm happy to simply accept the humane and generous sentiments of that burial ceremony on board the Glomar Explorer. Of course, it's easy to be generous to an enemy after he's defeated.

Ex-Diplomat Sues State Department for Invocation of Immunity

A former Foreign Service Officer, one Sabrina De Souza, has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of State, SecState Hillary Clinton, and the United States of America ("defendants") which asks the judge to:

"Require the USG to formally invoke diplomatic and/or consular immunity on behalf of De Sousa and provide her with legal representation with respect to both the criminal and civil proceedings in Italy"

Background information on this convoluted matter can be found here: Woman in Rendition Case Sues for Immunity. There are also detailed stories about the filing in today's Washington Post (Lawsuit seeks diplomatic immunity in Italian case) and New York Times (Woman in Rendition Case Sues for Immunity).

This paragraph from the filing seems to go to the heart of the matter:

42. De Sousa categorically denies having any involvement in the alleged kidnapping of Abu Omar. She also rejects the allegation that she was a principal planner of the alleged operation. Even if the allegations were true, though, her actions clearly fell within the scope of her official duties and thereby entitle her to diplomatic/consular immunity.

In other words, "I didn't do it, and, even if I did do it, I am entitled to skate away free because I had immunity at the time I did it (not that I'm saying I did it)." Actually, I think that argument is fair enough.

Explosive Allegations Reported by ABC News

ABC News is reporting this bad news this evening.

The CIA's station chief at its sensitive post in Algeria is under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for allegedly raping at least two Muslim women who claim he laced their drinks with a knock-out drug, U.S. law enforcement sources tell ABC News.

Officials say the 41-year old CIA officer, a convert to Islam, was ordered home by the U.S. Ambassador, David Pearce, in October after the women came forward with their rape allegations in September.

The discovery of more than a dozen videotapes showing the CIA officer engaged in sex acts with other women has led the Justice Department to broaden its investigation to include at least one other Arab country, Egypt, where the CIA officer had been posted earlier in his career, according to law enforcement officials.

The U.S. State Department referred questions to the Department of Justice, which declined to comment.

"It has the potential to be quite explosive if it's not handled well by the United States government," said Isobel Coleman, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who specializes in women's issues in the Middle East.

If the Ambassador found cause to send him home, I have to assume the allegations against the station chief aren't frivolous.

This is so wrong on so many levels, not least of which is the counterintelligence one.

Here's a detail that really struck me:

One of the alleged victims reportedly said she met the CIA officer at a bar in the U.S. embassy and then was taken to his official station chief residence where she said the sexual assault took place.

Embassy bar and embassy residence? Let's just say that the U.S. embassy community members in Algiers live in very close proximity to each other. The station chief couldn't have expected that to go unnoticed. Did he think he could explain it away as operational activity?

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Update: ABC News has now posted the Affidavit in Support of a Search Warrant for the station chief's laptop computer.

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Tidbit: He's the author of a 2002 novel, The People of the Veil, described by Amazon.com as follows:

In the midst of a bloody civil war in Algeria, and left in charge of the American Embassy in Algiers, Consul, Nick Phillips, is forced to make a decision that will have far reaching ramifications. An Islamic revolution is in the process of taking place and based upon information from his friend Sami, an Algerian detective, Nick fears the imminent attack by terrorists on the US Embassy with the goal of killing all Americans. Because of the deteriorating security situation, Nick orders an evacuation of the embassy. Nick goes head to head with Abu Fahad, leader of a violent Islamic terrorist cell, who has already killed the Prime Minister and several senior Algerian leaders, including Nick?s girlfriend?s family. In a race with the ultimate consequences, Nick, Sami, and his girlfriend must escape from terrorists who will stop at nothing to kill them and every other American in Algeria.

The following reader comment was added this evening to the Amazon page on The People of the Veil:

I haven't read it, but I am curious if the brave and so honorable protagonist uses Xanax and Valium to subdue and interrogate ruthless female enemy agents posing as nice, modest women while in Algeria?

If not in this book, perhaps in the sequel, which I understand a CIA operative with embassy cover manages to terribly harm the US reputation, feed Al Qaeda's hate machine, and endanger the lives of countless Americans in the Middle East -- all while having sworn to defend our country? That would be a great story!

A biography of Warren on his publisher's website has these details:

Andrew M. Warren grew up in Chesapeake, Virginia. An expert in Middle Eastern affairs, Mr. Warren served as a Foreign Service Officer for the U.S. State Department (1997-2001); during his tenure, he spent two years in Kuwait at the American Embassy in addition to traveling extensively throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Prior to his service at the State Department, he worked with the National Security Agency. Mr. Warren obtained a Masters Degree in Middle East History and Arabic from Indiana University; and a Bachelor of Arts Degree from Norfolk State University.

Mr. Warren's career in the Foreign Service, and now as an author, has allowed him to fulfill his lifelong dream of combining his myriad of experiences and his love of writing into one career. Mr. Warren injects a cultural, intellectual, psychological realism into his writing that could only have come about by his many years of living and working abroad. He currently resides in New York City.

Prior to his service at the State Department, he worked with the National Security Agency???